Well, it's happened: I was at nbcolympics.com and encountered a full-page advertisement interruption--delayed maybe 10 seconds after page load just so you're well into the content but haven't yet moved on. Up until now, some sites have employed flash ads that have crawled across the screen or popped up and then vanished or whatever, but this is the first I've seen an entire page replaced temporarily by an advertisement (some forthcoming Kevin Costner movie--whom I actually like, despite his essential unlikeableness: *The Postman* was a way-underrated movie (a cinematic Dhalgren, oh yes it was!), and when joined by the right kind of co-viewer (pretty lashes lashing), I even enjoy his romantic films--but anyway--). This troubles me truly. Already I have the constant threat of invasion by telephones, front door visitors, upstairs neighbor's stereo, email, instant messenger, software and hardware failure, and Outlook reminders; now I have to accept that even the web page I'm reading might suddenly vanish and present me instead with the faces of grinning waffle-kids or lemon detergent boxes or Coming Soon Baby Are You Ready? ad copy.

At least with television and radio, the format has evolved to the point where you can anticipate the commercial interruptions and psychologically prepare yourself for them (a company I used to work for actually wrote the software that NBC and others use to provide the silent black buffer space between program and commercial), so there are few ax-wielding maniacs hidden behind the furniture of your entertainment or news broadcasts. This sudden interruption thing, though, is way over the line. I feel jumpy just typing this. What if Microsoft decides to embed random unannounced advertisements into its Office products? Or into the OS itself (Linux evangelizers grin greedily)? What if hologram technology one day allows paperback novels to pop up ads while you're reading (mass customized on what genre you're reading of course). It's just too much. I don't think our collective cardio-vasc can handle it. I hereby refuse to return to any site that does this to me. (And thus one more step is taken towards only using sites that support Lynx.)

William Anders:

"For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you".

"In the Beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth.
And the Earth was without Form, and Void;
And Darkness was upon the face of the Deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the Face of the Waters.
And God said, Let there be Light: and there was Light.
And God saw the Light, that it was Good:
And God divided the Light from the Darkness."

Jim Lovell:

"And God called the Light Day, and the Darkness he called Night.
And the Evening and the Morning were the first Day.
And God said, Let there be a Firmament in the midst of the Waters,
And let it divide the Waters from the Waters.
And God made the Firmament,
And divided the waters which were under the Firmament
From the Waters which were above the Firmament:
And it was so.
And God called the Firmament Heaven.
And the evening and the morning were the second day."

Frank Borman:

"And God said, Let the Waters under the Heavens
Be gathered together unto one Place,
And let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth;
And the gathering together of the Waters called he Seas:
And God saw that it was Good."

Frank Borman:

"And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth."

We, the members of the First World, own this world. They, the members of the Last World, want either to take it away from us or, failing that, render it worthless for all. A bi-polar Zeitgeist.

Could it be that religion has turned upon itself? Essentially a mechanism for the psychological and emotional preservation of the value of LIFE, how and where did it change into a rationalizer for suicide and murder? This implies the bigger of question of AFTERLIFE. The way religion (qua religion) presents its promise of AFTERLIFE directly influences how it sponsors LIFE. Osama Bin Laden: an indicator of the ultimate failure of Islam?

I've finally found some good oranges; they taste like they were meant to taste back when the initial specs were submitted for client-approval. But I'm still having trouble with the peels.

Tonight, Greta Van Susteren interviews Shannon Spann, wife of CIA Agent Mike Spann, who was killed by crazy people in Afghanistan several months ago. Ah, I can't wait--she's such a hottie! Shannon, not Greta. Although the nose job helps a little. Guess she had to conform a bit in order to move to Fox News (Greta that is, not Shannon), since they only hire attractive women to be on camera there (you should see who's reading me the market news right now!); I swear, whoever's in charge over there needs a medal or something. You should see who's telling me about the Olympic skating controversy right now! Seems there's a World War brewing based upon which pair of figure skaters was better. At least this time Germany and Japan are on our side--I wonder what would have happened if the US had joined the Axis of Evil in 1944? But wait, if Saddam Hussain is now some kind of Lex Luthor Mastermind of the Axis of Evil, then does that dialectically make George Bush some kind of Superman?

CNN still employs my beloved White House Correspondent Kate Snow, who is so smart, sexy, and confident that I'm never able to hear a word she says. I'm sure Fox News is looking to coerce her defection as well as Greta's since there can't be that many smart sexy confident women available in the news racket. Can there be? Well, but they're mostly weather girls who can barely read their cue cards--I said smart women.

