7:46 PM  
Thanks to Bruce Sterling for pointing me towards this proposal to archive information in the DNA of cockroaches.

Links to this are popping up like wildfire, so why not here? Roger Ebert has proposed that everyone record their own commentary tracks for movies (Check out his sample for the first nine minutes of Hitchcock's Notorious.) What a damn cool idea--it might actually convince me to do something with the microphones that came with my computer...

7:25 PM  
Direct from Memepool to here to you, the animation-interested, it's The Chronology of Animation.

4:45 AM  
Medal of Honor now complete, mainly because I began cheating about 3/4 of the way through the game. Perhaps one or both of those statements shocks you. But for now, I go to seek sleep. Next week I will write up a microreview and all will become clear.

By the way: another Google hit, this time for--of all things--"nude ssx tricky".

Good night. Morning. Whatever.

4:33 AM  
Okay; I am now

Sure, sure, the new features are nice and all, but I mainly did it to support Blogger. For one guy running the show, he's done a pretty good job, and he deserves a bit of my money.

I'll toy with the features over the next few days and give you an update.

BONUS:More online Chemical Brothers-based fun: Booby Trap.

12:57 AM  
Blatently stolen from Metafilter:

"Alterslash takes all the hard work out of reading Slashdot. On a single page, it compiles the day's headlines, along with the top five rated comments on each, and graphs the signal % over time for each thread. Think of it as an automatic digest, showing just the best of Slashdot, each day."

12:56 AM  
The End of Free has begun for Blogger with the rollout of Blogger Pro. I need to read carefully about Blogger Pro this weekend and decide if upgrading is worth it. What do you think, fellow Blogger-users?

9:48 PM  
Much as I have been picking apart my tracking data, so have others, apparently. I note recent visits from the person who posted the French Magnum P.I. Flash movie, and the mad geniuses behind Beatallica. I'm so accustomed to web surfing being a one-way process--browsing anonymously--that it's strange to think of people whose words/pictures/code/madness I have visited going to all the trouble of coming here. Well, if I've posted a link to their page it at least made me chuckle. Hopefully they get something in return.

5:54 PM  
I love that this page has now been in existance long enough to start getting strange Google hits:

* "Dial-a-Pirate"
* "ford focus stainless steel coffee mug" (I'm on page 7; note how many people before me are also complaining about the stupid letter that came with the mug.)
* "Music from GTA3" (One of only three, one which is the place you can actually download it!)

Google spidering my page certainly explains some of the 'unknown origin' hits this page gets...

5:40 PM  
On my links page you'll find a link to Matt Hughley's blog Wholelottanothin'. In today's entry, you'll find a link to this blog. On that page, you find a link to Chris Komlenic's Tools page. Entering "monkey" into the neat-o Yahoo Briefcase Search on the right side found me the Yahoo Briefcase of someone called Dim the Barbarian. In there, I found this collection of wacky decorated spork photos.

Some days I just want to keep clicking forever, to see what I can find.

5:25 PM  

"Based on a review of thousands of completed auctions for "EverQuest" items
and in-game currency, Castronova concluded that players earn an average wage
of $3.42 for every hour they play the game and collectively produce annual gross
"exports" of more than $5 million."

$3.42 an hour. Looks like I won't be quitting my job to play EQ full-time anytime soon...

1:51 PM  
An image to ASCII converter; this is the coolest thing I've seen all day.

The weirdest thing I've seen all day: Beatallica.

6:17 PM  
Even Batman likes cereal.

2:31 PM  
As I've been playing Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, I've really been enjoying the score. Turns out that the it was done by the same composer who did the other Medal of Honor games, Michael Giacchino. I've found his website, but no MoHAA downloads yet. Time to hit the Net and do some searching...

3:58 AM  
A quote from an interview with the guy who runs the Internet Wayback Machine:

"If all books are 20 TBs, and 20 TBs (cost) $80,000, that's the Library of Congress. ... All music? It's tiny. It looks like there're only one million records that have been produced over the last century. That's tiny. All movies? All theatrical releases have been estimated at 100,000, and most of those from India. If you take all the rest of ephemeral films, that's on the order of a couple hundred thousand. It's just not that big. "

"It's just not that big."

I remember smiling when the characters in Bruce Sterling's novel Heavy Weather were carrying around portable versions of the Library of Congress for entertainment. It's nice to see we've got "Oh, we can archive that" down and can move on to "Sure, you can carry that around."

3:32 AM  
Oh man, does this archive of textfiles take me back to my BBS days...

