Do you care about privacy? Dossier program alarms Utahns.

"It sounds like a sci-fi thriller: a super computer program that gathers dossiers on every single man, woman and child - everything from birth and marriage and divorce history to hunting licenses and car license plates. Even every address you have lived at down to the color of your hair.

It sounds surreal, but former Gov. Mike Leavitt signed Utah's 2.4 million residents up for a pilot program - ironically called MATRIX - that does just that. And he never bothered to reveal details of the program to Utah citizens or to state lawmakers who, upon learning of the program on Capitol Hill this week, are now worried the state could be involved in a program that jeopardizes basic civil liberties."

This is old news from 2000, but I mentioned it during a conversation at work and thought I'd post it here because it's both interesting and freaky.

The basic idea is that the brain of a lamprey was removed from the body of the animal, then hooked up to a little robot. That robot responded to output signals from the lamprey brain, and it sent input signals to the brain. I imagine that things have come a long way since then.

More news on banning the word "evolution" from Georgia schools, this time from former President Jimmy Carter. Excerpts taken from this CNN article:

"As a Christian, a trained engineer and scientist, and a professor at Emory University, I am embarrassed by Superintendent Kathy Cox's attempt to censor and distort the education of Georgia's students," Carter said in a written statement.

Carter also predicted ridicule for the state, along with discredit on Georgia's university system.

According to the Death Clock, my personal Armageddon Day is August 25, 2060. So I've got another 56 years to get my business done.

The "evolution" topic made it onto Bunny after it showed it up in this New York Times article.

raven: Nothing really new here. But always fun to laugh at stupid people.
rnorris: fucking idiots
corncob01: She added that people often associate it with "that monkeys-to-man sort of thing."
raven: and that galileo was not considered reputable at first either . . .
lvaughn: That argument always pisses me off. Most visionary scientists are considered a bit whacky at first, but what they fail to consider is that for every Galileo, there are tons of people who sound like crackpots who really are just that, crackpots. Given a person who science of the day doesn't accept, the odds are pretty good that they are a crackpot.
rnorris: http://objective.jesussave.us/creationsciencefair.html
raven: oh my god: Jonathan Goode (grade 7) applied findings from many fields of science to support his conclusion that God designed women for homemaking: physics shows that women have a lower center of gravity than men, making them more suited to carrying groceries and laundry baskets; biology shows that women were designed to carry un-born babies in their wombs and to feed born babies milk, making them the natural choice for child rearing; social sciences show that the wages for women workers are lower than for normal workers, meaning that they are unable to work as well and thus earn equal pay; and exegetics shows that God created Eve as a companion for Adam, not as a co-worker.
rnorris: the site may be a hoax, but it's a good one
raven: must be a hoax. did you see Habu's Corner in the Just4Kidz section? Question to Hindu looking elephant: Hey Habu how many god's do you have? Habu: I don't know. I lost count. Zoinks!
corncob01: http://www.creationdiscovery.org/cdp/events.html
corncob01: Wayne Williams CS grade 4 showed us how God created gravity, and how gravity controls the universe.
rnorris: kindergarten 1st prize: "On the 6th day God made Rabbits"
corncob01: On the 6th day God made Rabbits
corncob01: :-)
rnorris: good times

It is strange, but true, that evolution has never existed in the deep southern states of America. It exists in the rest of the U.S., just not in the southern states. How can this be?

See, the south is known as God's country. In God's country, science is a bunch of nonsense, and everyone knows that species do not evolve. For all those who think the southerners are wrong, you're missing one glaringly huge detail: it's written in a book, and therefore it is true. Got that?

So in keeping with the undisputed reality that evolution doesn't exist, the state of Georgia is trying to ban the word "evolution" from use within the Georgia public school system.

Pixar and Disney currently have an agreement where Pixar is responsible for content and Disney is responsible for distribution and marketing. But today, Pixar broke off 10 months of negotations over the future of the Pixar/Disney relationship, saying that Disney unfairly wanted too much of the profits.

From this article at CNN:

"After ten months of trying to strike a deal with Disney, we're moving on," Pixar CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. "We've had a great run together -- one of the most successful in Hollywood history -- and it's a shame that Disney won't be participating in Pixar's future successes."

You'll need a Windows Media Player watch this. It's posted on this page, or you can download the video directly.

ehh.... Lions and Tigers in Kenya

This is too crazy. In response to numerous security problems with Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser, Microsoft produced this informative page.

