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.