September 2003 Archives

Tonight was the one year aniversary of Turntables and Beer. A weekly thing dedicated to friends, good tunes, food, and of course, beer. We've been getting together at the current location for quite a while, and after a bit of a break for the summer we've started up again. I made a brief appearance tonight, but plan on bringing my records next week. It's good to have a weekly chance to practice spinning.

So I guess I'll be at this thing. Both days even. Keen!

Being a huge fan of ribs (and being quite picky about them too), I'm always on the lookout for new places to try. So when I saw a link to Uncle Pete's over on Halley's Comment I knew I had a new place to check out. It sounds amazing. I think I must grab one of my BBQ loving friends and make an excursion soon.

Fran Lebowitz: "Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try." [Quotes of the Day]

This weekend I finally got around to doing a test run for a project I've been wanting to do for a while. You see, my dad has a ton of old Jazz records and someday it's just not going to be that easy to listen to them on vinyl. In some cases it's possible to get the stuff on CD, but in others it isn't. This weekend I gave a try at ripping two of his records. Dave Brubeck's Dave Brubeck At Storyville: 1954 and Old Sounds from San Francisco. Both came out quite well. The one thing they're really missing though is the notes from the album covers. A lot of these old records have a lot of text on them talking about the music and the songs on them. Unfortunately there isn't as easy a way to get that information on the computer. I could scan it, but it would be quite a job to get it all looking right since album covers are pretty big. Maybe if I feel so inclined I could type the information in from some of them. But there still really isn't a great way to store all this information together. I could put it in the same directory as the files for the album, but I'd love something that mp3 software could easily choose to make available as you are playing a song (beyond the info field that mp3s allow).

Why? Because they are making me run their actual program to use their service. I see the days of my using this quickly coming to an end. The one person I talk to on it (Hi Chris) will have to use something else also to talk to me.

From Reuters: North Korea calls Rumsfeld illiterate psychopath.

Once again, Apple rocks for offering more bonus stuff for its .Mac subscribers. This time it's a free download of Lifli Software's iBlog. The offer is only free till the 24th of November, so grab it while you can. I haven't tried iBlog, but intend to check it out just to see how it works. For someone with a .Mac account who wants to start a blog, this is probably a great way to get started. It's .Mac aware so that it publishes to your iDisk.

While this isn't a regular feature for .Mac, I think it would be a great one in the future. Imagine combining this with the features in iPhoto. You can make a photo gallery, hit a button in iPhoto and it makes a blog post with the gallery. Or maybe even just posting a picture with a thumbnail. There's lots of cool things that I think would really fit into their whole iLife setup. I'm supposed to be helping a neighbor with her new iMac this afternoon and will probably show her this.

So I just got done watching the first episode of the US version of Coupling. I dunno, the dialogue was pretty close to the original, even the staging was pretty close to identical. But the US actors, just didn't have it. Most of it felt forced. Sally was too prettied up, Jeff didn't have enough that weird borderline creepy guy thing, etc. The whole show just felt like it was slightly off target, and as a result it didn't work that well for me. Oh well, luckily season 2 is coming out on DVD soon.

Oh, my other question. There were something like 25 or 26 episodes of Coupling on BBC. Is this show going to follow that then try and go on and on forever like every other sitcom? Ick.

I haven't been posting much cause I've been dealing with some offline stuff, and also been doing a fair amount of work with the Individual.com website. It's interesting seeing how a site slowly evolves. For instance, if you aren't yet a user of Individual.com and you go there, you just get a login screen. Nothing to really give you an idea of what it is all about. So, we're looking to change that. I've also gotten the okay to work on RSS stuff for the site, so I'm pretty psyched about that.

On the blog from, you can now see my most recent phonecam pic to the left. It will update automatically when I post new pictures.

