I admit it: I was the last person I know to get a cell phone (with the possible exception of my parents), and I've sent and received a total of maybe 30 text messages ever. But my habits as a news-and-opinion consumer have evolved as new technology has afforded easy access to all sorts of information. I use Twitter (where I'm CoCreatorDude) and iGoogle to cull headlines from blogs and other sources I find useful on a daily basis.

Below are some of my favorites, organized by topic. My inclusion of a source on this list does not mean that I endorse the content, only that I find it interesting, provocative or helpful in keeping up with trends, issues and ideas. Let me know of other sites you'd recommend.

National Politics and Issues:

• USDemocrazy (UMBC-based blog, written by students, breaks down policy issues into plain language and mixes in some humor)

• Talking Points Memo (insights and commentary from a generally left-leaning perspective)

• Ezra Klein (analysis from a brilliant 20-something policy wonk writing for the Washington Post)

• The Plank (political analysis from The New Republic magazine)

• Robert Reich's Blog (always-insightful commentary from the former U.S. Secretary of Labor and friend of Bill Clinton; he was one of my professors at the Kennedy School of Government)

• Paul Krugman (well-written and thoughtful commentary from the Nobel Prize-winning economist, writing for the New York Times)

• Swampland (Time Magazine's politics blog)
  

• Marc Ambinder (right-leaning political analysis, for The Atlantic Monthly)

• James Fallows (wise longtime journalist writing about a variety of issues, for The Atlantic Monthly)

• Political Animal (The Washington Monthly's political blog)

• Glenn Greenwald (sometimes-acerbic criticism and commentary from a liberal perspective, for Salon)
  

• Maryland Politics (a blog from The Washington Post)

• BlogNetNews-Maryland (a compilation of posts from blogs about Maryland politics)

• Baltimore Sun Op-Eds

• Inside Ed (Baltimore Sun blog about education news, policy and practice)

• Liberal.Education Nation (blog from the Association of American Colleges and Universities)

• The Paper Trail (U.S. News & World Report compilation of stories from college student newspapers)

• Peter Levine (Tufts-based educator's blog about many trends and issues relating to higher education and civic engagement)

• American Democracy Project (blog from a national collegiate civic engagement initiative in which UMBC participates)
  

• UMBC SGA

• The Retriever Weekly Blog

• UMBC Insights Weekly (news directed at faculty and staff, but often relevant to students)

• UMBC Eats
  

• UMBC Underground

• My Sociology (UMBC alum Eric Grollman's provocative commentary emphasizing social justice issues relating to race, gender and sexual orientation)

• On a Lobster Placemat (UMBC staff member Rose Huber's observations about nutrition, fitness and her creative process)
  

• The Rainbow Road Less Traveled By (student/activist Paula McCusker's personal blog)

• mistypedURL (UMBC alum Michael Castello's personal blog)

• Andrew Gordon's Blog (UMBC alum's personal blog)

• Mashable (great information about news and trends relating to social media)

• Metafilter (links to the most useful or odd web sites; trends seem to start here)

• The Edge of the American West (offbeat blog about culture, philosophy and current affairs maintained by academics based in the Western U.S.)

We've added two new status indicators to iTunes Connect: "Upload Received" and "Invalid Binary." These new statuses give you a more precise indication of the state of your app when you submit your binary through Application Loader.

Upload Received means that your binary has been received through Application Loader but has not yet completed processing into the
iTunes system.

Invalid Binary means that your binary has been received through Application Loader but did not meet the requirements of iTunes Connect.

For more information, refer to the App Store Resource Center, App Store Approval Process section.

We've added two new status indicators to iTunes Connect: "Upload Received" and "Invalid Binary." These new statuses give you a more precise indication of the state of your app when you submit your binary through Application Loader.

Upload Received means that your binary has been received through Application Loader but has not yet completed processing into the
iTunes system.

Invalid Binary means that your binary has been received through Application Loader but did not meet the requirements of iTunes Connect.

For more information, refer to the App Store Resource Center, App Store Approval Process section.

The economist has an article, Gamblers united, on Spain’s lotteries, like El Gordo (“the Fatty”) will will pay out €2.3 billion this year. What I found interesting is that this and other Spanish lotteries are events that enhance social ties.

“Loterías y Apuestas del Estado, the government agency that runs El Gordo and other lotteries during the year, encourages mass participation by dividing each €200 ticket into décimos, or tenths, which sell for €20. This, in turn, allows players to improve their odds by buying small shares in many tickets, often by forming syndicates with friends and colleagues. … All this has transformed the lottery from a glorified tax on the poor, as it is in most countries, into part of the social fabric. Sharing tickets at Christmas has become a way to reinforce social ties, says Roberto Garvía, a visiting professor at Georgetown University. The practice of forming syndicates, which initially started in the 19th century when lottery tickets became too expensive for working-class folk, has become a tradition among all classes. As one banker says, “I don’t want to be the only idiot who has to turn up to work if the office number wins.”

Shades of Y2K! Mike Cardwell reports on a rule in Spamassassin that judges any message sent in or after 2010 as “grossly in the future” and treats this as evidence of it being spam. I just checked and found that our mail server’s Spamassassin is using this buggy FH_DATE_PAST_20XX rule.

If you are using Spamassassin, or think your mail server might be, check the source of mail you have received today. Here’s an example from one of my messages this morning.