So tomorrow I'll drive down to Virginia where Shannon is partaking in the observation of the trial of American Taliban Johnny Walker Black, who with his sexy sidekick, Mohammad, has the ability to form into various shapes and animals in order to fight crime. And I'll join the thousands reportedly already there just longing to get a glimpse of sweet Shannon, each holding secret hopes of somehow filling up the gaping hole of loss and terrible loneliness that she must be feeling in her husband's absence. Those guys are all losers though, so I should have little trouble. And then on my trip home, I'll swing by Kate Snow's house and we'll go out dancing or something. I'll have to learn to dance on the way; I hear these new dance-lesson audio cassettes are really effective.

Soon we'll have the Naked News on cable too. Who the hell needs a job?

My respect for and appreciation of George W. has grown since the beginning of the current crisis (the poorly named War on Terror, not Enrongate or Skategate), but why is it he still cannot correctly pronounce the word "nuclear"? His handlers must routinely grab at their hair and yank it over this, jot into their palm pilots notes to fire the newest voice coaches, and schedule additional meetings with the PR and Spin groups to see about making "nucular" the legitimate pronunciation of the word (the world must cater to its leaders after all, especially the ones with the most smart bombs--didn't the measurement for a foot come from the size of some big-shoed King of England?).

I'm so happy for Kate Snow, who finally made it to the desk at CNN. Last night she filled in for Wolf Blitzer (for whom she makes an outstanding replacement), and now again this morning she's taking the weekend anchor slot. I've predicted this would happen for some time, as CNN tries to compete with FOX News and their brilliant tactic of delivering news through attractive women; CNN's resources in this area are somewhat limited (not taking anything away from Kate's journalistic skills, without which she wouldn't be on CNN, or so ably command the post of Washington Correspondent), so it swiftly became inevitable that the pretty reporters would be migrated to the desks. Call it sexist, but I like Kate better indoors--she always looked so cold standing out there in front of the Capital.

Well, I was happily watching Kate lead a roundtable discussion on international events, when my CNN blacked out again, thanks to Comcast Cable, which sucks. For some reason, Comcast--or at least my local provider--hates CNN. It routinely blacks out into noise (quiet noise, but dark, and no Kate Snow anywhere), and when it's up, there's typically a low volume signal from some other, unrelated broadcast, carried on top of it or as an additional channel, so that I might be watching Kate deliver the details of the Senate's latest waste of time and money, or Wolf idly scratching at his beard and mustache, and there will be the faint traces of a Mexican maraca or the beat of a European disco in the background. Very disconcerting and one of the reasons I've spent more time at Fox in recent months.

MSNBC has Jeannie Ohm anchoring its Saturday afternoon slot today (this is the first I've seen her). She looks Korean--I'll ask my friend Jenny if Ohm is a Korean name--and as far as I know, she is just one of two Asians serving anchor for a US cable news outlet (Connie Chung having moved to CNN last month).

Ah--turns out she's been with the network since August (bio here); this is the first I've seen her, probably because I give MSNBC somewhat less attention than the others (but gotta love that Ashleigh Banfield!)

Chuck Jones is Dead. The creator of some of my most beloved childhood friends is now gone from this earth. Jones also adapted Geisel's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" for television, and for that alone he deserves the Lifetime Acheivement Award from all the groups of leaches who award such things. Time for a Bugs Bunny marathon, I think.

I followed a link from memepool to gamespot (which I check regularly for game reviews*) concerning Chess 2, a "licensed sequel" to the ancient strategy game by some French company (typical!) called En Passant (http://www.gamespot.com/features/chess2/). As a long-time (and occasionally obsessive) chess fan, I was skeptical at first, predicting the usual embellishments to the game that never offer any improvement (chess being, after all, one of the three or four perfect creations of man, along with Beethoven's Ninth and Doom 2), but this version actually has some interesting augmentations, and while it cannot possibly replace chess, it might make an interesting game on its own.

First of all it makes the obligatory change in board size so typical to chess mutations, in this case expanding by 50% to 12x12 squares. But unlike those other leach-games, this one has a reason for the expansion: the addition of two new pieces, one of which acts as a mutator for the knight, and another which has a novel "range" attack. The first is the Squire, which can move forward on file or oblique two squares, cannot attack, but if placed adjacent to a knight, mutates the knight's move for that turn to 3x2 squares. The squires start next to their knights, so this has a radical impact upon opening strategy (but retains the center contest of the original game), and since the pieces cannot attack, there will be a significant change to positional strategy in general (providing a sort of mobile barricade for opposing pieces--these Squires could turn into more trouble than they're worth). The other new piece is the cannon, which can move as a king, but attacks two squares away, and does not take the place of the piece or pawn it's attacked. The cannon is placed between knight and rook, the squire between knight and bishop.

