In one fell swoop, Robert X. Cringely describes a potential business that can (1) provide music downloads cheaply, (2) isn't illegal, and (3) pisses off RIAA. I love it. If I had $2,000,000 hanging around, I'd be all over this like white on rice.

This email archive has a quick statement by an anonymous IBM source about how SWT (the Eclipse widget set) came to be and why they think AWT/Eclipse is teh suXor.

Rachel Lucas opens up on a particularly deserving specimen of homo stupiditous. It's so moving, I'm all teary-eyed. <sniff/>

Some time ago, Kathy's brother Michael called and told Kathy about this new massively-multiplayer online role playing game, set in the Star Wars universe. After the two of them talked about it a while, she told me I should pre-order the collector's edition so we could try the game and see how it went. Being the easy sell that I am, I dashed right off to EBworld.com to order our copy and then I promptly forgot about it.

On launch day, the box arrived. We were doing other stuff that weekend (I forget exactly what now), and so didn't get around to opening the box and installing the game until Sunday. That meant that we went to bed at a decent hour both Friday and Saturday nights. That was good, because I'm pretty sure that was the last time I went to bed at anything like my usual bedtime since (about three weeks now). This game is really good. There are bugs, of course, and I spend a bit of time complaining about them, but I also note that I'm spending all my leisure time playing the stupid game instead of doing other stuff so it's obviously more entertainment than the bugs are annoying.

Here's how addictive the game is: after playing less than a week, Kathy said I needed to upgrade another desktop machine so that she could have her own character and we could play together. After pricing upgrade bits, we wound up buying a pre-made HP Pavilion system for her, and she's been playing since. That's right ... we bought a computer system just to play this game. We're insane, obviously.

While in the game one day, we ran into a friend of Kathy's brother who told us his in-game hobby was taking snapshots of the other characters to post on his website. "Well, duh," I thought to myself. "I should be doing that as well." So, here is my first batch of snapshots.

BWA-hahahahaha. Oh, my aching sides ... this is high-larious: Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.

"You want some of this? All you gotta do is stand up." That's pretty much what I heard President Bush tell the bad guys, and it appears I'm not the only one who heard it that way. "Woot!" for the President.

Bill Whittle finally posts Trinity in two parts. I continue to be amazed at the quality of the writing that falls off this guy, and further amazed at how perfectly he captures the essence of Americanism. Hooray for Bill!

Trinity Part I

Trinity Part II

Go and read. Now.

David Brin's "The Transparent Society" had quite an impact on me, not least because it crystallized a suspicion I already had towards people who claimed that if we all used PGP then the government would just wither away and utopia would arrive. Now, interestingly enough, MIT appears ready to test his theory of transparency.

I don't mind overdubbing so much; everyone makes mistakes and overdubbing just helps ensure that the finished CD is listenable over many sessions. I do, however, think that pitch correction like this is pretty dishonest. I'll grant that it's merely a question of degree; you could claim that it was just overdubbing if you cut-n-pasted individual notes that a musician happened to get just right, but we'd all recognize that as a travesty of the idea of performance. Pitch correction: okay as long as it's labelled.

Java Performance Tuning author Jack Shirazi went to JavaOne and watched a bunch of presentations on large-scale deployments. From this, he's generated all new tuning heuristics for your edification and pleasure.

I wish these guys would get over their anti-commercial attitude and get on teevee already. "Adult Swim" would be much improved if they had a few shorts like this in the rotation.

I'm gonna start a petition to MAKE them take some money from the teevee people!!!!

I'm laughing so hard my face hurts. I'm also running through my list of friends classifying each as "TweedleDee & TweedleDum" and "Ren & Stimpy" now, thanks.

Frank J. talks about hurricanes. I laughed out-loud enough to make people stand up out of their cubicles to see what was happening.

Cue the music! Dinesh D'Souza writes a stirring article on why he became an American. Most of these are obvious after-the-fact, but this is still well worth reading.

I wonder if this workflow engine will produce a stable release ... it sounds like a promising project. I wish them luck, which I suspect they're going to need since they've stopped COMPLETELY EFFING DEAD IN THE WATER to change build systems. I hope the "change the build system" need came across them because something in the old build system was fundamentally b0rken, not because they felt compelled to lemming off behind Maven (rant forthcoming).

Not quite the smoking gun we expected, but they are warm gun parts and we've got the guy who put them there too.

Yes, sir, Mr. Tim Blair sir ... we'll get right on that because we don't want that kind of result at all. No siree-bob.

Hooray! The only thing (and I do mean the only thing) I didn't like about IDEA was that you couldn't get the correct keybindings for it. As we all know, had there been a diety he would have wanted us to use "vi" for all time. And now, Rick Maddy has developed a "vi" plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. The world is saved!!!!

Mean Mr.Mustard has designed yet another t-shirt for me to buy. BWA-hahahaha. Ahem.

Hi. I'm Mitchell, and I'm a bright.