Dance Dance Revolution Extreme 2
Link: http://ps2.ign.com/objects/746/746768.html
The accusation always goes that computers and video games make you gain weight because you're sitting on your duff instead of getting some exercise. That's not without some truth to it. Heck, I can feel it even just blogging here 
That said, there are a few games that totally and utterly break this trend. The "Dance Dance Revolution" series certainly cannot be labelled as a "sit on your butt" game (unless you have an extraordinarily talented butt, which you might).
This is one of the latest in a line of home versions of the arcade dancing games, where you have to hit the arrows with your feet at the right time. Now you could theoretically use a regular controller for this, but it's just not the same without laying out the $20 (or maybe a little more, but you can get them for $20 easy) for a dance mat controller.
Pluto Has Three Moons
The Hubble plus really good researchers just keeps on coming up with surprises. It's been ages since I've kept up with Pluto. Last I left it, they had figured out that it had a pretty big-sized moon around it, Charon. I didn't even know that it had a confirmed atmosphere, however thin. Now this poor rock who people have been trying to take "planet" status away from has two new moons. Who knew?
The outer solar system is shaping up pretty interestingly. One thing that seems a little strange so far is that there is still no sign of an Oort cloud, which was hypothesized as being where long-period comets with odd orbits, like Halley's comet. Everything past Pluto has so far been in pretty much the same angle of orbit as the rest of the planets. How long before we can prove or disprove the existence of the Oort cloud?
Virtual Photons
Have you ever wondered where forces in nature come from?
In mainstream physics, the theory goes that forces happen because matter exchanges little particles between them. Now, these are no ordinary particles, these are virtual particles. They 'borrow' energy from space, exist for a while, and then give it back.
Telling Where People Come From
I've always had an interest in spoken languages. We boarded foreign students to help make ends meet once upon a very long time ago, so I got exposed to quite a few people whose first language was not English. I thought it was the most fascinating thing ever. My maternal grandpa, bless his heart, gave me two phrase books for my ninth birthday, Collins German and Collins Spanish.
That said, I can't really claim fluency in any of the languages I've studied, really. I've got enough of a lot of different languages to know the alphabets, some fundamental grammar, and to know how they work. A lot of the pronunciation errors that people make in English can be directly traced back to pronunciation rules or lacks of particular combinations in peoples' native tongues. Sometimes you can use these to trace where someone comes from, even if just in general. Sometimes you can look for clues if you hear them speaking their native language.
Let me give you a few samplings...
Light-Hearted Monkey Trial
I'm always interested in things that go on south (or, perish the thought, north) of the border here, to see what the latest shenanigans of creationism, or its smartly-dressed, smooth-talking brother, Intelligent Design.
So, the goings-on in the case where the Dover, Pennsylvania school district decided to put Intelligent Design into the curriculum (causing some science teachers to ask that their names be withdrawn as authors of the rest of the curriculum that they designed), has me most intrigued.
When I'm up late at night, flipping through channels, I see the ads for the injury lawyers and the like, and I cringe. Judges seem like they might be a mixed bag. Reading the transcripts of trials like this, though, are a refreshing change from whatever conceptions and misconceptions I have about the professions. Seeing a lawyer in a transcript saying things to Michael Behe like, "And to say this very colloquially, you conclude that it will take a large population a long time to evolve a particular function at a disulfide bond, right?" is utterly surreal.
Bubble, Bubble, Build's In Trouble
Well, my coworker Robert actually went out and did it :)
I came back to work after my wedding to see two lava lamps on top of the filing cabinet outside our office.
Katamari Damacy
Link: http://www.namco.com/games/katamari_damacy/
A lot of people I know have encountered this before (to which I have to say, why didn't you tell me about it?), but our good friends Ennien and Robin showed this to us during one of our visits.
They gave us a pre-wedding gift of a Playstation along with this quirky, quirky game. It was mighty fine for stress relief. In the history of unique games, I would place this one right up there with Dungeon Keeper (where you get to be the bad guy defending your treasure against heroes) or Nomads (battling out between flying islands).
This game is weird, weird, weird, and I love it!
Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Link: http://www.wandg.com/
My best man took me to see this movie on the day of the wedding. Ahhh, what a nerve-calmer :)
It's pretty good, and the story line with its twist is nifty, but it doesn't get truly funny until quite late in the movie. I still much prefer Aardman's "A Close Shave" for its pace and humour.
Still, I hope they make more. Making a feature-length claymation film is pretty impressive. Seeing it in the movie theater, you can see the fingerprints on Gromit pretty clearly.
(The business of censoring the poster on the Isle of Portland in the UK was quite bizarre as well.)
Wedded!
Wow, I am going to have a lot of updates to do here, especially to the wedding site, now that we've done the whole kitten kaboodle!
The wedding went great!
Some people told me in advance that things go much more quickly than you had imagined it would. I would not have believed that before. I do now.
Frigits
While I was ordering a couple of things from good ol' ThinkGeek, I decided to spoil myself a little bit with a silly toy. That toy was Frigits, which is essentially a little marble maze on magnets that you stick to the side of your fridge. You know, stainless steel refrigerators may look nice, but to deny yourself magnets and other toys... I just can't see them being worth it.
Anyhow, here's a picture...
A Week Left!
Great googly-moogly - there's a week and some handful of hours left until the wedding. Criminy! Lots of last-minute things to do, I'm sure, but we have covered off so many. We can't get away for an actual honeymoon, but we'll spoil ourselves for a couple of days - this sort of occasion doesn't come around very often!
One late-minute thing I covered off was to get the rings engraved on the inside. It has our names, the date of the wedding, and the phrase Anar ar isil in Tengwar as a nod to many things.
Townhouse Gone!
Possession date has come and gone. September 30, all final transfers took place!
Thank you to my sweetie and my future in-laws especially for all their hard work in evacuating the place, and to my realtor for getting it on market and giving some great advice :)
That is all!
Hacker, Hack Thyself
I'm sure this one has made the rounds before (it's from April), but I just love the [possibly apocryphal?] story and didn't encounter it until just today.
It answers the question: what happens when a angry, blustering, amateur "hacker" who feels powerful because they have downloaded hacker tools... meets people who know simple networking :)
The story...
Comment by Adam:
Cute! I'm continually amazed at the number of technical people who don't understand that "localhost" or "127.0.0.0" refers to their own machine. I'm slightly less surprised at the number who do know that but don't understand the concept of loopback versus routers just sending packets back.
(And I'm also testing the RSS feed so generally ignore this spurious comment!)
Comment by Ritchie:
And how is the RSS feed working?
*laugh* I tried to keep up with blogs using SharpReader for a while, then work got utterly insane and I didn't have the attention span any more...
SharpReader really does grab things far too often by default. I'll have to look up the reader Tom was recommending after having tried SharpReader. (Of course, if it looks like a Unix shell prompt, I'll laugh ;)
Comment by Adam:
I'm using Trillian's RSS feed monitor. I only have it set up at work rather than at home. It seemed to work fine other than for some reason all of the updates appeared at once, typically at the same time each day, rather than when they were posted which does break the timely RSS concept a bit. Since I have it polling every five minutes or so, I would assume it's your aggregrator that's updating the RSS page once a day.
First E-mail Spoof "Attack"
No, it was just under 350 bouncebacks from a spam that forged a nimblebrain address as their 'from:' address.
