CNN.com - iRobot co-founder comes clean - May 30, 2005

Nice little article about one of the co-founders of iRobot, the company that makes those Roomba vaccuum cleaners, as well as “PackBot” for the military.

Pardon me for being so old-fashioned, but I must admit I was surprised to find out she was a woman.

Need a little light reading for your PDA? How about a free Dr. Who e-book?

Doctor Who - Ebooks

There are bad movies, and then there are BAD movies. House of the Dead is a BAD movie. It isn’t even entertaining in its bad-ness. In fact, there are only two redeeming qualities to the movie.

First, director Uwe Boll does pay homage to the Sega video games that the movie is based on. Both in the title credits and in little ‘cut scene’ transitions between movie scenes, we see brief clips of the game. Often they match what’s going on on-screen.

Second is Ona Grauer as Alicia. This lady looks hot in a bustier, and Boll pays loving attention to her, ahem, assets in some slow motion clips that really educate the viewer on the effect of physics and inertia on the female anatomy.

Skip this one. It just plain sucks.

Since I bought my new iMac I’ve been spending almost all my time in OS X “Tiger”. I even shelled out $100 for a .Mac account so I could sync bookmarks and mail accounts and stuff between my 3 active Macs.

Then I found out that .Mac only syncs Safari bookmarks. Doh! But I’m kind of liking Safari 2.0, especially the quick and easy RSS reading.

But I really hated losing Firefox’s cool “Find at you type” feature. So I went back to the ‘fox (not a bad thing, mind you…its an excellent browser).

Then today, I stumbled upon AcidSearch. This is a little ‘plug in’ for Safari that gives you mega-super-duper search options from the search bar, AND the ‘find-as-you-type’ feature I’d been missing out on.

So far it seems to work great. And better yet, its freeware. Check it out, Mac users!

CNN.com - New planet found in Milky Way - May 26, 2005

Check out the incredible picture on this page!

Apple’s Jobs says company will support Podcasts
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) will support and organize podcasts in the next version of its iTunes and iPod software, the company said on Monday.
read the rest…

Sweet, even though I’ve already shelled out $20 for iPodderX. But its a little flakey. In fact, every client I’ve used has been a little flakey. This news kind of lends legitamacy to Podcasting, and hopefully Apple will do it right.

So I’ve become a little bit addicted to Bawls Mints lately. And of course I went through all the obvious jokes, but eventually they wear off.

Anyway, they come in a metal tin, and I had a tin in my front pocket the other day. I was walking somewhere with a female co-worker and with every stride the tin shook, and the mints knocked against the sides.

“What’s that noise?” she asks me.
“Oh, that’s just my Bawls rattling.” I said.
“You’re disgusting!” she says, and hits me.

It took me a few seconds to realize what had upset her…

CNN.com - Brain downloads ‘possible by 2050′

Nice. So I’m like the last generation that gets to die! Unless I live an extra special long time and get fabulously wealthy by then.

OTOH, let’s face it…who wants to live forever, anyway?

Wow, what a trip. House of Flying Daggers is a rather amazing spectacle. It’s full of crazy martial arts special effects similar to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but without going so far as to seem totally silly. And the cinematography was just stunning. The Bamboo Forest scenes alone were worth the price of admission.

The story itself is a classic love triangle affair, with a nice dose of espionage and things not being what they seem. “House of Flying Daggers” is the name of an rebel outfit. If you’re more up on Chinese history than I am, you could probably name the government and tell me if it was really corrupt. Anyway, their ’special talent’ is, obviously, throwing daggers. But they’re darn good swordsmen as well.

One of their agents, a blind dancer (played by the lovely Ziyi Zhang) is caught by the local police/army. One of the officers then poses as a bandit and frees her, after which he tries to get her to lead him back to Flying Daggers HQ. But as I said, all is not what it appears.

Absolutely a fantastic movie. If you have *any* taste for martial arts, get this film. Even if you feel neutral about martial arts, still get it!

One thing to note, though. If you buy it, play it right away. It would appear that there are some bad copies out in retail. My first copy started to skip about two thirds of the way through, and a Google search tells me there’ve been a lot of problems with the DVD. A second copy worked fine. Also, frankly, the print isn’t as good as it should be. I’d love to see a collector’s edition come out with a better quality print and more extras!

