I tried hellotxt for awhile and for the first week or so liked it, until I really started trying to use it and found it to be quite buggy. Wouldn't connect to Facebook after being able to previously. Wouldn't remove services after I told it to. Wouldn't send the status via email. Would not interpret a line break from email with a space (so your update looks like it was typed by a fifth grader). Sorry, but my attention span is just too short to put up with that.

My new status-updater best buddy is ping.fm. You can sign up for the beta and receive an invitation within a few days. It updates all the major social networks and works fairly quickly. It has an AIM bot you can route your status updates through. It updates your statuses/statii/whatever within seconds. It even has command directives where you can send different updates to different services by prepending the sentence with a code corresponding to the particular service. Sweet.

The only thing it's missing is direct SMS support. You can get around this by sending an SMS/MMS to your assigned email address for updating on ping.fm, but it would be nice to have direct support.

Since I've been working from home I go almost three weeks between tanks of gas and hardly ever go anywhere else. I had to go to the mall today, though, to replace the battery in my watch. I haven't been there in eons and had a handful of observations.

• The Apple store was jam packed with people and wreaked of BO. I didn't get past the front counter.
• Victoria's Secret. Is not.
• The last record store there closed. I'm sure the last place you'll be able to buy CDs soon is Best Buy, Wal-Mart, or some other box-shaped store.
• The lone book store there had a whole section for manga.
• It's hard to find high-tops at the Foot Locker that are purposed for playing basketball in them.
  
• Is it me or is there a serious shortage of fabric for women's clothing?
• There were two shops which had blackened windows where you couldn't see what they were selling unless you walked inside. Loud music was blaring out of both of them. I'm probably too old to go inside. That and/or my wife wouldn't appreciate it if I did.
  
• I did have to go to the Best Buy nearby and noticed they are now selling albums in the store that you download from iTunes. The album art is resized so it fits on the card containing the redeem code. The mp3s are 320kbs. No surprise the record stores are going out of business.

Over on YouTube.

You don't say.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado released an alarming graph on August 11, showing that Arctic ice was rapidly disappearing, back towards last year's record minimum. Their data shows Arctic sea ice extent only 10 per cent greater than this date in 2007, and the second lowest on record.

Other data sources show Arctic ice having made a nice recovery this summer. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center data shows 2008 ice nearly identical to 2002, 2005 and 2006. Maps of Arctic ice extent are readily available from several sources, including the University of Illinois, which keeps a daily archive for the last 30 years. A comparison of these maps (derived from NSIDC data) below shows that Arctic ice extent was 30 per cent greater on August 11, 2008 than it was on the August 12, 2007.