X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.5 ... on mail.cs.umbc.edu
    X-Spam-Level: *
    X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.6 required=5.0 tests=AWL,FH_DATE_PAST_20XX
      autolearn=disabled version=3.2.5
    Received: from mail-yw0-f142.google.com (mail-yw0-f142.google.com
      [209.85.211.142]) by mail.cs.umbc.edu (8.14.3/8.14.3) with ESMTP
      id o01DjJUn011187; Fri, 1 Jan 2010 08:45:19 -0500 (EST)
    

If the message exceeds the local spam score threshold for, you may find a block with more details in your message header, like this example.

Content analysis details:   (6.1 points, 5.0 required)
    
     pts rule name              description
    ---- ---------------------- ----------------------------------
     3.4 FH_DATE_PAST_20XX     The date is grossly in the future.
    -4.0 RCVD_IN_DNSWL_MED   RBL: Sender listed at http://www.dnswl.org/,
        medium trust [130.85.25.80 listed in list.dnswl.org]
     1.8 SUBJ_ALL_CAPS  Subject is all capitals
     0.7 MSOE_MID_WRONG_CASE  MSOE_MID_WRONG_CASE
     4.2 FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK  Forged mail pretending to be from MS Outlook
    

As a workaround until your server updates Spamassassin, the points that the rule adds to a message’s spam score can be lowered to 0.0 in Spamassassin’s configuration file (local.cf) or your own user-prefs file.

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

If you had asked me ten years ago tonight where I would be living and what I would be doing at the dawn of 2010, my guesses would not have been close to the mark.There has been some continuity from the beginning of 2000 through today:Then as now I was interested in democracy and human development.Then as now I was in love with Sharon Hutchison; we got married in 2001.But I could not have anticipated how much I would learn in the decade ahead, and how the process would change me and my circumstances.When I was younger I imagined adulthood as a sort of plateau: Once you reached a certain age, you just sort of settled in and lived your life.In my experience there are indeed huge numbers of adults who want exactly that for themselves: stability, finality, and an end to questing, with all of its attendant anxiety and uncertainty.My life has not turned out that way, and now I know myself well enough to realize that it never will.

I would say “I’m all about the quest” (I typed and erased the phrase twice), but it’s not entirely true.I am all about the need for questing, and sometimes impatient with other people’s cravings for pat final answers, especially when clinging to those answers means becoming numb to the lessons that can be gained from experiences.But in the past decade I’ve had some experiences of stability that have freed me to learn in new and profound ways.One of those experiences has been spending six and a half years at UMBC.Our campus community is intensely familiar to me, more familiar than any other community of which I have been a part.I’ve literally occupied the same space—my little corner of The Commons’ 2^nd floor—the entire time.Yet instead of stagnating or re-living the same academic year again and again, I’ve thrived and grown.Maybe the fact that the community is constantly renewing itself with new members has made the difference.In any case, feeling at home has helped liberate me to explore and create, and to embrace changes initiated by students and colleagues.Every day I take risks, and every day learn something new, in part because I feel safe enough to be who I truly am, questions and uncertainties and all.

Where will I be 10 years from now?I’m less willing to predict that than ever before, partly because I have become better at embracing the present.I used to be full of big plans.Now I’m more attentive to the problems I’m trying to solve and the contributions I’m trying to make than to the details of my career path.Also, I’m more aware of how vulnerable we all are to the vicissitudes of life.In the past ten years I’ve had my mother-in-law, other family members and a close friend pass away, and watched friends’ and relatives’ marriages fall apart.So above all I’m going to treasure all that I have, and appreciate the enormity of my privilege: For the most part, I get to struggle with the problems of my own choosing.If I’m lucky, I’ll be struggling with some version of those same problems, and continuing to create and contribute to solutions in partnership with people I respect and care about, ten years hence.I’m getting some amazing opportunities to make those contributions at UMBC, and I’d like to think that I’ll still be a part of our community at the dawn of 2020, and that the impact of our collective work will be felt across the United States.Based on the developments of the past few years (see this, for example), I think that’s a reasonable hope.

UMBC won the 2009 Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship yesterday with perfect score of 6.0 points. This year’s tournament was held in South Padre Island, Texas on December 27-30

This is from the UMBC press release:

“Capping a near-flawless performance over the past four days at the tournament in South Padre Island, Texas, the Retrievers topped a team from the University of Texas-Brownsville today to secure the title outright for the first time since 2005.

Today’s win completed a perfect 6-0 match record for the tournament, known as the “World Series of college chess.” UMBC’s dominant performance is all the more impressive given the high quality of the 28-team field this year, said Alan Sherman, director of the school’s chess program.
…
Today UMBC topped UT-Brownsville’s “B” team, 4-0, to complete the march to the title. But the Retrievers most of the hard work yesterday, winning decisive matches over two of the strongest teams in college chess. The Retrievers topped UT-Dallas, 3 to 1, in the early match, and then got past UT-Brownsville’s “into today’s action. The tournament also included teams from Yale, Princeton, NYU, Stanford and University of Chicago.
…
The Pan-Am is the most celebrated intercollegiate chess tournament in the Americas. Since its 1946 inception, dozens of universities throughout the Americas have participated. The tournament is open to any college or university team from North, South, or Central America.

Since 2003, the teams representing the top four schools in the Pan-Am have met again in the spring to compete for the President’s Cup in an event sponsored by the U.S. Chess Federation — the “Final Four of Chess”. In 2010 the University of Texas Brownsville will host the final four, UMBC, UTD, UTB and Texas Tech, in April.

You can get information on the tournament and the games at monroi.