Author: gulley

Any fan of Terry Gross and Fresh Air needs to drop whatever they’re doing and read about her interview with KISS leadman Gene Simmons. What a pathetic wanker. Maybe he’s playing some kind of Andy Kaufman head game for art’s sake, but I seriously doubt it. Best bet is that he’s just a pathetic wanker.

Now I’m sending you this message through the courtesy of Blogger Pro ™, a steal at $35 a year. It’s finally got a feature that I’ve been waiting a long time for… using the “draft” option, you don’t have to publish everything that you’ve posted if you don’t want to. You can even post into the future. Love it! I’m happy to pay and hope that Evan Williams gets a nice business going with Blogger. It’s a great service.

Steve Grand wants to be a “latter-day Baron Frankenstein” according to this New York Times article on artificial life: Man Who Would Be God: Giving Robots Life. He comes across in the article as a genuine latter-day eccentric Englishman, the clever kind, not the unbalanced kind. He’s written a book about his adventures creating artificial life (Creation : Life and How to Make It). The thing that sets him apart from other a-life hobbyists is that he’s written a bone-fide game bestseller that’s based on a-life. Called Creatures, it’s popular enough to give him the money he needs to fund more ambitious research. It’s exciting to think that a-life is now self-sustaining in terms of revenue, even if it’s not very advanced yet.

Google is running a programming contest. Not much like the programming contest we ran with MATLAB… it looks like they’re willing to pay big bucks to people who can help them do a better job with their search algorithms.

Learn how to do astronomy from the privacy and comfort of your personal computer. Virtual Astronomy: Now Anyone Can Make a Discovery

Use Marketleap to see how popular (in terms of links) your site is. Link Popularity – Marketleap Visibility Index – Measure your link popularity

From Marketleap, I tracked down AllTheWeb.com, which let me construct this search that shows all the non-Star Chamber documents that link to this site. AllTheWeb.com: Web pages results for `link.all:www.starchamber.com’

Guy Ottewell has left his digs in South Carolina and has moved back to England. Universal Workshop Home Page

I like this well-written Seven wonders of the web list in the Guardian. Blogger makes their list; it makes my list too.

The Coffee Czar has turned me on to Joel on Software. Joel Spolsky, the eponymous author of the site, also runs Fog Creek Software, publishers of City Desk.

I enjoy reading New Scientist magazine, but my local newsstand has stopped carrying it. So I have to remember to look at the web site more often.