Okay, interesting, now I can just go and make my own board and pieces and forget about En Passant. They've added some "missions" or something to the game in order to persuade you to buy it (you can't sell new rules, after all--at least I pray they cannot patent them!), but I didn't pay much attention to these.

*Gamespot has finally turned the corner of commercial madness recently by attempting to charge money for downloading game demos and movies made freely available by the game publishers. They'll tell you their fee is for the use of the servers that supply mirrors of the files, but servers are like sidewalks on the internet, and if there's some troll demanding gold for the use of one, I can easily go find another. This is either the lure of profit of the caterwauling of a another bad business model.

Can you imagine what it's like? When it turns off pain???

RSS feeds are fun. I've cobbled together a servlet based on Jay Eckles' RSSViewerServlet to display some headlines from moreover and the onion here. It's kind of slow, so I've been trying to tweak it (I'll probably get bored soon, though). Here's a javascript version with some different feeds.

The idea behind RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds is that sites with content to share (and with which to draw users) can publish it in a standardized way (RDF/XML) that ensures links back to the content's host are presented with the content. Aggregators and search engines can easily locate and retrieve this content for their own use. I love it when the web gets webbier!

RSS is just one application of RDF; with tools being developed, you can embed RDF/XML information into software, picture, music, and video files, helping to ensure catalog, version, and copyright maintenance. Using a tool like Sesame and the RQL query language, you can search for these files wherever they may roam.

Incidentally, this site provides free hosting for java servlets. Very nice indeed--I'd been searching for some time for a public servlet container.

Justin Frankel, that bastard who has my life, and his gang of merry coders have finally turned the corner with Winamp. Winamp3, is the best utility I've seen since Dave's Search Bar. Admittedly, that's not so long a time, but if not for Dave, it would be, like, since PGP Freeware or something. It's currently still in beta but stable so far for me (except for the time I tried to apply a winamp2 skin), and sounds much better than the previous version or Windows Media Player--which can bite me: with my latest OS install, I decided to give wmplayer an honest try (since it's so convenient--Redmond's sharpest tool), and while it doesn't suck, it annoys me in several spots that I'd rather not have annoyed. And the things that used to annoy me about Winamp (for instance not being able to resize it) are now gone. That is, you can resize it! A-and you have to check out the default URL for the Skin Switcher (just kidding, don't do that--it's a mean joke).

What else.... Database interface, skins of any shape, a shoutcast server browser full of good work-music (lots of trance, ambient, jazz, etc--right now I'm listening to the Braveheart soundtrack from streamingsoundtracks.com (bet you didn't know *that* site existed!)). A nice queue function: alt-click on a song that's not playing and it will play that one next. It has lots of component windows (the major tech progress here is a distributed component architecture rather than the monolithic design employed by the previous versions)--not that you *have* to see any of them--and you can move them all at once by holding ctrl-alt while dragging the player window. It also supports video playback (which so far seems to handle all the codecs I have installed).

I'm honestly surprised AOL has let these guys continue to work in this direction. Maybe it's a side project while they produce modules for that globular monstrosity most people think they need to access the internet.

By the way, the Braveheart Soundtrack is excellent too--what a great day I'm having! AEHAHGH--just now, just as I finished typing that, streamingsoundtracks.com switched Braveheart to Rocky 3 (Eye of the Tiger!) I knew my happiness couldn't last....

I am philosophically and ideologically opposed to Capital Punishment, but in the case of Danielle van Dam, the guilty party--and it looks more and more like it's the neighbor, David Westerfield--should be killed. If found guilty, his life then belongs to the van Dams, and he should be given to them to do with as they see fit. Some crimes, some atrocities, are simply too much for a society to bear. This crime is more than any society anywhere or ever should tolerate, and we should not lie to ourselves with the fallacy of rehabilitation for this man. Why would we even *want* to rehabilitate such a monster?

The evidence revealed today indicates that Westerfield drove his RV into the desert just hours before Danielle was discovered missing, that a tow truck was sent to pull that RV from where it was stuck in the sand near the Mexican border, and that the vehicle had been cleaned so thoroughly he could have parked it on a sales lot. According to CNN, "DNA test results showed Danielle's blood on an article of his clothing and in his motor home and other DNA evidence on an article of Danielle's clothing in her bedroom."

God can only bare to know what happened in that RV while it was in the desert.