One for the cat owners among you:

I Meant To Do That

My kitty chases shadows, as her instincts demand

And sometimes the excitement gets a bit out of hand

She'll ramble and she'll scramble and she'll fly through the air

To pile on the tile at the foot of the stair.

(She says)

I meant to do that, I'll have it be known

I did it on purpose, for plans of my own,

Since you're just a human and I am a cat,

I thought I ought to mention that I meant to do that.

[...]

[Via rec.arts.sf.fandom]

Best. Halloween. Party. Invitation. Ever.

[Via Oliver Willis]

I see Channel 4 continuing their policy of scheduling good programmes at ridiculous times. On November 12th at 1.10am they're showing the first episode of the six-part miniseries The Corner, an adaptation of David Simon's book about inner-city life in Baltimore.

Simon's previous book-to-TV adaptation resulted in a little series by the name of Homicide: Life on the Street (aka The Best Damn Show on Television) and his latest show, The Wire, has also been getting terrific reviews in the States, so naturally I've been keen to see The Corner show up on terrestrial TV. It's just as well I was watching the listings carefully or I'd have completely missed the debut of The Corner. (Ironically, the only reason I spotted the show was that it took the slot previously allocated to an episode of the similarly mis-scheduled The Secret Life of Us.)

Yet another cute baby animal picture.

Jason Kottke has issued a stirring call to arms:

Attention, citizens of Earth! The time for talk has passed; we need to take action. Our nearest solar neighbor, who goes by the seemingly benign name of "the Sun", is currently making what is the latest in a series of aggressive moves against our planet and its inhabitants.

[...]

Don't Touch My Computer! No, I'm serious – DON'T TOUCH MY COMPUTER! (Not safe for work – nudity.)

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

What self-respecting geek with access to a Mach 5 wind tunnel could resist the temptation to simulate how the USS Enterprise copes with travelling at warp factor 5?

I'm just a little surprised they didn't try to settle the old Enterprise versus Death Star versus White Star controversy once and for all while they were at it.

[Via Slashdot]

The Onion AV Club reviews the DVD Commentary Tracks of the Damned:

SUSPECT: Glitter

CRIMES:

• Building a film around Mariah Carey
• Hiring Mariah Carey to play a Mariah Carey-like figure
• Allowing Mariah Carey to perform the soundtrack
• Choosing a script that feels like it's been gathering dust since the early days of the Great Depression

DEFENDER: Director Vondie Curtis-Hall

[...]

COMMENTS ON THE CAST

He lavishes praise on the supporting cast. As for his star, Curtis-Hall says he was impressed by the talent she displayed during a screen test for John Singleton's Shaft. It's worth noting that Carey does not appear in John Singleton's Shaft.

[...]

[Via Jejune.net]

I know The Six Million Dollar Man was one of those kitsch 70s classics that wasn't actually very good, but even so Colonel Steve Austin doesn't deserve this grisly fate:

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 22 /PRNewswire/ — "The Six Million Dollar Man" is up and running. The project, long in development, was put on the fast track after the studio met with superstar Jim Carrey, fresh off the over $470 million dollar worldwide gross of "Bruce Almighty," and set the actor up with writer/director Todd Phillips. The combination of Carrey and Phillips led to a fresh, hilarious take on the potential franchise.

"The Six Million Dollar Man" will be written and directed by Phillips who has co-written and directed the blockbuster comedies "Road Trip," "Old School" and the upcoming "Starsky and Hutch."

[...]

Can't you just picture Jim Carrey's hilarious take on Colonel Austin's slo-mo running style? Doesn't it just make you want to book your tickets for the opening night right now?

[Via Oliver Willis]

Life imitates The Simpsons. (Link points to 2.5MB MPEG file.)

[Via GromBlog]

Kris is missing Halloween in Indiana.

* Title shamelessly ripped off from Alacrity.

Joey deVilla has posted some notes (Part 1, Part 2) from a Q&A session with Neal Stephenson in Toronto which he attended last week.

I loved the article you wrote for Wired [Mother Earth Mother Board, quite possibly the longest article ever written for Wired ] about laying undersea cable around the globe. Are you planning to do any more non-fiction writing?

He was surprised that he was he was asked to write that article. As for the question about non-fiction writing, he replied "That falls into category of things that I might do in the future".

I'm still working my way through Cryptonomicon – who knows, I might even finish it before the paperback edition of Quicksilver is released – and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Even so, I'd trade one of Stephenson's 1,000-page doorstops for his spending a couple of years concentrating on tech journalism if he could come up with more work as informative and entertaining as Mother Earth, Mother Board.

