No updates this weekend? Au contraire! Tony will be gone, and that means I have unchecked, free reign access to this weblog.

Just a heads up, there will be no updates this weekend, as I am going to be at Grand Tournament. Cheers!

"The Israel Defense Forces sent helicopter gunships and tanks to hit targets associated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat today, following a series of deadly attacks against Israelis. The Palestine Red Crescent Society said a member of Arafat's personal guard was killed in Ramallah and at least six people were wounded -- two in Ramallah and four in Gaza City".

Oh crap.

We're pleased to inform you that we've accepted your story, At the End of Time, the Grand Marshal Indulges in a Speech for publication in the August 2001 issue of The Cafe Irreal. Within the next two weeks we will mail a check in the amount of $2.00 (approximately one cent per word for 188 words) to the following address: yadda yadda yadda

I'm glad, but I have to shake my head and ask myself, did I really name a story that?

"It's weird that Microsoft is going this way, it lacks courage, it lacks philosophy, it's not consistent with what Microsoft already knows about the Internet, imho."

Dave Winer's excellent article on why Hailstorm might not work. I think Dave's right in identifying Hailstorm as a huge event and a big change in The Way Things Will Be. Either that, or Microsoft's pulling the biggest fake to the hoop in computer history.

"We're collecting names to pass on to Warners to show your displeasure at what they're doing. Defence Against the Dark Arts, PotterWar Denmark, PotterWar, Hogwartsonline and a number of other fan sites (including fans who've had the letters from Warners!) are working together on this."

Sign the petition!

PS. Breaking rumor: John Cleese will be playing Nearly Headless Nick (which is pretty much how I'd pictured it).

"The studio, whose Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone comes out in November, sued Claire Field last fall, claiming her Website, harrypotterguide.co.uk, was 'likely to cause consumer confusion or dilution of intellectual property rights.' The company gave the teenager one option: Shut down the site or go to court."

Imperio!

No one died in the earthquake, but there are ghosts. The ghost of the OK Hotel has been wandering up and down 1st Avenue. Residents wake in the middle of the night to see bricks and planks wandering by their windows, but when they look again, they're not there. Late workers in the parking lot at Starbucks talk of "The Banshee", the shade of a BMW that terrorizes the lot, screeching it's car alarm and keying their cars.

"They cut off the Minotaur's head in February."

Long Live the Minotaur!

Once again, thanks to Philos, leader of the unknown free world, for the link.

"Impact of vulnerability: Attacker could digitally sign code using the name Microsoft Corporation."
This from the resounding, earth shaking 'DOH!' category.

We have a class 2 toxic waste spill in our neighborhood. I'ts just an overgrown lot now, fenced in and full of shiny barrels. I walk past it every day on my way to get my morning coffee. It's been over a week since I've been that way. You see, I've been very busy at work, and I haven't been feeling weel besides. Today I was coming back from the coffee shop when I noticed that two very old houses that stand behind the lot have been boarded up. I know that people were living there the last time I walked by.

Grand Tournament! In just a week I'll be happily moving small lead and plastic models around a table and making silly explosion noises with 120 other like-minded fanatics and out-and-out weirdos. Until then, these pictures from the Sydney GT. Some really, realy great pics, like that doomed Death Wing terminator over to the left there.

Survivor Collectible Card Game

"Castaway game cards from the game are already popular among collectors who are buying and selling them online at a premium. Bidding wars over Upper Deck's Survivor trading cards on several online auction services are as cutthroat as the game itself."

Survivor is now adding series two losers to it's CCG. How popular is this game, really? When I asked about it at my local game store they unloaded all their demo packs on me for free, and cards are going at cost on Ebay. Anyone wanna bet that the news story quoted here was written by someone on staff at Upper Deck?

I'm tired of being sick. I can't beleive that Harry gets to go to Hogwarts and I have to go to boring old Redmond.

"Users are definitely not in control of the technology that surrounds them. Asked to adapt to the differences between the way they interact with local programs and sites on the web, asked to cope with doing things completely differently on their cell phone, their PC, and any other device they have, users are generally frustrated and confused."

Thus Spake... Microsoft?

--Microsoft Hailstorm Whitepaper. Strange things are afoot in Redmond.

"On the way home I find myself admitting, "I am so ashamed to be heterosexual."

--Seattlestories.net

Look, it's a peeve of mine, a thing that bothers me. In the US release of the first Harry Potter book, they replace the phrase "Philosopher's stone" with "Sorceror's stone". The argument is that Americans won't know what a Philosopher's stone is supposed to be. So how does replacing the name of this thing, that no one know what it is, with another name, that doesn't mean anything at all, supposed to fix anything? Sacco thinks it's because "Sorceror" has a very definite marketing meaning for Americans: Mickey Mouse. Oh please let that not be true.

