noah’s ark is a problem

Cas is currently

Firstly, thank you everyone for your lovely birthday wishes. They really made me smile on a day not normally known for it’s smile-worthyness.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming –

I have been remiss in my recent blogging, letting the Random folder once more reach dangerous levels of obesity. So, without further-ado, here is the best of the last two weeks.

Biological USB drives. Kinda.

Web 2.0 and glocalization – Danah Boyd being all sensible once more.

Worms to help combat allergies. *shudder* They would have to be proven to be very very useful. Then again, I am not as afflicted by allergies as some, so perhaps if I suffered more, I would appreciate this?

Universal Power Adapter. Geeky-gadget usefulness.

Joel Johnson, late of Gizmodo, doing his bit down in NOLA. Bookmark this page/get the RSS feed because it gets updated whenever Joel gets a moment.
Also, go to Jacob Appelbaum’s weblog as he is also down there right now.

AA Cell Phone Charger. So useful!

* Microsoft’s Ergonomic Keyboard. I have nothing against ergonomic design. What I have against this is the tenor of the article that implies Microsoft is the one and only company to ever think of this problem, or to try and address it. Grrr. And who wants a giant slab of black plastic anyway? I did find a pretty clear ergonomic one (and a shiny metal one), once, but I can’t remember the site. *Sob*.

Green Tea Ice Cream. *drools* This looks so tasty! And after tasting YoYo’s green tea and red bean cookies, I am open to the idea of matcha in sweet things. *drools*

Flying Spaghetti Monster game. It just wouldn’t be a Sunday morning round up without at least one Mata link. Ahhh, more ID-related humour.

BBC Creative Archive. You can now download BBC archive footage. I got the two penguin ones!

If I Had an English Accent. Funny. Very funny.

6 Degrees. We all know the “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game, right? Well, I came across this book the same day I was writing my “6 Degrees of Wiki’s” section in the thesis. A bizarre confluence of events I thought. So here’s the link.

Bizarre Japanese male-cheerleaders in a game… The CC is totally to blame for this one. I do recommend the exam-study one. Quite why you need some black ninja-clad male cheerleaders to help you in your homework endeavors, I am not sure. I am even less sure how it then becomes a computer game?!

If the world were Goth…
One
Two
Three – is it wrong of me to find this dress totally gorgeous? I think in a nice deep wine red it would be perfect for me.

Pop-Idol Malaysian Style. The Malaysian public get to vote by text message for the next astronaut… Funny on so many levels. Will we get to see the footage of the astronaut-wanabees who didn’t make it?

Picking an MP3 player. People have been asking my opinions on these lately. I seem to be gaining a rep as the Queen of Gadgets. Alas, I know bugger all about non-iPod players (still not sold on the new Nano. For that amount of money, spend a teeny bit more and get the one with 20gb of storage), so here’s a dude who knows what he’s talking about.

Timetable for digital switch over. I’m a young person who is tech-savvy, and I don’t want analogue switched off. I have never yet lived somewhere where there is a digital signal, and that includes two large cities. In fact the only place I have been able to view freeview was on a boat, on the canal, moored up at the back end of beyond somewhere in the Midlands. And even that was Skyview, and not Freeview. My other main problem – before, you needed one aerial and the entire house could get TV if they wanted (and had a license of course). Now, you need a box per TV , an aerial, and a license. Grrr.

Nightmare on Elmo Street. Because it still makes me laugh days later.

* The Universe in a Single Atom. Reason number 23 to become a Buddhist. Or not. Whatever works for you. Nice to see that the Dalai Lama *1* is being all sensible on the whole science/religion debacle.

Endnotes:
*1*TextEdit’s spell check doesn’t recognise ‘Dalai’, the name of a major religious leader, so I feel all insulted and like an oppressed minority now…Back