Month: July 2003

If you want to really gain some perspective on our place in the universe, check out An Atlas of The Universe. This pretty much blew my mind; as David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap would say, “Too much fucking perspective.”

Pretty funny… (links directly to Flash animation)

CNN reports that in the wake of the government’s Terrorist Information System, MIT Media Lab has developed the Open Government Information Awareness site. The site’s mission is “to empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America,” countering the “widening gap between a citizen’s ability to monitor his or her government and the government’s ability to monitor a citizen.” Right now, the site appears to be inundated with traffic, preventing me from exploring it fully. It sounds like a great idea, though…

Colorado is probably going to be the team to beat next season. ESPN reports that “the former Anaheim teammates both took major pay cuts Thursday in agreeing to contracts with the Colorado Avalanche.” “‘When we both became free agents, we made a hockey decision,’ Kariya said at a news conference. ‘We both said, "Forget about the money, where’s the place we want to play?” And Colorado jumped out at both of us immediately. So we made things work monetarily.’“ Wow.

I’m very sad to hear that Barry White has died of kidney failure. Now Barry’s singing from above when I hit a Triple 18. “Can’t get enough of your love, babe…”

I made a post last week about the RIAA’s announcement that it is gathering evidence in order to sue illegal file-sharers. Well, the Washington Post reports that their announcement is actually having the opposite intended effect, at least in the short term. Wayne Rosso, president of Grokster, one of the popular file-sharing applications, says that “file-trading activity among Grokster users has increased by 10 percent in the past few days,” adding his take that “even genocidal litigation can’t stop file sharers.” Other file-sharing applications are seeing similar gains, adding credence to the idea that the RIAA’s action has done nothing but make people more curious about the technology rather than scare them away from it. This may yet change as the organization allegedly gets further into its investigation, but for now I think it’s pretty funny…

I’m experimenting with a three column layout. I’ve put all of my graphic links on the left, which also allows me to more prominently feature the links to actual content on my site. The center column now contains blog posts. I think this section looks better now that it takes up a little more vertical space due to a smaller column size. The right column has mostly blog-related links and navigation. I’m finally able to properly use my Blogroll, which is a pretty nice automatically-generated list of my favorite blogs (still a work in progress) that can double as a sidebar in your browser.

I’m still mulling whether I need to add things to the page or not. If I don’t, I’m left with two mutually undesirable options: reducing the amount of posts on the front page or leaving white space on the bottoms of the outside columns. I’ll probably think about adding something to both sides, although I don’t want the page to take too long to load.

Since I didn’t exactly get a rousing response to my last post on the matter, I’ve temporarily added Google Adsense ads. Supposedly they’re targeted to the current site’s content, but hopefully I can edit out sites that just don’t mesh. As it stands now, somehow election ads are the big thing…

Please let me know what you think about the layout or whether you have any suggestions!

OK, time for a major plug here. Are you tired of Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, QuickTime, and whatever other audio, video, and multimedia programs you have constantly stealing each other’s associations? Well, they’ll still do that if you continue using and updating them, but if you ditch them and find a good replacement, you can be done with them once and for all. jetAudio is that replacement. Visit the page for a complete listing of all of its features, as there are too many to list here. As I mentioned, it can play nearly all the current audio and video formats; I have yet to see one it can’t handle.

As much as I hate to admit it, it even does a nicer job with MP3s in some respects than my beloved WinAmp does, although I’m still on the fence about that. Just now, it picked up not only the associated cover image I embedded in my MP3 file, but it also even found the tagged lyric 3.2 file I embedded, allowing true karaoke-type lyrics display. If you don’t have a tagged lyric file, as long as you have a text file named the same as the MP3, it will display that along with an associated cover image when the file plays. OK, granted I’ve obsessively collected all of those things myself, and with the proper plugins the new version of WinAmp can find them automatically (I’m not sure that jetAudio can), but I am really hooked on this interface and the versatility of the program.

But enough of my ranting here; I’ll stop now and let you try it out for yourself. Although WinAmp might not be replaceable, all of the other competing video and audio players on my system are history now. Oh, and did I mention that this is all free? Pretty sweet…

Going through the Popular Mechanics Covers Archive is a pretty interesting journey. A lot of their covers border on the sensationalistic when they speculate on future technologies, but you can also track some of the more conventional scientific and technological developments when browsing through the covers.

The BBCi Solar System page is very informative, and it has some fun games too.