"I Was in Prison, and You Visited Me"

Inmates' families are paying $1,000 monthly phone bills thanks to profiteering by state corrections departments and telephone companies, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

These public officials and corporate executives would do well to remember the words of Jesus: "I was in prison, and you visited me." (Matthew 25:36) Contact with loved ones is a basic human need, even for those who have done great wrong. And treating others as you would have them treat you means supplying such basic needs -- even if you're doing it less out of personal beneficence and more out of a duty to society. (After all, can society afford to cut inmates off from the very family structures that may hold the key to rehabilitating them and preventing recidivism?)

Jesus mentioned prison visits in perhaps the most weighty context found in Matthew's Gospel: The Final Judgment. Jesus tells about how at that time, he will tell the righteous that they fed him when he was hungry, gave him a drink when he was thirsty, clothed him when he was naked, cared for him when he was sick, and visited him in prison.

Reverse Alphabetical Order for Blogrolls

Let's put our blogrolls in reverse alphabetical order to match our reverse chronological order posts, shall we?

It just makes sense, and it lets those Z-people (like my distant acquaintance Andrei Zmievski) finally be first in line. Stop to remember those kindergarten queues, and you'll know what I mean.

Davezilla's Headline Anagrams = MGD Light-Sprayed Keyboard

My keyboard's covered in nose-sprayed MGD Light after reading the headline anagrams at Davezilla.com.

Examples:

Britney Spears waxwork unveiled = Sexy underwear invokes brawl pit.
Windows users download iTunes = Woo! Nerds' sounds widen lawsuits.

(via Utterly Boring)

Bureaucracy Burns Calories

At my university you can get more exercise trying to pay for Campus Recreation than you can working out there.

They've got the bureaucracy tuned so perfectly at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that you actually need to fill out a form to get permission to pay certain bills. They'll usually bleed you to a nice desiccated husk without your even asking, so my four-office runaround today came as quite the surprise.

But in wearing the rubber off my shoes trudging from Campus Rec to Student Accounts to the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs to the Bursar to the Student Union and back to the Bursar, I learned a valuable lesson: Big stage smiles equals pleasant (if not especially quick) customer service. (By the way, who came up with "bursar"? The same guy who's got us driving on parkways and parking on driveways?)

Buy Proteus for Instant Messaging

I'm a shareware leech.

For years I've used shareware for free, clinging parasitically to the backs of programmers who only wanted to fill a need without going through the whole rigamarole of releasing a commercial product. No longer. Proteus -- and a little dog named Hamish -- has inspired me to change my ways.

For instant messaging on OSX, Proteus is really the only way to go. Justin Wood's user interface is so elegant it looks like he's part of the development team behind Apple's iLife applications. In reality, he's developing Proteus alone while a student at Queens University in Canada.

Justin's quick release of version 3.03 to fix Yahoo's attempt at locking out third-party IM clients made the 15-buck registration fee especially worth it. But now I may never get to see again the world's best shareware nag screen: A picture of an adorable white dog with an empty food dish and the legend, "Hamish says please register." Maybe Justin can send me a screen shot of the nag screen, and I'll post it here.