Dave Winer writes about Replay Radio, saying it sounds perfect. It's interesting, but the one I'm really waiting for is the Radio Shark (which I've mentioned here before). It does everything Replay Radio does, but a bit more. The big thing is that it comes with a USB AM/FM receiver can record from any AM/FM station. This makes it a bit more useful. It also gives you TiVo like features in that you can pause live radio. Yeah, it's Mac only, and I'm not really sure if Griffin tends to support Windows that much (I just checked, they definitely do support Windows for some of their products). But I'm sure the Replay Radio folks don't intend to support the Mac either.

This one listed because I used to love watching WKRP, and because he died of Pulmonary Fibrosis. Here's wishes that he is able to breath freely on the other side (and that the phone cops don't come for you because of that stunt Johnny pulled).

Gordon Jump of 'WKRP', Maytag ads dies

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Gordon Jump, who played a befuddled radio station manager on the sitcom "WKRP in Cincinnati" and made his mark in commercials as the lonely Maytag repairman, died Monday. He was 71.

Jump suffered from pulmonary fibrosis, said his cousin, Katherine Jump Wagner. The illness causes scarring of the air sacs of the lungs, leading to heart or respiratory failure.

So it seems some enterprising sales person has decided to post comments that are ads for someplace to get a certain pill that will help prevent hangovers. To this person, stop it. Your comments have been deleted. This isn't the place for that. Sheesh.

My latest online addiction is Button Men Online. I found the link to this over on a friend's LJ and quickly found myself playing in a bunch of games at once. Button Men is a dice game from the cool people over at Cheapass Games. Someone made an online version of it and I've been enjoying it quite a bit. One thing I like is the pace of the games. You make a move in a game, then go off and wait for the other person to make their move. So it isn't really real time. But it is a nice distraction to jump over to when I need a break for a second. And it really takes about a minute or less to make a move. I will say that the game can be a little confusing at first and I don't think the rules are necessarily that easy to understand. One thing that is nice though is you can play a 'for fun' game with a mentor who will answer questions for you. And I just got notified that it's my turn again, off I go.

A friend pointed me at an article about some strange plaques that have been found on roads around the country. The author certainly did quite a lot of work trying to find out about these things. Of course the geek in me is already making note of this for the next time I need some ideas for a role playing game.

Perhaps the urban equivalent of a crop circle. A mysterious sign appearing in the night. A cryptic message left behind by beings with a seemingly extraterrestrial agenda.

Or perhaps by a paranoid journalist-hating Nazi. In some cities, the basic tiles are sometimes accompanied by an adjacent tile that urges people to "Murder all journalists, I beg you!" And in Philadelphia, next to one of the regular tiles, was a long rant, also made up of individual hand-formed letters imbedded in a tile, that blamed "hellion Jews" (whatever they are) for a long list of personal problems that the tile maker seemed to be experiencing. [Kansas City Star]

There's another page that lists where people have found these plaques. Kind of bizarre and neat. Makes me wonder what I'd do if I wanted to do something like this. Maybe I'd put signs in strange places with the recipe for brownies.

When I reinstalled Kung-Log this morning I forgot to tell it to allow comments and trackbacks. D'oh.

The second thing from over on David Harris' blog that I found interesting was his meme experiment. Back on the 12th of September he posted:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.

Then, after a few days he changed it very slightly, and then after a few more days changed it again. Then he searched Google to see how many times each appeared. He's also updated the stats a few times since then. The original is still the most linked to, but it is interesting seeing how much the other ones are growing too. Of course, I'm now inflating the original results myself :).

The first of two posts that point to David Harris' Science & Literature blog. The first one is about an news article that begins:

Feeding children a diet rich in fish could prevent violent and anti-social behaviour in their teens, according to research to be announced this week which suggests the root causes of crime may be biological rather than social.

It's an interesting read, and it reminds me to think twice about what I read in the news.

(Catching up on my blog reading/writing, so expect a few posts tonight...)