It's weird to realize that in my four years of college it went from the only way to use email being an account on the Comp. Sci. department's VAX to the point where everyone on campus got university-issued accounts to use on the Ethernet that was being wired into the dorms; from the point where the only online communities were local BBSes (except for those crazy boards that were hooked into that wacky WWW network thing) through Mosaic to the early days of Yahoo (I remember seeing it even before it looked like this, back when it still had the "Jerry and Dave's Links" subtitle).

sjohns14@cs.wisc.edu. That was my first email address. I wonder if anyone has it now, and more importantly--who were the 13 'sjohns' who got addresses before me?

I'm getting sentimental. Time to go to sleep.

3:23 AM  
Neat clocks! And they're real ones, not online ones! (Well okay, they're online, but they're real. If you know what I mean.)

3:21 AM  
By the way, here's a look at Blogger's future, including the soon-to-come price ($30/year).

I didn't write it, so I refuse to apologize for the verbose style of the writer.

In other news about your online future, here's a bit about spyware. Now you know why I update and run Ad-Aware religously.

3:09 AM  
I heard a rumor the other day that the only pinball machine still being manufactured inthe U.S. was the South Park pinball. Fearing it might be truth, I did some research and discovered that it's almost true....but not quite. There's more than one machine in production, but one company claims to be making them all:

Perhaps you'd like to own a T-shirt from this last stalwart, Stern Pinball.

12:18 AM  
According to Reuters, a picture of the Clash on stage has been selected as the "perfect rock and roll picture of all time". I find it interesting that the photo itself doesn't accompany Yahoo's online version of the story, nor does a search of their online news photo archive turn up a copy of the photo.

Granted, this is probably because the photographer would rather not that millions of pixel-perfect copies of made instantly by those reading the story; I admit that saving a copy was one of my first instincts. (If you want to see it, as the story says, you can find it as the cover to the Clash's album "London Calling".)

Then again, I may just be thinking too hard. If anyone sees a print version of the story, let me know if my over-deduction bears fruit.

Off to play more Medal of Honor. Good night, sirrah and madame.

Archive problem fixed, so pertinent text deleted. Link to Blogger-powered archives in sidebar should now work properly. Now I'm off to play Medal of Honor.

2:55 PM  
I am absolutely not a fan of The Real World on MTV. Besides the fact that it's been a stalwart of MTV's wrong-headed non-music programming, I don't want to spend my valuable media consumption time watching other people's problems. I have enough of my own, thankyoumuch. That said, I am jealous of the apartments and houses the selected nitwits get to live in during taping. Thus (and again to support my theory that even the nicheiest niche has it's fans online) I provide you a link to RealWorldHouses.com.

That's probably all you'll get from me today. I'm off to go play Medal of Honor.

10:25 PM  
I'm going to post a few links to the new Chemical Brothers video in the hopes that you will be able to get through on one of them and check it out. It's neat-o keen.

*Official Chemical Brothers site (Highest quality, highest lag)
*BBC
*More to come as I find them...

9:06 PM  
Only a couple times in the past have I ever done anything against or in support of pending legislation. But I do believe, with the FTC's proposed further restrictions on telemarketers, the time has come. Man, do I hate telemarketers.

Update: Done. You can send your own comments to the address listed on the page linked above.

1:53 PM  
I'd like to congratulate my sister on the fall of one of her rivals.

11:19 AM  
"A horrendous combination of bad gameplay, graphics, character design, and a complete lack of charm. This is an affront to gaming." 17%

11:09 PM  
I don't know how I wasted the eighties, but now it's incredibly obvious that I should have learned to breakdance.

10:59 PM  
I just noticed that Bezzy linked to my blog last week. Well hello right back at you, sir. I enjoy reading your page immensely and can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to K...

10:26 PM  
Fox Trot has jumped on the game design bandwagon. Check it out (start at the bottom and read up.)

9:51 PM  
Just to show that there are crazy fans of everything, enjoy this French Magnum P.I. fanFlash--you should watch it, if just ot hear the soundtrack.

6:50 PM  
Just a link to an article I want to re-read later: "The Case Against Knowledge Management". But feel free to read and enjoy it yourself.

6:39 PM  
Listen, I don't know what blogs and pages you read on a regular basis, but might I suggest adding James Lilek's Bleat to the list? When you have a few minutes, the rest of his site is good reading, too.

5:51 PM  
Thanks to the Seeker, my mind is now at rest; I understand(!) the Anabuki commericials.

And since everyone is explaining how they got a tank in GTA3: I never had one until I completed the game, at which point there's one free for the taking at the armory on the north tip of Staunton Island. One day I drove over, calmly got in, drove over to Portland, and gave it to the crane down at the docks. Now I have tanks whenever I want on two of the three islands. (Okay, there's a tank parked over on Shoreside too, from when I was experimenting with cheats and accidentally saved, but I'm not proud of it--so it sits blocking the tunnel entrance beneath the Cochrane Dam Bridge as a reminder.)

