Marmalade
Ooo, disorienting. I was flitting from place and place and landed on Marmalade, only to find that one of her links leads here to Mooselessness. The link was about The One Ring, which brings them all, just as promised. That's the first time I've come across a link to my own page. Marmalade's page is Hello-Kitty cute, tests positive for Great Big Sea, and she has a diary too. I suggested The One Ring in a Slashdot thread about Christmas presents and it was moderated up to 4. Hope Badali Jewelry makes a zillion dollars.

The TechBC Project
Good Lord! The welcome page for British Columbia's new university looks like the poster for the Blair Witch Project. This place gives degrees in web design.

eCrush
"Hey, find out if she likes me." The idea is pretty simple. You tell eCrush who you like. ECrush mails that person and says "Someone likes you. Who do you like?" If the crushee respond with a match, then you both get a "They like you too!" message.
      However, clever teens could easily subvert the system. If I registered the names of all the cute girls and then mailed, say, Graham, he could be tricked into sending his crush info to me. Other concerns: how accurate is the matching system? Plus, the site's name starts with e, which is just fricking annoying.

Carl Cookies
Internet omnipresence Carl is using the BigStep site to sell a cookie with his face on it. I got this link from the Beebo Overplay list so I'm definitely behind the curve on this one. Boy, when it comes to cookies, I'm always the last to know.

The One Ring
I will never win the Nobel Prize for Hipness after admitting this, but if I didn't already have a ring, I'd want one of these. "One Ring to rule them all / One Ring to find them / One Ring to bring them all / And in the darkness bind them."

Tim's Christmas Wish List
My wish list, web log style.

Beginning of my Journey
To quality for a writing contest, I put up the only story I could find under 1500 words. The screenplay I should be writing now is a descendant of this story.

Sappy love e-mail gets forwarded to world
Women are so mean. This web newspaper is pretty mean too, come to think of it. I hope there's more to the story and the fellow deserved it.

Ed was the smartest man in the world
Have you sent your $5 to Brunching Shuttlecocks yet? I'm going to raise the rate soon if you don't hurry.

Spot's Underwear Problem by Kibo
Einstein turned back to the big machine he was working on. "Silly puppy, stop yapping about my laboratory! I am building a time machine and time machines are best built without the help of puppies!"

Conversational Terrorism
Insidious ways to avoid questions or disparage questioners. Also available every morning in interviews on the CBC.

PNG to HTML
The link above leads to a photo that's been converted into coloured text. The program that does it is only for Linux. But I only have Windows. Waah. (Oh stop smirking, you!)

Wordprocessor.com
A 1996 Suck article in which they present the absurd idea of putting word processing on the web. Except now it's happening. Microsoft's got a pilot project going. Doh.

Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie page
I'm going to need more scotch tape. (Tripod pop-up on this page. I need a beanie against these things too.)

Out of Doors
After swearing that I wouldn't, I went and made a multiplayer Age of Kings level. It involves a large central valley where no pesky garrisons can be built. If you don't play the game, just keep moving along.

Brains4Zombies
My Christmas shopping is done.

Greg Costikyan essays
An amazing collection of essays on game design by Star Wars RPG creator Greg Costikyan. Game design is tied with screenwriting for things-I-really-like-doing. (Second only to harvesting semen from mice.)

Mice squirt human protiens
This BBC story about using GM animals' semen to make human protiens is full of delightful quotes. "Creating animals which produce the proteins in easily-collectable body fluids means a lifetime's supply of the drug." (The scientists think it's easy to collect because they make the grad students get the mice all turned on. But wearing those little mouse hats isn't easy.) "Clearly mice cannot produce significant quantities of this biomaterial, so they suggest that genetically-engineered male pigs, which can produce up to half a litre of semen at a time, could produce pharmaceutical proteins cost-effectively." (Hmm. A half litre is like a bottle of Coke.)

Glow in the dark living Christmas trees!
"We calculate that the initial trees would cost about £200, which means going for the upper end of the market. But I'm sure a lot of people would love them, especially the Americans."

Construction yard photo
This is what a professional's digital camera can do. The Nikon D1 is nowhere near my price range, but I love this photo of a construction yard in low light.

The Risks of Closed Source Computing
Alan Cox makes a good case for open source software by comparing it to commodity hardware. You'd be mad to buy a computer that needs all its upgrades from one supplier (just ask my Compaq-owning love), so why do we buy operating systems this way?

Presidential web site fun
Who's the most frequent visitor to presidential hopeful John McCain's web site? Why, people from the Bush camp. (McCain and Bush are politicians in the United States of America, a large country founded in North America in the late 18th century.)

Making a tactical nuke from fire detectors
There is great virtue in being able to keep a straight face.

Lotus Notes in the Hall of Shame
I've always loved the Interface Hall of Shame. This analysis of Lotus Notes is particularly savage.

Internet Dictionary of Philosophy
I haven't done much searching for philosophy resources on the web, but Bifurcated Rivets led me to this dictionary. It's thin, but a start. The discussion of euthanasia uses the example of not shaking someone's hand to show that inaction is still an action. A much quieter example than the not-throwing-a-lifesaver example I'm used to. I prefer my philosophy dramatic! "You're in a plane that's about to crash..." "These rogue neuroscientists have stolen your brain..."

Would you be drafted?
A web device to discover where you would have placed in the Vietnam draft (if you are a boy). With a 300+ number, I wouldn't have been drafted. Anywhere under 196 and it's "One, two, three, what are we fighting for?"

Voting on Time's Digital 50
Do not ask the Internet for its opinion. The Internet will just play games with you. (At the time of this posting, every single answer is fake. And the fakes come from all over too.) Press Vote to see the results.

http://i.am/faulty
Another web page pretending to be something it's not. I'm sure it won't scare you.

Monsanto vows not to use terminator gene
Monsanto, the evil genius of the biotechnology world, had been reviled for its plan to force farmers to buy new seed each year by rendering their wunderplants sterile. They've reconsidered, although their contracts with farmers may continue to enforce the same restriction.

House of Representatives diet pill spam
Haha. I wish when my coworkers sent spam it ended up as the lead story on Wired.

Amazon's new trick
Amazon is letting other people sell through their site. You can sell your own book, your ice cream cake, whatever. What differeniates this from eBay for me is the fact that Amazon handles the payments. This helps fight my biggest nervousness about eBay: fraud.

Donkey Kong in Java
Not only is it a 1980s game emulated in your browser, it's an emulation of the handheld version. How many warning signs is that? The guy asks for your e-mail address without saying why, so my good friend fake@aol.com got to play.

Dear Jack Straw
An open letter to a UK politician which, under the provisions of proposed encryption legislation, could send the politician to jail.

Side Effects by Steve Martin
I'm having to read this in ten seconds blips because any more and I'll break out laughing like a madman in my very quiet office.

Older Mooselessness entries
Despite Andrew's assurances, I swear I lost a few entries in the crash, but since I can't remember any of them, they're all falling trees in the forest now.