Boing Boing has a pointer to an article about Provigil over at Fortune. It caught my eye because I've been taking it for a few months now and it's been wonderful (though I don't think it works quite as well as the article says, at least for me). My psychiatrist perscribed it to me because the Lexapro was making me want to fall asleep during the day and it definitely helped. One thing that is cool about Provigil is that it doesn't prevent you from going to sleep if you want to, which is cool. The only problem is that I feel like I'm on way too many pills these days. I'm on two antidepressants (Lexapro and Trazodone (to help me sleep)), Provigil, Allegra, and then all my various lung stuff. Add in vitamins and I wish there was some way to buy all these things mixed up into a few less pills.

In the long run I'll be happy when I can be on a few less pills. But I wonder if this is now going to start being one of the new drugs that everyone wants to get. I can see demand from all kinds of people who don't really need it.

Amanda Cross: "The point of quotations is that one can use another's words to be insulting." [Quotes of the Day]

Bah. Something happened in the last few days and now I can't upload images with Kung-Log anymore. I have no idea what might be causing it either. Hopefully the author of this fine program will be able to help.

Ever wonder what Cthulhu would look like if it were a cute japanese character? How about the Shub-Niggurath or the Great Race of Yith? See your favorites in chibi form at this page whose title I can't translate because I'm lame.

Now, for the low low price of $100,000,000.00, you too can own a Key Tronic E05305US205-C 104-Key Keyboard Win95 PS/2 L-Shape Enter Key (or you can get one used for $17.79). Be sure to check out the reviews, it sounds like it just may be worth it.

The other day I decided to upgrade my phone from the Sony Ericsson T68i. I'd had mine for probably close to a year and while it has been a pretty decent phone, I'd been waiting for the ability to take the next step up for a while now. Luckily, AT&T started offering the Sony Ericsson T616, and was letting me get the rebate on the phone so that it was pretty cheap. I've had it for two days now and love it. Here's some initial thoughts on the phone.

One of my biggest complaints about the T68i was the screen. Yes, it was color, but it was small, and I always felt like it would be nicer if it was a little bit bigger. The T616's screen is beautiful, very much an improvement over the T68i. The next thing I really like on the phone is the T9 support. It always felt fairly kludgy on the the T68i. The interface to it on the T616 is much cleaner, making it very easy to add words to the dictionary and switch to the old fashioned method of typing in words.

The next cool thing is the camera. It lets you take pictures at either 288x352 or 120x160, and then lets you either send them via MMS or an email. Pretty slick. So far I've enjoyed it a bunch and even started posting to the new part of my blog with it. The phone also comes with bluetooth support, which is a must for me (and made moving to the phone very easy). And it even lets you play games on it (though I could care less about that feature).

Moving to the phone was trivial. When I bought the phone the salesperson (who was extremely helpful and helped me figure out if I should update my service or not). And all it took to activate was moving the SIM card from one phone to the other. So far, I'm digging this phone a lot. My only complaint is that it is taking a little to get used to the buttons on the phone, they're just different enough in feel from the T68i that I can't dial w/out looking... yet.

BOOTY! WENCHES! ARRRR!

That's right, it's Talk Like A Pirate Day. So go out there and have some pirate goodness. Me, I'm gonna watch a buncha One Piece.

I just visited the wonderful folks at wewanteryoursoul.com and found that my soul is worth 7518 GBP (12,151.44 USD). Also 87% of people have a purer soul than you. Rock. I'm pretty EVIL!

Well. I've finally taken the next stop in blogging. I now have a moblog. Since I have a swanky camera phone now I decided to set one up. I'm not sure how much I'll post to it, but it was a neat exercise to get it working. Big thanks go out to Erik Benson for his moblog guide. Without that I would have been lost.