I'll spare you the time of reading through it all, and point out the most important piece (taken verbatim from Microsoft's own text):

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself.

Just to be sure we're all clear on this, Microsoft has said that people should stop clicking on hyperlinks in web pages, because that's insecure. Got that? No more clicking urls.

Update: this is now on slashdot with plenty of silly comments in the discussion threads (though none as silly as Microsoft's advice of not clicking urls).

From this BBC article:

A dead sperm whale has exploded while being delivered to a research centre near the southwestern city of Tainan.

Passers-by and cars were soaked in blood and body parts were sprayed over a road after the bursting of the whale, which was being carried on a trailer.

Update: A friend sent me this link about a whale that washed up on the Oregon coast several years ago. They didn't know what to do with it, because it was too big to move and they couldn't just leave it there, so somebody had the utterly brilliant idea of using a half ton of dynamite to blow the whale up. Their thinking was that the seagulls would eat the small pieces after the explosion, and nobody would have to do any more work. Things did not go according to plan. A quarter of a mile away, some poor guy's car was smashed by a huge chunk of whale. Go the the site and scroll to the bottom, there's a QuickTime video that shows the scene before, during, and after.

I have recently learned that my phone number has been copyrighted by Magnus-Opus, a company in Australia. They used a computer to generate 10 billion phone numbers, and then they generated the sound of the numbers being dialed. Then they filed copyrights on those phone numbers. Now, every time a phone number is dialed, it violates international copyright law. Don't believe me? Check your own phone number, and then read their license agreement which you can fill out to obtain the rights to the sound of your own phone number.

Symantec has a page about the the W32.Novarg.A@mm virus (the one responsible for all of those "hello" email messages you've been receiving from random people). If you're on an infected machine, Symantec's page includes instructions for virus removal.

Play Hit The Penguin for great, penguin-smacking fun.

There's an article at The Register about a recent study by MIT investigating peoples' affinity toward various techno-gadgets. The results show that a third of US adults hate mobile phones. Additionally, a quarter said they hated alarm clocks, and two out of ten said they hated television.

WiFi - SM: feel the global pain

WiFi-SM is an Internet connected wireless device that you can fix on any part of your body. It automatically detects the information from approximately 4,500 news sources worldwide updated continuously and analyses them looking for specific keywords such as death, kill, murder, torture, rape, war, virus etc.. Each time the text of the news contains one of these keywords, your WiFi-SM device is activated through the Wi-Fi network and provides you with an electric impulse. This impulse is calibrated so that you can feel a certain amount of pain, but is completely safe.

I wish I had thought of this service - you send your stack of audio CDs, a few days later we send your CDs back along with a hard drive containing MP3 versions of your entire music collection.

At work, I had an 11,434 line data file that needed to be fixed, and it needed to be fixed right now. So I opened the file with vi and used the following regular expression to make the required change to every line that was incorrect:

s/\(^.\{199\}\)1\(.\{27\}\)/\10\2/

Regular expressions are cool.

Since Friendster is a pile of poop (I believe the official definition of "pile of poop" is thus: 'any web application that's so bloated that your web browser times out when you try to log in') and broke once people started using it, Google decided to give it a try.

The new service is called Orkut (it's named after a Turkish guy who wrote it, Orkut Buyukkokten) and it's powered by Google.

Incidentally, I just tried to log in at Friendster. Same shiznat, different day - another browser timeout. I hope this Orkut thing takes off, because it's a neat idea that requires a ton of server power.

I had some questions about the DVD format, so I hunted around for answers. I found the DVD FAQ to be extremely helpful and informative. Give it a look if you want to learn something new about DVDs.

This article at CNN says that citrus growers are having a hard time due to the popularity of Atkins, South Beach, and other low-carb diets. Having personally lost more than 30 pounds (without gaining any of it back), I have to laugh at this stuff.

Any temporary change in your lifestyle, such as going on the Atkins diet for 3 or 6 months, will only bring temporary changes. That is, when you go back to your old ways of eating and living, you will put more weight on. Why don't people realize this? There are zillions of crazy diets, but most of them are just a temporary break in bad habits. What's more, gaining or losing weight isn't just about what you eat. If you change what you eat to lose weight, you'd better prepare yourself to gain that weight right back when you switch back to eating like you used to.

