October 2006

It's not clear who created SiteAdminStuff, but s/he certainly has collected an impressive list of resources for webmasters.

I recently saw a magic show put on by "Merlin and the Court Jesters", part of the Magic for Special Education program, which "may be the worlds first education program designed to teach skills to people with a disability not taught to regular students. Learning to perform magic will build self-confidence and self-esteem while improving the mental and physical skills of special education students." The show was terrific, and the performers were clearly having the time of their lives. If you are a magician, or are interested in special education, you could not do better than to become involved with this program.

John Horton Conway's Game of Life is perhaps the most famous example of cellular automata. It's probably wasted more computer CPU cycles than anything else, including the Internet. Waste a few yourself by playing with the Mushroom Life simulation (Requires Flash.).

SPOILER WARNING: If you did not see last week's episode of Battlestar Galactica ("Exodus, Part 2"), do not play this video.

If you did see it… was this not the frakking coolest starship battle maneuver EVER?
 

Even Klingons celebrate Halloween… "Even in the simple act of carving the holiday pumpkin, a true WARRIOR can hone his skills with the Bat'leth! Unfortunately, as human pumpkins are so small we will content ourselves with the more delicate klingon weapon – the daq tahg."

If Star Trek isn't your cup of raktajino, how about a Cylon Jack-O-Lantern?

Thanassis offers his list of 27 of the most useful Firefox extensions.

Google Tutor offers tutorials, tips and advice for Google users, as well as a Google Search Manual.

My mom's a really nice, sweet, loving person. There's nothing she wouldn't do for any of her children or grandchildren. But… I've seen her angry, and when she gets pissed, no one is safe. It happens kinda like this…
 

I know that Ohio State is huge in college football, but could this be a case of carrying things a tad too far?
 

Remember all those warnings you got as a child, not to look at the sun lest you go blind? Well, now you can stare at the sun all you like, and in real time no less!

"Meet-O-Matic is a meeting scheduler that does not constrain participants to share a common diary or even to use a common platform – you can propose and schedule meetings online and invite participants using your own email system, then monitor responses to your meeting invitation as they arrive and are displayed in Meet-O-Matic's intuitive visual constraint table. With this table you can perform a powerful what-if scenario analysis and home in quickly on the best dates."

An Introduction to Linux Basics is a free, online course covering the Linux operating system: "Linux can certainly be used as a Desktop without much understanding of how it works. This course is designed to give a foundation of understanding of Linux to a beginner who wants to know a little more about the system. More advanced Linux users will find an opportunity to dig deeper into some areas they always wanted to know more about or discover gaps in their knowledge that they didn’t know existed."

Award-winning author John Scalzi is writing a novella set in the same universe as "Old Man's War". To be titled "The Sagan Diary", it is available for pre-order. The coolest part? Order the limited edition, and you will become a part of the story.

"Pixsy collects visual material from thousands of providers across the web, resulting in millions of photos and videos for you to search and browse. Traditional image search engines take a mathematical approach to search, with the focus entirely on relevancy. With Pixsy, you can search for both photos and videos by "relevance", "category", "provider", or "freshness". "

HassleMe hassles you: "Not eating enough fruit? Forgot to feed the fish again? Need a little help keeping your New Year's resolutions? Tell us what to hassle you about, and we'll nag you via email at semi-unpredictable intervals."