I started making a post about this device thinking it was pretty silly. But as I thought about it, it is actually kind of cool (but still kinda silly), though I'd have wanted one or two more features. What is it? The iSeePet (okay, we can stop putting 'i' before everything now. It is just as bad as 'e'.). This device offers remote monitoring and feeding of your pet. In simple terms, it's an automated feeder that happens to have a webcam attached to it. So, while you are at work you can feed your pet and then get a close-up of it eating. Be sure to check out the promotional VTR (It looks like it is a japanese product actually) on the web site. Oh yeah, it is linux based too. I wonder what else you could hack it to do. Maybe add a food request button that would send you an email or text message that your pet wants food. And at the very least it should let you listen in at your home, or maybe you should be able to send a voice message to it to play for your pet (think of it as iChat A/V for your pet). The only problem is the price. $500 seems a bit steep.

This could be the start of a whole range of products. I can just see it, next we'll have the iSeeKid, for parents who have to work late.

Yay! It's back. It sounds like metamark.net got hijacked. Here's the word on what was up with the whole xrl.us/metamark(s).net thing.

I'd been using the URL shortener at metamark.net (it shortens things to http://xrl.us/...) for a few weeks. One thing I really liked about it was that it had a fairly nice api, which made it very easy to fit into my mud client (tinyfugue). Sometime on Monday, the service just went poof. I haven't been able to find any news about it either. Anyone else have any idea what happened with it?

So I finally broke down and picked up the BroadQ Qcast, though I got the one sold under the name GameShark Media Player. First off, I must say that now that I have this working it kicks ass. I pointed it at my laptop and it is playing a divx file over wireless. Pretty keen I must say. Also, it lets you install this on more than ones computer, so my G3 will definitely be running the server side of this soon for music.

Now, for the hell part. This software has the worst documentation/install process I've ever seen. In fact, if I didn't have a clue about how OS X does things I would never have been able to install this. Let's see. First, the documentation instructed me to put the server CD-ROM into my computer and copy the GSMP to my desktop. The problem, there's nothing that says it is GSMP. There's just a MacOS folder with a file called jinstall.zip. Not that big a deal, I can figure out what to do with that.

Next problem, the documentation says "First, click on and run GameShark Media Server to connect with our server(s) and allow updated software modules to download". Um, there is no GameShark Media Server to click on, just the zip file. Nowhere is there any mention of this. And, when I do unzip the file, all I get is an executable called JExpressInstaller, which quits as soon as I try running it. Wow, what great software! This is the point that someone who doesn't really know some of how things work on OS X would be sunk. There's nothing else to do. The one program you have to run doesn't do anything.

The solution, go in via command line. The way applications work on OS X is that they are folders with an extension of .app, and since I knew the app was in java (oh yeah, others might not know that. The only reason I know it is a friend has it). I found the jinstall.bin file, which was mentioned as the installer in the linux install instructions, and ran that. And after filling out where to install, it finishes up.

We won't get into the next stage where the buggy java code for the initial registration and setup fails do render any text in the forms you have to fill out (unless you go back and forward in the forms). Once I got it all set up though. It worked like a charm. It's just getting there was hell. I wonder how much of this is GameShark's fault and how much is BroadQ's. Oh yeah, the game is being supported by MadCatz, but there's pretty much no mention of it on their site. I know that I'll be posting to the support forums at BroadQ about this. But, for now, I watch some Hanaukyo Maids.

I was catching up on my RSS reading and this caught my eye on the AP news feed at Yahoo! News:

China 'Open-Crotch Pants' Face Extinction

His head is shaved. His red-and-yellow T-shirt proclaims "Cute Girl!" His loose, white-cotton shorts are grimy with dirt. Suddenly, he stops in mid-stride and squats, the seam of his pants parting smoothly to allow a stream of urine to pool onto the concrete.

"Good boy!" his 25-year-old mother, Wu Chunhua, shouts encouragingly as he speeds back to play.

The startlingly revealing "kaidangku" (literally "open-crotch pants") have made such posterior peek-a-boo a common sight in China for decades — rain, shine or, in a specially padded form, snow.

The principle is clear: no-fuss waste disposal. They're split down the middle — in front and back — and provide what many parents say is maximum convenience with minimum coverage. [Yahoo! News]

Can't. Stop. Laughing. (And possibly the best headline EVER)

As someone said when they mentioned this, yet another example of how everything is on the Internet. This time it's the Racial Slur Database. So many here I've never ever heard before.