When I wanted to lose weight, I took the advice of every personal trainer, coach, and nutritional expert out there - increase your caloric needs so that you are burning more calories than you consume. Simple as that. Following this rule, you could eat 2,500 calories in a day, but be sure to expend enough energy to burn 500 calories. Guess what? At the end of the day, you're at a 500 calorie deficit, which means your body will burn extra energy from your fat stores, and you'll lose weight. It takes about 3,000 calories to equal one pound of fat, so if you maintan the same eating habits but burn 500 calories more each day, you'll lose a pound a week. That's exactly what I did.

I ate whatever I wanted, just in moderation, and always included regular exercise. I dropped a pound a week, and continued like that until I lost more than 30 pounds. Since then, I still maintain the same eating habits I had before (which include protein and carbs).

I guess I should drop it, because the real issue with this country isn't about finding a healthy lifestyle, or healthy habits. People don't want to work for a healthy lifestyle. This is about quick fixes, and how to continue being lazy. Being lazy is how we end up putting on weight in the first place, right? Soon, laziness becomes the norm. Over time, it becomes less and less possible to get away from that lazy behavior, so you're stuck there. I just wish people would take a break from all of the eating and the food-centric perspectives, and go take a fricking walk outside...

Here's a collection of absurd product warning labels. For instance, a warning on a bottle of drain cleaner: "If you do not understand, or cannot read, all directions, cautions and warnings, do not use this product." Another good one, "Do not allow children to play in the dishwasher."

The likelihood of coming across a 1959 Fender Strat today is extremely low. There simply aren't many of them around. I was just as suprised as anyone else when I found out that a co-worker has one at home, played for only a few days before spending the last 44 years sitting, untouched, in a pristine guitar case.

Commence crazy story....

I recently bought a Stratocaster (2003 model, new). I deliberated for a few weeks on what to get, and one morning I finally decided to get it. So I picked it up from the guitar store on the way into work that day. Not wanting to leave my brand new guitar in the car all day, I brought it into the office. I did the Show and Tell thing with a few co-workers, "here's my new toy...", etc. One of the guys walks by, glances down at the guitar, makes a joke or two, then goes back to his desk.

The next day, that guy asks me and another guitar player what we think an old model Fender might be worth. What condition? He tells us that it was purchased by his Great Uncle, and mere days later the man died, and the guitar has remained literally unplayed since then. How long ago was that? Sometime in the late 50's, he says. What model? He doesn't know, but he says it looks just like the one I brought into work the day before.

Oh yeah, he also has a 1959 Fender tube amp, still in the box and wrapped in the original plastic.

He had the guitar and amp appraised this past Saturday. The appraiser's opinion was that the amp would probably sell for $2,000 to $5,000, and the guitar could easily sell for $15,000 to $20,000, and it might be even more.

Update: The guitar and amp were sent to Fender for official appraisal. The final analysis values the amp at $22,000 and the guitar at $55,000. They also tried very hard to buy the pair for the Fender museum.

I'm looking at a bag of Chex Mix. On the back, it reads:

"FRESHER IF USED BY: 02JUN04".

Used? Who talks like that? "Sorry, I used all of your snacks last night."

And what will it be fresher than? I think it would clear things up a lot if they rewrote the packaging like this:

"FRESHER IF EATEN RIGHT NOW"

Groklaw has converted all of the Novell/SCO correspondence (previously available as pdf documents) into text. I just read through most of the letters, and I'm left wondering what SCO is really trying to accomplish. Both Novell and IBM (and others) have repeatedly demanded proof from SCO of the purported "violations", and SCO continually fails to demonstrate anything to anyone. If Linux is running code that was stolen from Unix, SCO should be able to say "here it is" and produce evidence that proves what code was stolen. SCO has consistently ignored this demand, and has chosen instead to focus its energy in other matters (specifically, matters that are not helping their case at all).

This whole situation seems incredibly strange. The popular claim is that SCO (and more importantly, SCO's CEO Darl McBride) are trying to inflate SCO's stock value. Whatever their intentions, the general posture and approach taken by SCO is antagonistic and greedy. Furthermore, it's a strong indicator that all those involved with this SCO battle (on SCO's side) have little to no character, and are probably shallow people who won't be missed when their time has passed.

I think somebody should start a small business making and selling "SCO Is Dumb" t-shirts. I'd probably buy one.

Today is Personal Firewall Day. It's a public service website that hopes to educate consumers on what a firewall is, why they should use one, and where they find tools that will help protect their computers.

Really, the hidden message is that only Windows users need to worry about this, because many *nix operating systems (including OS X) have a firewall installed and configured from the start. Contrast that with Windows where you have no firewall running, and several dozen services actively listening for traffic from the outside world (which is one of the big reasons why Windows is constantly plagued by security problems).