"Something weird is going on in Matrixland. Some new batch of drugs has hit the street, I think. Shorty, a sweet little waitress from the diner down the street, was attacked by a stranger. Two kids on Spring Break from Pennsylvania were attacked by strangers [no link yet]. The g/f's neighbor arrived at her door at 2 a.m. today sweating profusely and trying to sell us his DVD player."

The latest in Tony's listing of really fine blogs.

There's a strange music in the air. I was waiting for the bus around the feet of the new convention center. They were cutting concrete with a giant circular saw blade. Someone crankin' the bass, shaking the glass in the windows at FAO Schwartz. A young girl's voice begging her parents "please"?


I know this city has its music. I don't make any demands. I just make sure my mood is wait-ful, and catch it when it sings.

Mockingbird Imitates Car Alarm Perfectly

Killogs is a pretty durn cool weblog. Still sick today.

"Eleven years in the States had led him to believe that this kind of thing doesn't happen here, or at least not anymore. I wish he were right."

More school kids branded with the 'potential killer' stigma. It makes me want to cry.

"Why does radio suck? Because most stations play only the songs the record companies pay them to. And things are going to get worse."

--From Salon.com.

Once again, thanks to Philos, leader of the unknown free world, for the link.

I am feeling altogether unwell this evening.

Spacefarers of Catan

"One of the most anticipated titles to hit the Essen '99 fair, Sternenfahrer von Catan takes the Setters of Catan to the stars. Players compete to colonize new worlds and set up trade agreements with alien cultures. The game shares some basic similarities with its older sibling but the components and strategies in Sternenfahrer offer up a completely different game."

I've been playing Settlers of Catan for ages. If this Sequel is as good, it'll be well worth buying. Wonder when it'll be availavle in English?

I just began playing a fascinating game called Nomic. The game is played by email and starts out with a very simple set of rules (e.g. something like "each turn each player rolls a dice and gets as many points as are shown on the dics"). Each player may propose a new rule each turn. The game quickly gets complicated and quite, well, weird. Apparently this game has been around since the Arpanet. I'm playing a variation of the game called Nomopoly. Quite neat.

"Important notes: I'm not a Canadian. I'm not a lawyer. I am not intimately familiar with Canadian law. The following is my uninformed opinion only."

Nevertheless, this is a very informative analysis of why relocating Napster to Sealand may just not work.

An interview with Norton Juster, who wrote The Phantom Tollbooth

"When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd bothered. Nothing really interested him -- least of all the things that should have."

When Farida finally had me read this, I wished I had read it when I was young.

Link courtesy of Philos.

Harry Potter | Daily Prophet | Mar 1, 2001 The Teaser Trailer Has Arrived!

Now with search!

That's right. I've added search capability through Atomz.com.

"Our goal is to establish a Napster server (OpenNap running on a server provided by HavenCo) in a jurisdiction (the Principality of Sealand) beyond the reach of the major governments of the world (and of course the RIAA)."

--Lin courtesy of Scripting News.

I have an admission to make. I spend a significant portion of my personal time painting toy soldiers. Then I play with them. I'm not even sensible enough to be embarassed about it. I'm very excited right now. I've been painting my current army on and off for a year in preparation for the Seattle Grand Tournament. There will be players and painters from all over the US there. I've written up my army list. I've painted most of my models including my Exalted Champoin. I'm nearly ready.

Nooooooo!
"We're being very, very careful about what we're doing," said Robert Staten, an Agriculture Department scientist who will run the field trial.

--CNN Online: First Biotech Insect to be released in US.

Apparently scientists are anxious to find out if they can obliterate a whole species through use of biotech.

How to tell if your ass is too small.

Courtesy of Bernards Basement

Yes Yes Yes!
"Community projects require good communication, and the Internet, if it does anything, is an unprecedented communication enabler."
--Scripting News, just about the only blog I read every day.

Michelle Shocked
I was sitting in the hairdresser's chair in Takoma Park, MD, when the song "When I Grow Up" came on the radio. I perked up when Michelle Shocked sang, "We're gonna have a hundred and twenty babies!" This was not Top Forty Radio.

A few years later, I bought Michelle Shocked's albums, went to a concert in Chicago, and danced on stage with her band to "Arkansas Traveller." I even wrote to her a couple of times. She wrote back. She had a rapport with some Goshen College students at one point, and called in to the local college radio station. (No one told me until afterward. Punks!)

