I can’t help it; interesting web pages always come in threes, maybe. Or it’s just the season. In any case, I can’t resist this followup to my CMGI comments. Apparently, CMGI had trouble because David Wetherell built his house on an Indian burial ground (original).

It was snowing this morning. Not sticking, except on the top of my car, but distinct white flakes coming down. As I’d half expected, my brain didn’t quite register the white stuff at first. It looked like rain but it was acting funny. It’s been a good ten years since I’ve seen snow, you see; a legitimate ten years. It doesn’t snow in San Francisco, it didn’t happen to snow in England when I was there in January a couple of years back, and I just didn’t happen to travel anywhere else at an appropriate time to see the stuff. ...

If you’re a New England sports fan, there are certain rules: In basketball, detest the Lakers above all others. Also, cheer against Philadelphia, because they’re the only other team to pose a significant threat to the Celtics in the 80s and there was that whole Wilt Chamberlain thing as well. It’s also good to hate any team that features a player who’s been called “better than Larry Bird,” but only while that player is active. No point hating the Chicago Bulls at this point, for example. ...

Phil Ringnalda makes explicit the Movable Type RSS .91 feed issue to which I just alluded, so yeah. His solution is more elegant than the hard-coded timezone I used (and was too embarassed to explain). I will be installing it at a later date.

John Tynes just released Meta Action (original), an incomplete set of rules for running modern action with the D20 ruleset. At first glance it looks interesting enough. It retains hit points, since it’s intended to simulate action movies and thus can be less realistic, but more or less does away with classes. Your Charisma bonus is added to every roll, since action heros are good looking. Without revamping the combat system, though, I’m not sure the ruleset works. PCs are going to get hit all the time, particularly since you can pump skill points into your ranged or melee attack bonuses. A level 1 character with a 14 Charisma (say) can easily have a total of +7 to hit right off the bat. Even level 0 NPCs can be fairly deadly. Three goons with shotguns are terrifying. ...

I have happily validated (original) my RSS feeds; sing hooray! Yeah, pretty geeky. Movable Type users should note that the instructions for fixing old Movable Type feeds assume that you want to replace your RSS .9x feed with an RSS 2.0 feed, which may or may not be the case — some aggregators will still choke on RSS 2.0 and there are no perl modules to handle RSS 2.0 feeds as far as I know. So you may want to proceed with a bit more caution there. If anyone wants to know how I fixed my .91 feed, drop me a comment.

The US is now floating a compromise resolution in the UN, which would not mandate military action if inspections fail. It would leave the door open for an invasion, but it wouldn’t explicitly link the two. This comes after strong criticism from most of the world in open UN debate. You’d expect Middle Eastern countries to be edgy about the whole thing, but even Australia recommended against linking military action to failed inspections. I should perhaps be more confident in the system. ...

Eugene Volokh has some interesting discussion about the limits of free speech. The Supreme Court commented this morning on the question of free speech as it applies to explanations of how to commit a crime. In short, they refused to hear an appeal of a decision in which a lower court essentially claimed such explanations were protected. However, the Supreme Court also explicitly stated that they were not agreeing with the lower court in that decision.

This is probably illegal, but here’s the transcript of the Supreme Court arguments in Eldred vs. Ashcroft (original). (I say illegal because I’m pretty sure Lexis/Nexis has some sort of copyright on the collection of transcripts. Consider it civil disobedience.)

Every little boy in the world wants to be a rock star, a knight (or samurai, or anyhow somebody with a sword), and a pilot. Bruce Dickinson, former lead singer for Iron Maiden, managed the trifecta. Not just casually, either; he’s got a real job as a jet pilot, and was at one point ranked seventh in the UK in foil (original). I expect in a couple of years we’ll be reading about Bruce Dickinson, fireman. Astronaut can’t be far behind.