Prior to this, I have not heard much of anything about Novell's involvement in the current SCO legal mess (where SCO is trying to claim that all versions of Linux are based off of SCO Unix, and thus every Linux user must pay SCO a $699 license fee. Yes, just about everybody thinks it's idiotic, except for the people at SCO.)

According to Groklaw, Novell has been doing all kinds of things behind the scenes, and they've recently disclosed correspondence that, among other things, waives all of IBM's alleged violations (alleged by SCO, and thus extremely vacuous in the first place).

Here's a letter from Novell to SCO's lawyers. It points out that when SCO bought the rights from Novell in 1995, they signed a Technology License Agreement. In that agreement, there are two clauses that provide Novell with the right to "authorize its customers to use, reproduce and modify Licensed Technology (including related documentation)."

The closing sentence is priceless, "In view of SCO's continued harassment of Linux users based on exaggerated and unfounded claims, Novell reserves the right to exercise its rights under the TLA."

The letter was also cc'd to Darl McBride, SCO's chief who leads the charge in this idiotic legal battle.

Warning: put on your Gossip Hat before continuing!

According to cyclingnews, Lance Armstrong and Sheryl Crow are dating.

"Lance Armstrong and singer Sheryl Crow have made their relationship public at the Los Angeles premiere of Along Came Polly, a comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Ben Stiller. The couple were spotted strolling down the red carpet on Monday, the first time that they had made their relationship public after Armstrong separated from his wife Kristin late last year."

Not really sure what to say about this site, but "weird" is probably the best I can do. See for yourself, go to the Boohbah Zone now.

The 2004 Annual Question at Edge.org, What's Your Law?. A few good ones: Alan Alda, Paul Ewald, Brian Eno, Gregory Benford, Keith Devlin, ... I could go on and on. Read the article for more "laws".

This is so funny, I don't know whether to file it under "news" or "humor". Basically, Microsoft is mad because Apple is blowing them out of the water with the iPod and iTunes Music Store (both of which are hugely successful, and significantly more popular than any offerings from Microsoft, because they are simply better and people know it).

So the general manager of Microsoft's Windows digital media division, David Fester, is all bent out of shape because Apple and Hewlett-Packard have teamed up to make an iPod clone and bundle iTunes with all new HP computers.

Fester said (this is the funny part), "Windows is about choice - you can mix and match software and music player stuff. We believe you should have the same choice when it comes to music services."

Choice? How about the fact that the iPod is supported by both Windows and OS X, and it can play standard MP3 files as well as AAC (aka MP4, another encoding standard that is not owned by Apple).

I think that what he meant to say is, "Windows is about choice, as long as you choose Microsoft-based technologies that exclude other companies from competing fairly. For instance, only after years of legal battling do we feel that users should be able to not use Internet Explorer if they choose, even though it will be used throughout their computers anyway. See, users have the choice to try to delete Internet Explorer from their systems. We happen to know that it's not possible to delete it, but we give them the choice to try! Isn't that beautiful? Microsoft is beautiful. And everyone else is ugly. And stop buying iPods because it makes Microsoft look bad."

Here's a Microsoft utility that lets you mount an ISO image as a virtual CD in Windows XP. I've used it only one time (with XP Professional), but it seemed to work and beats burning a CD.

Of course, if this were OS X I wouldn't have to hunt for and download some hidden utility to mount a virtual disk from a disk image, because it's one of the many cool things built into the operating system.

Are you looking for the Palm Desktop 4.1 for Macintosh? Have you tried visiting Palm's website yourself, eventually finding a "download" page that asked for your name, email, and some other info before allowing you to proceed? And after you entered the required info, you arrived at a page that basically says "check your email, in an hour we'll send you the real download url"?

I did all of that, and decided it was a stupid waste of time.

So you can skip it and download Palm Desktop 4.1 right now without participating in their time-wasting data gathering. If that link doesn't work, try their real download page.

Netcraft's server graphs show that Microsoft's IIS web server has lost a lot of ground to Apache during 2003. Since October 2002, Apache usage has grown from 53% to 64% overall (a 20% gain) while Microsoft IIS has shrunk from 36% to 24% overall (a 33% decline). Conclusion? The majority of server admins realize that Microsoft's IIS is a hunk of crap.

