I was catching up on some of my TiVo’d Daily Shows and I watched John Stewart’s great interview with journalist Lara Logan. She’s clearly frustrated with the tone of most American news coverage and especially with the near total lack of coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s difficult to find fault with her argument. Over 50 Iraqis died in a horrific bombing last week and the major networks did little more than mention it in passing.

My only beef with the interview is that Logan is bleeped out as she cheerily recounts how she greeted a group of American soldiers with “What’s up, motherfuckers!”

I’ve been going for lots of walks lately and today I discovered a place that had somehow completely escaped my attention until now. In the St. Anthony neighborhood, there’s a path that leads to Water Power Park. This completely accessible park offers magnificent views of St. Anthony Falls and, in the background, downtown Minneapolis. I didn’t have my camera with me, but someone else was good enough to post a brief video of the falls on YouTube. However, it doesn’t include the impressive roar of the rushing water.

My neighborhood is pretty cool, no?

Here’s something I learned last night. Even if one has good intentions and tries to get some writing done after midnight, one isn’t going to accomplish much if one keeps falling asleep in front of his computer screen. And every time I began to doze off, my ventilator would start alarming, jolting me awake. I need to somehow program it to distinguish between “My master’s tube is disconnected and I must call for help!” and “My master is sleeping with his mouth open and is in no immediate danger.”

The Justice Department has published proposed rules that update the access standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The new rules address the number of disability seats in theaters, access to auditorium stages, definitions of service animals (monkeys need not apply), the proper placement of light switches in hotel rooms, and much more. The Chamber of Commerce is not a big fan of these rules, arguing that they impose costly burdens on businesses. But opponents of these rules miss a larger point. The business community has had a decade and a half to comply with both the letter and spirit of the ADA, but their collective foot-dragging and apathy has forced the feds’ hand. While the new rules might seem ponderous to some, they represent a concerted effort to compel both businesses and local governments to get serious about accessibility.

Attention nerds: the final version of the Firefox 3 browser is now available for download. I’ve been test-driving it for the last hour and I’m impressed with what I see. Page-loading is noticeably punchier and the address bar (or the “Awesome Bar”, as some are calling it) is now much more useful; it does a pretty good job of predicting where you want to go based on what you’ve typed. Most of my extensions seem to be working (I can’t live without ScribeFire) and everything seems quite polished. If you want to be like the rest of the kool kids, download it now.