Some time later, she sued Mercury Records to get out of her recording contract, citing the 13th amendment. She won. It's hard to find her music on cd these days. She sells her new cds only at concerts, and her old cds have vanished form the record stores. (Mercury's revenge?) They can steal her royalties, but they can't steal her music. Take a look at an unofficial website in tribute to this fine musician and storyteller.

I had a good idea a few minutes ago Exploding Dog will make a picture based on any phrase you suggest. I'm suggesting my .sig quote, "Unbreakable toys are great for breaking other toys." click here for large image

I just got my copies of Wrox's XML for Databases and Professional XSLT. I'm very excited.

"Microsoft recently threw around its weight -- and its fat wallet -- to squash an independent testing lab from publishing benchmark results that the lab ran for InfoWorld's sister publication NetworkWorld. The test demonstrated that SQL Server 7 runs nearly twice as fast on Windows NT 4.0 than it does on Windows 2000."

--Robert X. Cringely on InfoWorld

New Star Trek Series Announced

"For good measure, the creators are throwing in an African-American helmsman, a Japanese communications expert and translator, and a Southerner who's not familiar with new civilizations."

So the next Star Trek series features a captain with a bold personality, a loyal vulcan sidekick and a quirky doctor. Added to the mix are an engineer who's shy around women and a close-minded southerner. I'm so glad that Paramount is doing it's bit to strike down stereotypes and give us something we haven't seen before. I also hear there's going to be a survivor-style "Federation Council" that votes out unpopular races.

--Story from CNN Online.

"You can only tell the shapes of things by looking at their edges..."

I am feeling lazy today; utterly worn. So all you get today is another good weblog, follow me here...

"Why Blogger Empowers Mindless Nits"

--by Morbus

It's true. You know it is.

"I had an idea once but it was too involved to put in this small space. So you will have to go somewhere else to see it."

--Michael Atkinson's Blog, Strange Brew. A worthy mix of politics and "guess what I did today".

I think blogging is going to have a very interesting future. One of the interesting things that's going on is people are groping towards some kind of way to find the good stuff in the haystack. I still think the best way is going to be word of mouth. The blogs with similar interests and levels of quality are naturally going to group themselves together by linking and commenting on BlogVoices. Nevertheless, there are some people who are trying to come up with technological solutions. One of these is BlogHop. So I've added a bloghop rating link in the left hand column to see what happens, even though a great and bizarre blog like deadman gets as many bad ratings as good. At least you can't call him mediocre.

"Never heard of SilentRunner? The scores of companies and government agencies using the program to keep tabs on their agents and employees like it that way."

--From Wired News Service

I don't know whether to say "scary" or "cool".

"My latte was everywhere! I always order a Grande, but after the earthquake I was left with only a Tall."

I swore that I wouldn't post any more earthquake stories, but this is just TOO FUNNY!

Very Clever Baby
Are you a parent whose baby is "very advanced" for his/her age? Are you forever finding your copy of Pride and Prejudice under the crib? Are you tired of going to the library to ask for Crime and Punishment or The Sound and the Fury in board book format, only to be told that they "don't carry abridged versions?" Garth Nix's Very Clever Baby books are for you! (As Rosemary Wells says, Read to Your Bunny)

I just added some links to some very good blogs that are based (like me) in the NorthWest. I think they are worth checking out. Just look under Blogging the NorthWest in the left-hand nav frame.

Personal Earthquake Tragedy - Picking up the Pieces

Threre are only 6 or 7 news stories. The news media keep them in a special room and only let them out to play once in a while. There is only one "personal tragedy" story, only one "picking up the pieces story" only one "natural disaster" story. Never mind that Seattle's earthquake was relatively minor, for many of us an almost festive event. The media must show pictures of crashed cars and huddling masses declaring their state of hype emergency.

Many of my friends have been getting hysterical calls from friends who have seen the pictures of carnage on the news. They ask if the windows broke and the walls fell in. I tell them that my copy of "Thus Spake Zarathustra" fell off the shelf and startled my cat.

"I guess we'll probably be blogging from hovercraft and wearing shiny suits."

--Evan Williams on Write the Web.

Ulysses for Dummies
Even if you do understand James Joyce without the Bloomsday Book, like Queen Victoria, you too will be amused.

We added Ezra Stutzman Hershberger's paintings to our list of links. Ezra Hershberger is my grandfather.

I have implemented permanent links. The little "link" link at the end of each post gives the URL where that post will be archived once it disappears from the page.

Scripting News is a very very good technical-minded weblog, despite the fact that it thinks that "Kafka is a small XSL framework for building SOAP endpoints."