The Simpsons vs Star Trek

Two great themes that sound great together!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkTpUxh8Vxc&rf=23m

A new Heinlein book is due out in September!

Apparently he started it, set it aside for other projects, then died. His estate contacted Spider Robinson, and Spider has finished it! Spider's a very good writer, though I haven't read much by him of late, I'm confident that he did a very good job. Quoth the article: "the novel is based on the notes and outline created by Heinlein for the novel over 50 years ago". So hopefully this is more early/mid-career and not the late stage of his career, or as I like to refer to it, his Dirty Old Man phase.

I have no problem with sex in books, but I just didn't care for it when Heinlein included it. Though it's been a while, I think that now I wouldn't consider it erotic enough. (Though I recently read an amazingly erotic scene in Cory Doctrow's Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town: the main character meets a woman with wings...)

Anyway, info on the book is here: http://variablestarbook.com/, and the ever-present Slashdot thread is here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/29/1746219. The cool thing is that you can download the first eight chapters!

Spam email funnies!

I was browsing through my spam folder just now, I'm not really sure why, and I came across the All-Time Winning Guaranteed To Read This Mmessage Subject Line:

Wholesale Diarrhea

I actually thought of a use for spam messages: random NPC name generator for contemporary role-playing games... Now to see about creating a little Perl script to do it, then finding a Perl distro that works on Palm Pilots...

Thinking about selling your old cell phone on eBay? Think twice

I knew there were data recovery tools for cell phones, apparently it's easier than I thought. This is more an issue for corporate cell phones and people who do a lot of text messaging, particularly ones that tie into a business email system. It's stunning the information that they've retrieved from these things. Better to put 'em into a shredder, I say!

http://www.wacotrib.com/hp/content/shared-gen/ap/National/Betrayed_by_a_Cell_Phone.html

I'm not concerned. I've never sold a cell phone, I've retired several by switching providers, but I've kept the phone. I won't own advanced cell phones for a variety of reasons, and I don't text message.

What if the ramen noodle industry was like the RIAA?

An amusing little article.

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71688-0.html

The Life of Christ, or is it the Life of Monty Python?

Taken from Not The Nine O'Clock News, Rowan Atkinson making some rather interesting statements.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/as_a_pythonist_i_am_deeply_dee.php

FIRE DANGER IS DOWN TO LOW!!!

w00t!

I think it's been over a year since it was at this level. It's been just a bit over two months since it was extreme!

*happy dance!*