Larry O’Brien found a website that will try and figure out what classic video game character you are most like. Like Larry, the quiz said that I too am a Defender ship.

They found an old Roman tablet with London’s ancient name inscribed on it, “Londiniensium.” Pretty cool, they even have a picture of it.

Farscape was cancelled by the SciFi Channel due to declining ratings. I couldn’t believe this when I heard it. This show is crtically acclaimed, has amassed a huge cult following, and SciFi just increased its marketing for it a few months ago. It just doesn’t make sense! Leave it up to greedy network execs to screw up a good show. Does anyone else care about this, or am I a hopeless nerd?

I spent all day playing Xbox games that my friend Bruce gave me. The best games in the batch are definitely Burnout and Project Gotham. I am not usually a fan of racing games, but both of these are top notch. I am waiting to receive an Xbox MAME Emulator so that I may play arcade games on the Xbox. Cool!

Here’s a great story on how the media blows any computer threat out of proportion. Remember the Y2K hysteria?

(Spoofing For Pirates sounds like a band name.)
The recording industry apparently has hired a company to create fake music files that have a snippet of the song or just static. This new practice, known as spoofing, is being done to frustrate music pirates into stopping their illicit song-swapping practices. This won’t work. If you are patient enough to download a song you like instead of paying for it, you are probably patient enough to download it two, three, or as many times as needed until you have it in your collection.

File swapping is getting out of control and the DOJ warns that they will start prosecuting peer-to-peer pirates. All you die hard Kazaa users out there, watch out. Funny, I remember that this is the same thing that the DOJ touted when CD-ROM burners were released six years ago. Unless you are making a profit (i.e. charging for copies) it is unlikely you will go down. I foresee that they will make examples of the largest offenders first, i.e. people with lots of source files on fast connections. Good luck.

Napster went down in a highly publicized court room battle that included major artists, including Metallica, speaking out against the service. Well, the RIAA eventually won the court room battle and Napster, as we knew it, was gone. However, Metallica became the subject of ridicule for their part in the saga as portrayed in this classic cartoon.

By the way, if you want to get free music and have the drive space, use Kazaa Lite–it’s Kazaa without the Spyware. Get it soon because Kazaa has been going postal and trying to stop Kazaa Lite since April.

People are flocking from all over the place to get to Encinitas, CA to smell the stink of a big flower. The flower does look pretty impressive, but there would be no way in hell that I’d travel to smell it. If I want to smell a “stinky bloom” I just eat a lot of beans and wait for the aftermath.

I just read this article on a big explosion that happened on the Sun. Other than that it was a pretty uneventful day, really.

Xbox modification chips are available for the Xbox–this will let you play “backups” of Xbox games. A friend of mine just installed one he got from Chipzone and says it’s pretty awesome, he’s already played a couple of backups without any problems. The installation is not trivial though, so only experts should apply.

I decided to throw an Xbox Party at home on June 30th. I went to a geek fest like this one a few weeks back and it was pretty awsome. It’s basically a bunch of guys munching on chips and soda blowing each other up playing Team Slayer on Halo. If you don’t understand that last sentence you probably don’t want to be there.