A few people have asked me how I set up ZOË, so I thought I'd post it here. I'm not sure how much of a typical user I am. If you aren't familiar with ZOË, I think the about document on the web site gives a pretty good description. You might also try reading some of the reviews that are listed on the reviews page. One simple way to think about it is as a search engine for your email.

WIth my current setup I read all my email with IMAP. So I have ZOË point to my IMAP inbox and folders and index everything from there. I also store all of my sent mail on the IMAP server so that it gets indexed too. One thing ZOË can do is be an SMTP server for you. It will accept email and forward it onto another server (like your ISP for instance). But there's an issue with this that I'll talk about later. I've also been slowly adding in RSS feeds that I really like into ZOË so that it indexes them (though not all the RSS feeds I read).

So far I've been running it for a few days and I really like it. I actually have some old old email sitting around on my old windows box that I'm going to upload to the server so that it will get indexed too. Okay, now for the parts of ZOË that I think need improvement (and I'll say again, that even with its flaws I think it is great).

Okay, so the things I see as flaws in ZOË (btw, to the author of ZOË, feel free to think of these as suggestions ;), and also note that I have no idea how complex any of these would be to do. Knowing me, I've picked the things that are the hardest to change.).

• SMTP Server - ZOË has a built in SMTP server. So that if you want it to index your outgoing mail you can send it via ZOË. This is actually a pretty cool idea, but my big problem with it is that it doesn't work unless your mail server requires SMTP authentication. Out of all the places I send email, only one of them requires SMTP authentication. This would be so nice to have. Also, I'm not sure how the code works, but what I'd really like is a way to be able to set up multiple SMTP servers and then choose which one to use from a pulldown list.
• Importing/Reading in messages - There has been a little bit of talk on this subject on the ZOË mailing list. One thing I'd love for IMAP stuff is some kind of understanding of the folder structure on my IMAP server. The first is that there is some mail that I really don't care about indexing. By just saying 'don't index this at all' I solve the problem easily. While thinking about this I also realized I have a few mailing lists I am on that don't use header tags to identify themselves. One thing that would be neat is being able to designate certain folders as 'mailing lists' so they can be accessed that way (though I have the feeling that this is getting into the 'complex to do' category.
• Searching - There maybe something like this already, but I haven't found it yet. I'd love an advanced search form. Something where I can search for just subject or author. Or some combination of stuff.

That's all I can think of at the moment. Once again, a big thanks out to the author of this software, it really is pretty cool. I plan on donating once I am employed again.

So amidst all the other stuff I was doing this weekend. I finally finished Golden Sun on the GBA. I have to say I was impressed. It took me around 28 hours to get through the RPG. I'm really not sure if I was going slow or fast through it. Overall, it was a pretty good game, even though it is really like part one of two (I actually got the second one first and decided to put off playing while I found and played the first one). Tonight I got sucked into the GBA again, this time by Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. I've now put the GBA in the other room so I can get some stuff done before I sleep. I may have to start hiding it. That is one of those games where it is very easy to just lose large chunks of time. So far I give it a thumbs up.

Emily Dickinson
"They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse." [Quotes of the Day]

So, as I was writing that last post I just saw that Johnny Cash has died too. CNN has it as breaking news, with no full story link yet.

From CNN:

Emmy-winning actor John Ritter dead at 54

(CNN) -- Actor and comedian John Ritter has died unexpectedly after he was rushed to the hospital for a "dissection of the aorta," his publicist Lisa Kasteler told CNN.

Ritter, who would have turned 55 next week, was the star of the ABC series "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter."

In a statement, Kasteler said Ritter was rushed to the hospital after suffering from an unrecognized and undetected flaw in his aorta.

Surgeons at the hospital tried to save the Emmy Award-winning actor but were unable to do so, the statement said.