Now the FBI Car...that was a bitch to get. My strategy involved luring the combined Forces of Good to the Staunton Island parking garage through a cunning combination of snipery and grenades. I then lured an FBI car into the ground floor of the garage, at which point the AI gets all confused. I jumped out of my car and ran up to the second level, FBI agents in hot foot pursuit. Killed 'em all like the bad man that I am, ran down and jacked their car, whipped out and around the police barricades, down the alley to the Pay n' Spray, and that was that. Oh, and I quickly took it over to the Portland Docks crane to complete that miniquest; now I can have one whenever I want without hassle.

That's my GTA3 style, see: I don't live with hassle--I cause hassle.

6:20 PM  
Consider: the announcement by the White House of today as National Sanctity of Life Day and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Now, there are some who say that the First Amendment is a one-way street, that it simply means that the government should not have influence upon religion, while the opposite is entirely fine ("Someone's morality is going to be taught -- but whose?").

Personally, I'm for what essentially boils down to Secular Humanism--not as a weapon against religion but as a doorway between all beliefs, religious or otherwise, that everything should be weighed and considered rather than accepted blindly. Individuals should absolutely be allowed to come to their own conclusions after those considerations* (e.g., I join those who found the Taleban's interpretation of Islamic law reprehensible), but that just as absolutely shouldn't close them off from future consideration of others' beliefs--or their own; as Socrates said, "The unconsidered life is not worth living."

The President's declaration of National Sanctity of Life Day worries me especially because of its manipulative language, equating via analogy pro-choice supporters to the terrorists of September 11 (terrorists=evil=no respect for life=no respect for the life of the unborn=(unspoken but present) pro-choice). The entry of the word "terrorist" into the rhetoric of expediency has become a worldwide phenomena since September--see how Israel constantly places the label "terrorist" on the Palestinians, how India and Pakistan both label each others' forces in Kashmir "terrorists", how Russia has suddenly reframed the Chechan rebels as terrorists. I'm not arguing for or against the labelling in any of these particular situations--those are other discussions--but I do think "terrorist" is becoming a dangerous shorthand used to justify violent action against oppositional beliefs. This seems to be being done by the U.S. because they know that "actions against terrorists" are so strongly supported by the public, and by foreign countries because they believe that if they label their conflicts similarly the world community may not stand behind them, but will at least stand aside.

The links above show that a few minutes with Google allow you to go and consider the facts and make a decision for yourself one way or another, but will the average person do that? Many will likely hear the word "terrorist" and shove them, unconsidered, into that pidgeonhole in their opinions. To begin using that language casually and domestically is, I think, a dangerous thing. It's just as easy to replace "pro-choice" with "pro-life" in the argument for respecting the sanctity of life, just as easy to label pro-lifers terrorists (indeed, a 1998 story by ABC News did just that.)

The word "rhetoric" is a double-edged sword. In one sense it can mean language used wisely and convincingly. But in another it can mean language used with shallow intentions simply to manipulate. I think we need to be careful that "terrorist" doesn't fall into such confusing territory. We don't want to come to a time when we have to stop and consider: is a terrorist evil, or just someone we disagree with?

Hopefully it's not too late.

(By the way--for those whose emotions pinged when the abortion issue was raised, I highly reccommend Carl Sagan's article on the issue. It paints pretty clearly where I sit--which is to say, right in the middle, as did Roe v. Wade--no matter how extremists on both sides of the issue like to paint it.)

UPDATE: Apparently now Tolkien fans in Kazakhstan are being called a "counter-cultural group"--just a police press conference away from "terrorist". Granted, the fans should probably stop calling themselves "the Tolkienisti", but still...

* Acting upon these conclusions is quite another thing; for this conversation let us remain in the rarefied environment of debate, okay?

5:26 PM  
From my latest set of tracking data:

No big surprise that the biggest spike is here in my home time zone, followed by areas in the US where my friends live. But: Who's reading this page from Iceland? From central Asia? From India? If you're a person and not a bot, send me an email; I'm just curious who you are. Thanks for stopping by, though.

4:04 AM  
While waiting for some downloads, I've been digging around Chowhound, a (despite their protests) poorly-formatted but interesting to read site. If you're interested in good food and good restaurants, it's worth checking out.

12:19 AM  
I stumbled across this archive of Superhero ICQ Logs while searching the net for something completely SA-unrelated. Enjoy.