Plutor

This is a neat Perl-powered Presidential Debate analysis.

I meant to post this earlier, but I kept forgetting. If you buy the new Star Wars DVDs at either Saturday Matinee or FYE, it only costs $50. And if you get it by today, it comes with a $15 rebate. I wasn’t planning on buying it myself, but for only thirty-five dollars, it’s definitely worth it.

Happy October. Here’s an eerie fun Flash game for your Friday: A Murder of Scarecrows

This is cool: thttpd, a tiny, fast, and simple HTTP server. Traffic throttling, IPv6 support, chroot jails, it’s exactly what I was looking for this morning!

Today is the one-year anniversary of the original release date of Half-Life 2. It doesn’t look like we have much longer to wait, though.

PC Gamer’s Half-Life 2 review (not preview) gave the game a score of 96%. The story is that it tied the highest score that the magazine has ever given a game. And the previous record was set by Half-Life.

Hype is one thing, but this is quite another:

Halflife2.net: Was Half-Life 2 what you expected?
Chuck Osborn (PCGamer Editor): More

The Kleptones' new release, A Night at the Hip-Hopera is damn rockin. A lot of Queen and Beastie Boys sampling, and it’s free for download! There’s also a sample listing reference, courtesy of Andrew Baio (who I get lots of my links from BTW).

Half-Life Fallout has a list of purchase options for Half-Life 2. Six CDs, three different Steam packages, and Counter-Strike: Source available for play by next week. Does that mean HL2 will be available at the same time, or shortly thereafter?

But it’s gonna cost more to get HL2 (through Steam) with CS:S than without it? Ouch, that’s gonna be a tough choice.

Update: HLFallout.net is running a bit slow, Halflife2.net has the information on their front page, also.

This would make a good “This is Broken”: some guy was able to order 150 Windows XP SP2 CDs from Microsoft, and they sent them all, and in individual envelopes. Microsoft should put in a little dupe checking in that script of theirs.

The Nascar Song by Tim Wilson - This song is funny, my dad especially will get a kick out of it. If you haven’t had enough experience with Nascar to recognize the names, though, you probably won’t find it amusing.

Not that you see them as often as Yuppie Food Stamps, but the firty-dollar bill got a new design (including color). Here’s a comparison with the newest $20 design, just for reference.

The Incredibles, trailer 2. Hell, yeah. Take that, dilettante Dreamworks dickheads.

A few weeks ago, Canadian Journalist Scott Taylor was kidnapped by insurgents in northern Iraq. A Google search helped save his life. (Streaming audio)

Return of the King Extended Edition info:

Update 09-28: The Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition is 208 minutes. The Two Towers Extended Edition is 208 231 minutes. The Return of the King Extended Edition is 250 minutes. 208 + 208 + 250 = 666 minutes. Update update: IMDB and Amazon disagree about Two Towers' runtime. I'd be likely to agree with IMDB, though, so that means the symbolism is broken. Oh well!

Everyone who’s a citizen of the United States should be required to read the Voters Information Guide for the 2004 Election. The best part is the link to Just Vote in the absentee section. Those of you who live in New York and are still registered in Connecticut should definitely check that page out. I’m looking at you Chris and Mari.

Zoom in to a zipcode with zipdecode. I hate it when I see something and realize that I’ve wanted something like this, but just never connected the synapses to think that it would be either possible or cool.

This weekend, Justin upgraded PostgreSQL on Eris (translation: the database software on my webhost). Best-case, this will solve all the weirdness that I’ve been experiencing with rebuilds, but more likely it’ll cause more problems until I can actually fix the tables. Again, reply or email me if you see anything seriously funky.

Just after passing behind the Sun ("conjunction"), the twin Mars Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) have received another six-month mission extension.

“qdot: NRRRRRR I HAVE 350 GBAs.”

I do three kinds of things at work:

1. Work. Sub-things: programming, monitoring management
2. Not work. Sub-things: surfing, programming
3. Semi-work. Usually proof-of-concept programming. This is the most interesting thing I do. WEBoggle started as a "what's this DOM thing I keep hearing about" semi-work. Here's another one.

I finally saw Terminator 3 last night. I had heard mixed reviews of it when it first came out, and I was not expecting anything more than a decent action movie. I was pleasantly surprised. I thought that it was very well incorporated into the greater timeline of the series.

Looking up some trivia online, though, people can’t seem to decide what the model number of the Schwarzenegger Terminators are. I’ve seen “T-101”, “T-800”, and “T-801”. The proper series number is “T-800”. Although the HTML is terrible, eterminator.com has a great reference on the Terminator models, taking information from all three movies, the T2-3D ride, and all of the novel-ifications.

I gave an interview today. It was a totally surreal experience. I think I was more nervous than he was.

In the same vein as the PSone, here comes Sony’s PStwo. (Okay, that’s not the real name, but it should be). That thing is ridiculously tiny. Barely more than an inch thick and one-quarter of the volume of the original. Yikes.

The Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, and Half-Life: Source Release Candidates have been sent to Vivendi. Now we play the waiting game (some more).

The waiting game sucks. Let’s play Hungry, Hungry Hippos!

This is the most amazing thing I’ve read in weeks, about Stanley Milgram’s other study: ‘Excuse Me. May I Have Your Seat?'

The are a lot of good reasons to drink a glass of red wine every day. Now, there might be just as many to drink a pint of stout, too. Bring on the Guinness!