I was a big Three's Company fan when I was a kid. And I remember watching a bunch of it when it was in syndication. And of course John Ritter played a psycho robot on Buffy in recent past.

This also caught my eye because my Grandfather died in a similar way. It was very sudden in his case too. Bleh.

I'd just written a big long post about setting up SpamAssassin and ZOË. And then Kung-Log crashed. So I'll just say this: ZOË is cool. Go read about it. It seems to work quite well. It really is like Googling your email.

There's this meme that's been floating around LiveJournal lately and I wasn't sure that I was going to partake in it. But after some urging from someone to "post! post! post!" I decided to do it. And since my primary posting place is my blog, I'm now also releasing this out into the blog world. So, here goes.

There ya go. Enjoy!

I really didn't know what to expect when I downloaded some episodes of an anime called Princess Tutu. I figured it would be some cutesie magical girl show. I was not prepared for the bizarre show I was inflicted with. It's about this girl, Ahiru, who is learning ballet (her instructer is a cat person who threatens the students with marriage if they don't do well). And she saves people by turning into Princess Tutu, a magical ballet dancer (or at least that's what it looks like so far). Oh yes, and she's not really a girl, she's actually a duck. If she happens to quack when she's in girl form, she turns into a duck until she gets wet.

This has to be one of the stranger shows I've seen, but it's also one of the better ones I've seen. There is just something that is very charming about it. I've been downloading more to watch and hope it continues to be as good (though, from the reviews I've read it sounds like I don't have to worry). Oh, and you can also click on the image to read a review of the show and see some more images.

This was supposed to be on my anime blog, but I'm lazy and don't want to move it. Oops.

I give you the SUDDEN GIANT NOSTRIL GALLERY. The name speaks for itself really. It's a gallery of giant nostril pictures. I personally like the one to the right the best.

I'm not quite sure what I think of this.

Strip clubs recruit student bodies

(CNN) -- A chain of strip clubs is offering to pay tuition for co-eds who work as strippers -- and keep up their grade-point averages.

With classes beginning this week, a full-page color ad, featuring a voluptuous blonde and the promise "We pay your tuition," appeared on the back cover of The Lance, the student newspaper at the University of Windsor in Ontario.

"A girl who wants to better herself, who wants to progress, makes for a higher level entertainer," said Robert Katzman, who is recruiting talent for his adult clubs in Windsor and in Detroit, Michigan. "They're happier young ladies. They're doing something with their lives."

Katzman said his company will pay $1,500 to $2,000 in educational expenses per year to women or men who work three or four seven-hour shifts in his clubs. The money is on top of the $10 an hour that dancers are paid, in addition to cash they get from tips and private dances.

But there is a catch.

"They have to maintain a B or above average," Katzman said. "They have to bring in their transcripts and prove they got the grades." [CNN]

So is having strippers who have at least a B average like a big thing? Is that a turn on? I mean, I like smart girls, but I've never thought about what grades any other type of female entertainer got in school. I wonder if you could say you wanted a private dance, but only from an A student.

I had my browser on Boing Boing in the background for a while and kept getting distracted by this optical illusion. It's from a site with lots of them. Many of them just as eye boggling. I decided I should inflict it on all of you.

John A. Wheeler: "If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day." [Quotes of the Day]

TechTV's Fresh Gear had a bit about this toilet over the weekend. It's pretty much the ultimate toilet.

If you need to sit on this throne, a heated seat -- 96.8 degrees, to be exact -- warms your fanny. Of all the Neorest features, this is by far the most luxurious. It's a whole different experience than the shock of a frigid plastic ring freezing your backside in the middle of a cold night. The seat-heat function can be timed to conserve energy.

So fresh, so clean

Kubik also showed me the bidet functions of the Neorest, underscoring Toto USA's dedication to hygiene. [TechTV's Fresh Gear]

Yes, it's got a heated seat and a bidet. And it also has a "heated fan to properly dry all of your parts". Can you say overkill? How much for all this? Only around $5,000.