This seems like a natural progression in the organic/healthfood market. From this CNN article:

Designer eggs, produced by chickens fed sea kelp, flax seed and other nutritious ingredients, are finding their way to more and more markets and menus. Some consumers say they even taste better than regular eggs, and sales are booming.

Eggland's Best Eggs, the nation's largest producer of designer eggs, saw a 25 percent jump in sales from 2002 to 2003.

Yum.

Farm-raised salmon contain significantly more dioxins and other potentially cancer-causing pollutants than do salmon caught in the wild, says a major study that tested contaminants in fish bought around the world.

Salmon farmed in Northern Europe had the most contaminants, followed by North America and Chile, according to the study released Thursday. It blames the feed used on fish farms for concentrating the ocean pollutants.

Articles at Wired and CNN.

This Wired article has more info on each machine. Kinda neato retrospective on Apple's hardware contributions over the years.

1. Mac 128K (January 1984)
2. Mac II (March 1987)
3. Mac Portable (September 1989)
4. Mac LC (October 1990)
5. PowerBook 100 (October 1991)
6. Quadra 700 (October 1991)
7. Mac Color Classic (February 1993)
8. PowerBook 165c (February 1993)
9. Power Mac 6100/60 (March 1994)
10. Power Computing Power 80 (May 1995)
11. PowerBook 5300/100 (August 1995)
12. Twentieth Anniversary Mac (June 1997)
13. Power Mac G3/233 desktop (November 1997)
14. iMac (May 1998)
15. iBook/300 (July 1999)
16. Power Mac G4 (August 1999)
17. Power Mac G4 Cube (July 2000)
18. PowerBook G4 (January 2001)
19. Flat-panel iMac (January 2002)
20. Power Mac G5 (June 2003)

Go ahead and put your "I don't care, it's all propaganda" hat on. Denial is certainly easier than accepting the possibility that what what you believe to be true might actually be false. Or maybe it's only partially true. Of course, what you believe might actually be 100% correct. But it might not.

Do yourself a favor and challenge your mind and your perspectives. Question the things that you take for granted every day, and perhaps you'll learn something new.

You can start by reading this article.

This just goes to show that you should never, ever become a thong thief. Crime just doesn't pay, not even for thongs.

Chat transcript from Bunny today:

lvaughn: "...they discovered a whopping 854 pairs of thong underwear, which investigators found stuffed everywhere--in shoe boxes, a briefcase, and even a Pokemon lunch pail."
jpnevin: wow. what a melvin.
rnorris: The email from the girl is funny.
kaan: jeez, she's got some serious memory of her missing underwear. I can barely describe what color t-shirts I own.
jpnevin: wow. why didn't I know these girls when I was in college?
rnorris: remember where you went to college
jpnevin: oh yeah. now I remember.
timbur: maybe that girl is a stripper?
lvaughn: Yeah, she might have had to keep track for tax reasons
timbur: I'd be pissed if I were her, how many Kathryn M's do you think are at U.W. Stout? What the hell is UW Stout anyway? How could she get in when she wears extra small panties?
lvaughn: The blanked out the names, but one of the pages had their home address
brandond: According to the student directory at www.uwstout.edu... there are 10.
brandond: Stout, Wisconsin is the answer to your other question...
lvaughn: Out of the 10, how many can wear size XS
brandond: unfortunately, that information is not in the directory...
lvaughn: And now many live at 901 8th Street?
lvaughn: And have a room mate named Kirstina?
lvaughn: Any have a middle initial of N.
brandond: I think the N there is a typo...
corncob01: we're total geeks. the conversation on this has been entirely about the petite victim. and it's turning me on.
rnorris: [silence]
wgcox: wooooeeeee..... how about them keyboard poopin' monkeys?
corncob01: talk about turning me on
kaan: I heard that this Kathryn girl might actually be one of the monkeys. so she wears thongs, and she is a monkey. and she poops on computers.
jpnevin: so are you saying that you think this pantie-raiding guy has a fetish for thong-wearing monkeys? or for computer covered in poop?
lvaughn: Both!
kaan: or maybe hot stripper monkey thongs covered in poop
brandond: but only if they're XS.
kaan: right, because a regular size Small stripper monkey thong covered in poop would be totally gross
brandond: duh

From this Apple press release:

Working to provide consumers with the most compelling digital content whenever and wherever they desire, HP and Apple today announced a strategic alliance to deliver an HP-branded digital music player based on Apple's iPod the number one digital music player in the world, and Apple's award-winning iTunes digital music jukebox and pioneering online music store to HP's customers.