I watched Secretary tonight, starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Short synopsis. Gyllenhaal is the secretary, fresh out of a mental institute where she was placed for self-mutilation. Spader is the lawyer in need of a new employee. His gig is that he’s a “Dom” and so drives most of his employees away. We get an inkling of this when, right under his shingle is a carefully painted “Secretary Wanted” sign with a set of lights around it, like a Vacancy sign at a motel.

Mix these two together and you get a quick exploration of the D/s lifestyle. It was pretty interesting to see such a niche fetish getting the Hollywood treatment. Lee (Gyllenhaal) thrives more and more as lawyer Grey (Spader) gets more and more demanding, until they come to a climax, so to speak, and Grey starts feeling guilty/remorseful, not believe that Lee is really into this lifestyle.

Some folks will be disgusted by the movie, others, like me, will just find it an interesting curiosity, and you D/s folks will find it a total turn-on.

Well, here’s a bit ‘o bad news for consumers…

Newspaper: Talks at a standstill in DVD race

Bottom line: it looks like we’re going to have to ride out a format war…

Now this kind of thing always frightens me:
Kansas looks at redefining science

Now I don’t want to get too deeply into theology here, since my own beliefs are ambivalent at best. But like the old separation of Church & State (itself eroding as of late) I think there needs to be a separation of Church & Science.

Why not offer theology classes where children can learn about “Intelligent Design”, and let the science classes keep teaching “Evolution”?

Kids get old fast these days; let them explore topics that they’re drawn to.

In the meantime, I’m going to thank Articulus (y’know, the being from Tau Ceti that created Earth) that I don’t live in Kansas.

I just finished watching Rashomon and had a bit of a relevation. I don’t enjoy anime because it’s anime. I enjoy anime because it’s Japanese. Or at least, that’s the theory I’m going on for now.

Rashomon is a 1950 film from director Akira Kurosawa, probably best known in the US for Seven Samurai. Like Samurai, Rashomon is sub-titled, though its fairly light on dialog.

Its the story, basically, of a murder, as seen by four individuals (included the dead man, via a very creepy medium). Each of the four is giving testimony to an unseen judge, but none of their accounts agree, and as a typical American film viewer I was waiting to see everything tied up at the end and for The Truth to be revealed. Only it wasn’t. Just like a lot of my favorite anime titles, the viewer is left to create his own interpretation of what really happened, and what it all means.

Cinematography is by Kazuo Miyagawa, which I fear meant nothing to me until I watched some of the bonus material. But it’s really interesting. The film is in black and white (of course, like I said…1950) so Miyagawa uses light and shadow to get it texture. Lots of ’sun through the leaves’ shots abound and… well hell, I’m just parroting the bonus features now, so I’ll shut up.

If you’re up for a bit of a challenge, try this movie. I’ve linked to it at Amazon, but Netflix carries it too. Enjoy!

Ok, so sometimes I obsess on the strangest things. But I’m telling you, the Mr. Clean Magic Reach bathroom cleaning gizmo is a miracle product! You simply have to get one, especially if you’re a guy. Because, as I was told my a female co-worker, “Guys don’t clean their bathrooms.”

It was hard to debate her because I do tend to let mine go too long between scrubbings, but no more! The Magic Reach is to your bathroom what Swiffer products are to the rest of your house. You have this base gizmo that looks vaguely like an iron with two pointy ends. You rip open a cleaning pad packet, and pull out this wet pad that wraps around the gizmo. And then you mop your floor (or walls, to sink or toilet) with it. It sneaks in behind the toilet bowl and the points get into corners. When you’re done (ie, in like 4 minutes) you pull the pad off, drop it in the trash and open a second pad. This one is more sudsy, and its for cleaning the tub and stuff. Scrub out the tub with it, and drop that pad in the trash too.

And you’re done.

Seriously, I’m a huge fan of convenience, and this thing really works and is super convenient. Guys, get one of these things and lets put an end to girls saying “Guys don’t clean their bathrooms” once and for all!!!

So I never got around to reading the Sunday New York Times last week. So today I was catching up, and I found it rather bizarre that in two consecutive Sundays, the times provided me with links to XXX sites.
[Note: Dragonchasers is normally a reasonable family-friendly site, but this post is intended for adult readers only. If you're under 18, please refrain from clicking the following link.]