The AltaVista saga continues: Yahoo’s buying Overture. The purchase price is 1.63 billion, which is pretty damned impressive. You gotta figure the AV and Fast purchases made the deal much more attractive to Yahoo, considering that those portions of Overture will allow Yahoo to replace Google as their search provider. Congratulations go to my compadres at AltaVista.
It’s pretty belated, but I didn’t particularly want to just post the Declaration of Independence. Or even the Declaration of Independence with snide comments about the current Administration. Yeah, but it’s too easy, you know? I came at last to Mencken’s translation (original), which pleases me no end. WHEN THINGS get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody. ...
I try not to run out my weak Photoshop skills too often, but now and again I can’t resist. I’ve sent this into gbaMOD so I can buy it as a real skin, but rumor has it they’re running kind of slow so we’ll see.
Warren Zevon has been diagnosed with lung cancer. He’s long been one of my favorite musicians and I am very sad that I never took the chance to see him play before now. It seems unlikely that I will have another chance.
The new World Trade Center designs are a vast improvement over the previous set of designs. I don’t like all of them, but I like that this set takes risks. I do like a few of them very much; in particular, the Peterson/Littenberg seems to me to be elegant without being boring, and the Studio Daniel Libeskind proposal would be my choice. It maintains certain features of the current site, so that we won’t forget, and the shattered crystal feel of the buildings seems really appropriate.
Mamet does 2001, via Amygdala.
The Game Boy Advance SP is the best computer gaming device I’ve bought in two years and it’s a close second to my Windows PC as the best gaming device I’ve ever bought. It blows my Playstation and Playstation 2 away. Man, what a cool little device. I had an old Game Boy Color, and it was OK, but it did not have the superslick form factor of the Advance SP. This thing is small enough to carry around comfortably in one hand. Plus it’s got a backlit screen. Plus the CPU is powerful enough to do interesting games. ...
I always wanted to know which states had lots of people with my last name. I just didn’t know it till I found this link. There are few of my kind anywhere, except there’s a cluster in Maine, which is completely expected. There’s also a cluster in Oregon, which doesn’t surprise me in the least cause I already knew about that branch. French names cluster in New England and Louisana. Scandanavian names cluster up in the Dakotas and Wisconsin and Minnesota. Cool stuff. (Via gtexts.)
A while back, Julian Dibbell wrote one of those articles about MMORPG economies (original). You know the kind, all breathless and interested. He’s the guy who wrote that article on LambdaMOO, too. I don’t know if we owe him a debt of thanks for that or not. In the interests of putting his, well, money where his mouth is, he’s now keeping a blog (via Kottke) chronicling his attempts to make money in UO. Solid stuff, particularly his reporting on the recent UO “gold farm” scandal. Read it from the beginning.
3leaf is hiring (original). I have no idea what they do, but their job listing is enough to make me wish I was a deep Windows geek. 13. Stealth plane are nice. You give one orders, and it disappears. When it reappears, it always says “Mission accomplished. I hit the target”, but sometimes it really hit Lichtenstein’s embassy. You are NOT a stealth plane, you are a big, noisy, C130, that we can hear, see, and talk to for the whole project. ...