Most of us have probably heard people joke about leaving a bunch of monkeys in a room with typewriters, and they would eventually (given enough time), produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The theory is that the random input of a monkey would eventually produce something that looks like the English language.

The Guardian explains that Geoff Cox at Plymouth University designed a test to show what a bunch of monkeys could do with one computer and four weeks.

So what happened? Here are some highlights:

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.

"At first," said researcher Mike Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it."

"They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened."

"They get bored and they shit on the keyboard rather than type."

More stories here.

Just ran the Xbench benchmarking tool on my 800mhz G4 PowerBook. It took about 10 seconds to download and launch the app, and the full suite of tests took no more than a few minutes to run. The machine seemed perform well, except for the hard drive throughput and access times; it may be time to replace the 4200rpm 40gb drive with something faster.

I found somebody else who replaced the 40gb IBM drive with a 60gb Toshiba on his 800mhz G4 PowerBook, and he wrote up a full step-by-step of what he did and how things went. It's basically the same machine I've got, and after he upgraded to the 60gb Toshiba drive he saw a 2.5 to 3 times increase in hard drive performance.

Here are the results of running Xbench on my machine:

Results					73.64
	System Info		
		Xbench Version			1.1.3
		System Version			10.3.2 (7D24)
		Physical RAM			1024 MB
		Model				PowerBook3,4
		Processor			PowerPC G4 @ 800 MHz
			Version			7455 (Apollo) v2.1
			L1 Cache		32K (instruction), 32K (data)
			L2 Cache		256K @ 800 MHz
			L3 Cache		1024K @ 201 MHz
			Bus Frequency		134 MHz
		Video Card			ATY,RageM7
		Drive Type			IBM-IC25N040ATCS04-0
	CPU Test			91.07	
		GCD Loop		84.94	3.32 Mops/sec
		Floating Point Basic	99.38	359.38 Mflop/sec
		AltiVec Basic		98.38	2.86 Gflop/sec
		vecLib FFT		98.74	1.53 Gflop/sec
		Floating Point Library	78.26	3.13 Mops/sec
	Thread Test			65.22	
		Computation		47.19	637.08 Kops/sec, 4 threads
		Lock Contention		105.54	1.32 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
	Memory Test			103.71	
		System			106.48	
			Allocate	494.89	322.81 Kalloc/sec
			Fill		112.00	891.52 MB/sec
			Copy		58.05	290.27 MB/sec
		Stream			101.07	
			Copy		95.53	698.33 MB/sec [altivec]
			Scale		96.04	708.75 MB/sec [altivec]
			Add		103.44	662.03 MB/sec [altivec]
			Triad		110.78	676.86 MB/sec [altivec]
	Quartz Graphics Test		113.70	
		Line			100.38	2.56 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
		Rectangle		114.23	8.04 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
		Circle			116.36	2.68 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
		Bezier			104.18	1.13 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
		Text			141.53	2.31 Kchars/sec
	OpenGL Graphics Test		81.12	
		Spinning Squares	81.12	56.77 frames/sec
	User Interface Test		147.75	
		Elements		147.75	47.52 refresh/sec
	Disk Test			32.03	
		Sequential		31.89	
			Uncached Write	21.61	9.01 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	30.58	12.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	78.13	12.37 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	29.71	12.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Random			32.18	
			Uncached Write	21.14	0.32 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	32.01	7.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	49.65	0.33 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	39.04	8.03 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Just realized that I've been using Bunny ("a moderately nifty application that's sort of like a cross between an instant messenger and Slashdot") for a month or two now, and it's still an interesting app. I'm curious to see how things will change as the number of users increases.

Apple just announced GarageBand, a fully digital mixing and recording application. This is huge. It's supposed to ship on January 16, and so far seems to be available only as part of the iLife suite ($49).

They've also updated iPhoto, eliminating any performance problems it used to have. You can now spin through 25,000 photos without any lags.

From this CNN article:

Every day, nearly one-third of U.S. children aged 4 to 19 eat fast food, which likely packs on about six extra pounds per child per year and increases the risk of obesity, a study of 6,212 youngsters found.

Maybe one day I'll no longer find this kind of thing shocking.

Here's a coupon to get $5 in tokens with the purchase of $5 in tokens at Chuck E. Cheese's. And don't say you aren't interested cause you aren't a kid - nobody is too old for an afternoon of skeeball.

Just got back into town from a 10 day trip in Oregon. Beautiful country up there, and the local economy is just as bad as everyone says.