Over at Cultivated Stupidity, Josh has posted the first two entries in his Which Is The Best Kate Bush Album Project. Even considering just her four most recent albums, that's an awful lot of quality material to consider.

Off the top of my head I'd place The Sensual World some way ahead of The Red Shoes, which in turn is just clear of Hounds of Love, with The Dreaming coming well back. But that's me shooting from the hip: I'm looking forward to following Josh's track-by-track progress through the albums and changing my mind several times along the way.

Yoda Auditions:

Auditioned for many movie roles Yoda has. But only very few gotten he has. Screw up the lines he does. Below appear examples do. What roles try out for did he?

[...]

17. "The greatest trick did Darth Vader pull, the world he convinced that exist he did not."

[...]

All good clean fun. See how many you can identify before looking up the answers.

[Via dust from a distant sun]

Derek Wyatt MP wants to save the world from spam. +10 points for good intentions, -50,000,000 points for practicality.

[Via NTK]

You might have read about Microsoft's new Information Rights Management system, soon to be released as part of Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003. It'll allow users to give emails and other Office documents a limited lifespan, or to restrict who an email or document can be forwarded to. All clever stuff, and if executed properly within an organisation which has thought through the issues involved it'll be very handy indeed.

When I read about IRM, I wondered what would happen if I received an email from someone using IRM. Would it appear as a normal plain text email, but with an odd attachment full of XML data which my email program would simply ignore? I didn't do any research at the time, because I'm lazy and thought I'd resolve the issue as and when the need arose. Today I read this post by David Brake which pointed me in the direction of the answer: in order to access protected files, users without access to IRM-enabled systems will have to download a plug-in for … guess which program I'm about to name … go on, it's not difficult … Internet Explorer.

I do hope that Microsoft have made it easy for users to turn off IRM for emails to a particular address book entry – better yet, to default to being turned off for all recipients – or we're going to have a repeat of the winmail.dat fiasco.

Danny O'Brien has signed up to deliver a paper on the "Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks":

[...]

There are hundreds of little tricks, habits, desktop arrangements, and hacks being invented (and I suspect, reinvented) by people to organise their life using today's technology. We very rarely get to see any of it, because we all assume no-one else would be interested in the dull rigmarole of our lives.

Because of my flawed nature, I'm really interested in these secrets. I find well-organised people fascinating, like aliens. I think everyone is curious about one another's desktop. If there was a soap opera for geeks, it would be all about people juggling sixteen projects while filtering sixteen thousand emails on twenty monitors. It would be called "Shoulder Surf" and would be on at five in the morning and to save time it would be broadcast in fast-forward.

[...]

I know I'd watch.

Kristen has posted a wonderful Friday Funny, listing some problems reported by airliner pilots and the "solutions" logged by the mechanics:

Pilot: Test flight OK, except auto-land very rough.

Solution: Auto-land not installed on this aircraft.

[...]

Pilot: Target radar hums.

Solution: Reprogrammed target radar with lyrics.

[...]

I'm fairly sure these are strictly apocryphal – can you imagine the furore if an accident investigation found some of these entries in the crashed aircraft's maintenance records? – but they're pretty damn funny anyway. Go read.

The actor playing Jesus in Mel Gibson's latest project has been struck by lightning and survived.

Given that Jim Caviezel is known to be a devout chap, you have to wonder whether he sees the fact that he survived a sign that the Ultimate Critic likes his performance, or a sign that He wants him to raise his game.

[Via Lots of Co.]

The Butterfly Alphabet. What a story:

This most extraordinary discovery began in the attic of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Kjell ("Shell") was balancing high on a ladder, surrounded by drawers and boxes full of exotic butterflies. When he opened an aromatic old Havana cigar box, there it was woven into the tapestry of a wing: a silvery, gleaming letter "F."

"I looked under the microscope at this miniature design," Kjell recalls, "and marveled at the scales in soft pastel and sparkling silver. Not even a calligrapher could have improved on its beauty. It reminded me of how the ancient scribes lovingly embellished letters in bibles and illuminated manuscripts with human and animal forms." Intrigued, Kjell photographed the letter and hung the print next to his desk where he admired it for over a year.

[...]

Then one day it dawned on him, that having found one letter of the alphabet, there might be others flying around. Could he find them all? What a challenge! Inspired, his mind was quickly made up. Kjell thought, "I am going to be the first to try." Little did he know that it would take him 24 years!

[...]

The results were certainly worth all the effort.

[Via Boing Boing]