Requires Flash. Badgers (a large amount of them even). Thanks to weebls stuff for bizarre things like this.

Seen over on The Universal Church of Cosmic Uncertainty, here's my Blogger Code:

B6 d+ t+ k+ s+ u f+ i o x-- e l+ c--

So my psychiatrist had me start taking something called Trazodone because I was having trouble sleeping. So far it is working great, but I just started reading the web site for it and sometimes wonder about these side effects. The ones that they say to contact your doctor immediately for include:

• shuffling walk
• slow or difficult speech
• fever
• prolonged or inappropriate erection

The last one confuses me the most. Just how does one define inappropriate erection. Is that like situationally inappropriate? Or being caused by inappropriate things? And by whose definition?

I was just looking through the upcoming releases for the GameBoy Advance and saw that the Activision Anthology is coming out for the GBA. Pretty cool from the sound of it (and coming from the cool folks at Aspyr).

Aspyr taking Activision classics to the GBA

The publisher will release a compilation of Activision's Atari 2600 games.

Aspyr, best known as a publisher for the Mac, has announced that it will release Activision Anthology, a GBA game that includes more than 55 Atari 2600 games from Activision. The compilation will include key Activision games such as Pitfall and Pitfall 2, Freeway, Keystone Kapers, Seaquest, River Raid and River Raid II, Spider Fighter, Fishing Derby, and more. Some of the games have not been featured in any previous Activision compilation. [Gamespot]

There's already something like this out for the PS2. But for some reason I think it fits better on something like the GBA. Being a lover of old video games (and having many fond memories of the Activision games) I will certainly be picking this up.

Groucho Marx: "Military justice is to justice what military music is to music." [Quotes of the Day]

Because disco will never die: Stealth Disco (I particularly like the best of).

Disco is still killing. When will the madness stop?

Disco lights lure baby turtles to death outside Greek park

Phenomenon highlights negatives in nexus of tourism, environmentalism

LAGANAS, Greece, Sept. 5 —  Disco lights are luring baby turtles to their deaths on the fringes of a Greek marine park in the Mediterranean Sea. Environmentalists say rare loggerhead turtles scramble out at night from eggs in the sand on beaches in the west Greek island of Zakynthos and instinctively head for the brightest horizon — normally the white foam of waves under the stars. But neon lights from discos and cafes along the back of the beach at Laganas, built for tourists who also go for boat trips in the bay to try to spot turtles, are often fatally brighter. [MSNBC]

The links to them seem to just hang around forever.

After a few rough starts this morning individual.com is chugging along. One thing I've noticed is that there are still a lot of sites out there still trying to hit the old individual.com. There were a lot of tools on that site for doing all kinds of syndication thing. The thing is, I think a lot of these old pages haven't existed for a while. I wonder how many 404s it takes for a site to try and start scraping things automaticly. Don't people write their scripts to notice when something isn't working right?

From Yahoo! News:

Scientists Retract Story on Ecstasy Brain Damage

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers horrified to find they had used a mislabeled bottle in an experiment retracted their findings on Friday, saying they had failed to show the drug Ecstasy can cause a certain pattern of brain damage. [Yahoo! News]

Somewhat luckily, the tests were done on monkeys and not humans. But still, that's a pretty big goof. It makes you wonder if there are any current medications on the market that had similar things happen.

When using mysqldump, be sure to remember this line from the help: "Note that if you run mysqldump without --quick or --opt, mysqldump will load the whole result set into memory before dumping the result. This will probably be a problem if you are dumping a big database." This is especially important when dumping a 2+GB table. Ooops.

The first time I heard about Individual.com was a few years back when my old high school roommate, Mark Israel, was working there. Over the years I worked with a few folks who had worked there, and just recently have been helping to revive the site. We just did a soft launch on Friday, so people can come by and take a look. It's pretty keen, but we're hoping to get some traffic to see how it holds up under pressure.

