News You Can Bruise for 2002 July 24

MoreSensationalistExaminer.com: Bad-guy backlog should be Bad-guy weblog. Now's your chance to one-up the Chronicle!

Mail from Kris in which he presents a theory for the origin of cereals so wacky, that if it's true then a similar theory must apply for the origin of wacky theories.

Microbusiness in action: feelies.org sells the little pieces of the game world that at traditionally accompany IF games, and can be instructed to sell them for your game.

I've decided that "Micro-x" is the next meta-trend, as the Internet and related technologies make it easier to offload more logistics onto other people and thereby dabble in more things. "Meta-trend" is also the next meta-trend (there can be multiple simultaneous meta-trends because, well, it's meta).

I'm a happy rabbit, because my spacecraft components have come in. For some reason I have been thinking of the hard drives and RAM I ordered as spacecraft components; possibly because I had the same feeling towards them as you have towards spacecraft components during a game of FreeCiv; you order them and are excited and they can't come in fast enough (counterpoint).

But I got to thinking that my new hard drives and RAM are probably better (in terms of raw power) than anything currently used in actual working spacecraft due to the long lag time involved in spacecraft design. So I decided that I should lead-shield my hard drives and RAM to protect them from radiation, incorporate them into a Gallileo-type spacecraft with a camera and radio transmitter, send it off into space, and reap the rewards (eg. pictures, and being the coolest person in the entire world).

This pleasant fantasy lasted only a moment before I realized that 1) it would take me years just to learn everything I'd need to know to build and launch a spacecraft, that 2) though I can afford amazingly huge hard drives and chunks of RAM, the sum cost of the parts neccessary to create a spacecraft is well beyond my budget, that 3) sending out a Gallileo-type spacecraft would probably violate some stupid law or UN resolution or other, and that 4) I bought the hard drives and RAM as part of a project to bring my computer back to life, and not as part of a nascent space program. So I abandoned the project before I led the taxpayer (viz., myself) down a garden path.

Also, if I did launch a spacecraft, with my luck it wouldn't make it through the green.

Scary future-speak spam:

To be from future mes please rep to this with the word

I can'the promise thehathe if you follow theodayse

Adam speaks:

Now I donno about text editors as herbal supplements, but can emacs do all the things mentioned here? I think not!

I'm back "on line", as the kids say. Thanks to my new hard drive (the fancy new RAM won't fit in my old motherboard, so no new RAM yet) and (finally) an installation CD that's less corrupt than a Calcutta phone line installer, I have computer again. And such unoccupied swaths of hard drive space! I'm a pioneer! I'm Pioneer 10!