Okay, I'm switching the DNS. Now the site really *will* break. There's at least a decent chance things will be pretty fucked up tomorrow. Apologies in advance.

Oh, and any comments you leave from here on out will be lost. So save your insights for later.

I think this Flash game has a lot of potential for ruining Charles' life. The guy's already primed to spend hours playing Sodoku and other brainteasers — making a game centered around a dynamic that boils down to tidying has the potential to put at least sleeping and personal hygiene in jeopardy. If there was feature that let you gain experience points I'm pretty sure he'd be dead within a week.

when DC SOB left town for chicago, he spent a good chunk of time crossing off items on a list of things to do in d.c. before you go. since i've got nearly a month of unemployment before i head off to the windy city myself, i've been trying to create a list of my own. i've got plenty of time; my two jobless days so far have settled into a nice pattern of waking up around 9:30, going for a run, showering, eating lunch, then drinking wine and surfing the internet. anyway, i'm having a bit of trouble filling out the list. i've only got three items thus far:

NPR, I'm begging you. I can't take anymore. Please, try to refrain from airing the following:

• Interviews with authors who have written books about their complex relationship their mothers/fathers/disabled children/childhood sexual abusers.


• Shows about ethnic profiling or oppressive third-world regimes in which you take calls from the public. The people who feel strongly enough to call are always the crazy/bigoted/genocidal ones.


• Finally, and most importantly — for god's sake, no more coverage of politically and/or socially conscious hip-hop acts. Words cannot describe how awful these segments are.

Your prompt cooperation is appreciated.

Our hosting is running out in a few days, and we've decided to switch providers. More space, more bandwidth, less money, and an address in the US rather than Hong Kong. I don't want to just throw around the phrase "a new golden age for humanity", but, well, there it is.

But our old host appears to not want to give the site up, and I'm having a hard time downloading our data properly. We're gonna put a freeze on things while the data gets moved. Hopefully this will all be done by tomorrow.

Oh, also: I promise to change the site background soon. It's long past "gaudy", and the days of "fun gaudy" are only a distant memory.

UPDATE: Scratch that. I'll export the site at the last minute and rebuild it on the new server rather than moving over the total archives.

I finished Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age over the weekend. I'm several years behind, I know. It's not bad, and certainly a nice, imaginative exercise in what kinds of consumer goodies might be possible with omnipresent nanotechnology. That's all Stephenson's really any good for, though — leaps of imagination. Take some neat toys, throw them into a world in which all of our contemporary power structures have been subverted or transformed and Asian culture is ascendant. Then add some completely inscrutable characters. Four hundred pages later, conclude abruptly.

Which is fine. I like that stuff. But Stephenson should really spend an afternoon with Physics for Dummies. Energy seemingly comes from nowhere and for free; impossibly large amounts of it get stored in impossibly small spaces; a novel but pointless blood-based computer network is introduced but never justified (Stephenson seems obsessed with STDs); and he blithely declares that humans aren't Turing machines (or more precisely, can't be simulated by a Turing machine). If it was wrapped in even a little pseudoscience I'd be fine with this groundbreaking result being a central part of the story, but the justification basically boils down to "computers don't want to have sex with teenage girls". Searching for the apotheosis of that ineffable quality that defines our humanity? Look no further than the pages of Barely Legal.

And then there's this, which I first saw over at Articulatory Loop, and then at Slashdot. It's a urine-powered battery. Well, urine-powered in the same sense that your car's battery is water-powered. Really, nearly any liquid would do, including urine, if you really insist on it. The liquid just provides a medium for electron transfer between two dissimilar metals, not any of the system's energy.

Look, I'm as anxious to be brutally subjugated by robotic overlords as everyone else. But until we see how that eventuality actually unfolds, let's keep things plausible.