So just what is Individual.com? From the site help:

What is Individual.com?
Individual.com is a free customized Internet news service that continuously adapts to provide business people with the best news, information and services to put them ahead in work and life. Unlike other alternates, Individual.com offers the Web's largest collection of business, financial, industry, trade and company-specific news and information uniquely personalized to deliver better targeted, better customized and more relevant news and information to the business professional

Now, we just have to come up with a way to do some kind of authenticated RSS for people. Because I personally think that having something like this teamed up with RSS could be pretty damn kickass. Anyways, come on over and sign up and check it out. We'd love to hear what people think of it.

Yet another thing to make me feel old. CNN has an AP story up titled Cultural references for freshmen from Beloit College's Mindset List. Pretty scary. Some of the ones that stuck out to me:

• 7. Bert and Ernie are old enough to be their parents.
• 12. Gas has always been unleaded.
• 30. Adam and PC Junior computers had vanished from the market before this generation went online.
• 35. Directory assistance has never been free.
• 48. Killer bees have always been swarming in the U.S.

I've been using PHP for years now, it's become one of my standard tools when doing things on the web. But I do get lots of questions about just what PHP is. For those interested, here's a good article that gives an introduction to PHP and some examples. It also gives a history of just how this beast came into being.

I've started to get addicted to Trio. Today I caught a show on The Jam that was really cool. Last week I caught one on New Order. Very cool.

Lockergnome Bits and Bytes had a post on a new piece of software for your PS2 that lets you play audio and video from your computer called the GameShark Media Player. While reading about it, I thought it sounded kind of familiar so did a little bit of digging. It ends up that MadCatz is distributing the BroadQ Qcast under the GameShark name. Pretty cool. Friends of mine have Qcast and love it. They say it works quite well, and the computer side of it runs on every major OS (linux, Windows, and OS X) (I believe it is written in Java). If I see this in the store I just may have to pick it up.

From over on Game Girl Advance comes this line:

Playing an evil character in Knights of the Old Republic is a provocative experience. Games make me think! So I'm eager to rejoin the discussion online. [Game Girl Advance]

I have to agree about playing an evil character in KOTOR. At times it was hard for me to be as mean and just plain cruel as I was. I actually wussed out a few times (like on the Wookie planet). Though, I recovered by my squeamishness by the end of the game, where being evil has some very interesting twists in comparison to being good. But overall, I was really impressed with how thought out the evil side of the game was. There really aren't that many games where you can be just a complete bad guy. Here's hoping for a KOTOR II (or at least more games like this for the XBox).

Ambrose Bierce: "Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)" [Quotes of the Day]

Since I can't seem to fall back to sleep:

• Watching anime (One Piece, You're Under Arrest, Onegai Twins, and Gad-Guard
• Playing video games (.hack//Mutation, Golden Sun)
• Reading (Shonen Jump)
• Catching up on NetNewsWire

If I wasn't unemployed I'd try a late night trip to IHOP, nothing like a big helping of pancakes to help make one tired.

Someone pointed me at this story right before I went to sleep last night.

Bomb Kills Pizza Deliveryman After Arrest in Bank Robbery

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

In the beginning it appeared to be a run-of-the-mill bank robbery.

Brian Douglas Wells, 46, a pizza deliveryman, walked into a bank on a busy street in Erie, Pa., on Thursday, slipped the teller a note and walked out with a bag of cash, said Special Agent Bob Rudge, a supervisor in the F.B.I.'s Erie office.

But in a twist that has experienced local and federal investigators perplexed, Mr. Wells had a bomb around his chest that detonated and killed him shortly after he was stopped by the state police and taken into custody.

When he was arrested, investigators said, Mr. Wells claimed that someone had forced him to wear the bomb, set a timer and sent him out to rob the bank. [NYTimes]

Read the whole article. It's bizarre. I'm not sure what to think. Though the whole thing sounds like it is destined for a TV Movie.

Rabbit. Rabbit.