2003.08.07
Amazing Voyeuristic (voyeuristic in the non-sexual sense, unless you get really "lucky") Google trick, the Random Personal Picture Finder. Some guy realized that many people don't bother to rename their digital photos from what their camera calls 'em before they put them online, so by doing Google image searches for random filenames that match those naming patterns you can get some interestingly mundane selections.
Game of the Moment
Lovely simple game, Bounce. At the shockwave site but actually using an engine called WildTangent, so the game has to download that first, but it's really painless. The game has a cool 2D physics model, with nicely elastic spheres that squish, pop-up, and roll down. I like the second game mode "Think" the best, figuring out how to make simple patterns. The other two modes are simpler line-up-color modes, either at your own pace or against the clock, respectively.
Bad News of the Moment
Bill (he and I seem to get this mutual linkage society thing going on) pointed out this alarming article on the possibilities of vote fraud...I don't know if every possible thing they point out is likely but still. And that whole Florida "we must purge the voter lists of ex-felons even if a few innocents lose their vote"...it's absolutely disgusting. Are they that worried about waves of felons rockin' the vote, or is it reasonable to suspect something worse? (Similarly, Slashdot pointed out Maryland's Govenor looking for a software audit of the voting machines.)
We need frickin' paper trails, morons. Pretty soon we'll be looking more and more like a third world country. (Or, tangentally, as the Washington Bureau Chief of Russia's ITAR-TASS News Agency convincingly argues, we're acting more and more like Cold War Era Soviet Union (Article is 1/3 of the way down, do a Ctrl-F search for "#5" or "Andrei Sitov".)
And of course, there's that whole "Arnold for Governor" thing now. Man, what a farce that state has become. You don't call "do-overs" for elections because you don't like the policies. At least we won't see "Arnold for President". (Unless they amend the constitution; I think back to Piers Anthony's "Bio of a Space Tyrant" where a guy from the moon that had been given to Puerto Rico became president of Jupiter (which had been given to and mapped to the United States) and they had to have an amendment because he was born off-planet...)