Miscellaneous

I'll be out of town for a few days, so I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. Hope you enjoy the holiday(s).

Contrary to popular belief, it turns out that I am, in fact, NOT random. Here's the proof:

I know, I'm actually pretty surprised about that myself. :-)

Update
I was bored so I took one more:

So in addition to not being random, I also apparently have confirmation that I have no life whatsoever. Yay!

Try some of these delicious Chinese dishes.

Via Boing Boing

I'm almost afraid to post this, but here goes:

In case you're wondering what possessed me to do this, let me explain. We had a fund raiser at work for St. Jude's, and as an incentive a couple of co-workers volunteered to have their heads shaved if a certain dollar amount was met (originally $500, then upped to $1500 by the second person). In order to sweeten the deal even more, David and I both agreed to the shaving if they reached $2000, thinking surely they wouldn't raise that much money from just our building.

Now, let this be a lesson to all of you: Never underestimate the desire to inflect humiliation on others. Needless to say, we exceeded $2000, and the party got started. You can view the first batch of pictures in the photo gallery, and more are on the way. Enjoy!

Ever wonder what would happen if you suddenly and unexpectedly lost your internet connection? I know, it's a frightening thought! Fear not, though, this site has the answer. My personal favorite quote:

10. Use Your Emergency AOL Disk

If you find that your connection to the Internet is going to be longer than you can possibly stand, as a last resort, pull out an emergency AOL CD, the one with 910 free hours of connection to the AOL service. Take the CD in one hand...and slash it across your wrist! Suicide will probably be a better alternative than connecting to that service.

Read the full story.

In a move to undercut the Xbox, Sony has decided to lower its price by $20. I'm sure that Xbox and Gamecube prices will be lowered sooner because of this move.

Read the story

Yeah, buddy! New Line announced their plans for the upcoming LotR: The Two Towers DVD releases. Yes, releasees. As with Fellowship of the Ring, there will be multiple versions of the DVD.

Coming August 26 will be the 2-disc theatrical cut, in both widescreen and full screen versions. Quite a few extras are included, but true fans will want to save themselves for the 4-disc extended edition due on November 18. No specs have been released yet for the extended edition, but with an additional 40 minutes of movie footage and 4-discs to play with, you can rest assured it'll be on par with last fall's phenomenal Fellowship of the Ring extended edition release.

Now, that only leaves 6 months and 28 days to wait. D'oh!

Additional details

Sony is set to release an upgraded version of the PS2 next month in Japan. Improvements mostly focus on DVD playback, including new support for progressive out, recordable DVD media, and a built-in IR receiver for a DVD remote control.

All I can say is, "Kick ass." No release dates set for North America or Europe yet, but I think Sony has plenty more to gain than to lose by releasing it here, so I think it'll make an appearance here as well.

Full story

Sorry for the lack of news lately - I've been hard at work on other parts of the site. Too bad most changes I made aren't even noticeable unless you know what to look for...

Anyway, I have a few new articles for everyone. To kick things off, I wanted to mention the new O'Reilly Hacks Series of books. Each book in the series contain 100 hacks, or "tools, tips, and tricks that help users solve problems." I just bought Linux Server Hacks and Google Hacks, and so far I'm quite impressed. Well worth checking out if you're looking for some new reading material.

Thomas Bayes, one of the leading mathematical lights in computing today, differs from most of his colleagues: He has argued that the existence of God can be derived from equations. His most important paper was published by someone else. And he's been dead for 241 years.

Wow, tells you that sometimes old ideas are good ideas still.

Here is the news article from C|Net