News flash: Audiogalaxy forced by RIAA to share songs only on an opt-in basis. This is a sad day for those of us who discovered obscure bands and little-known tracks through the power of peer-to-peer sharing– sadder, even, than the day Napster was forced to implement filtering, as that was a far more lenient opt-out system.

Now where, pray tell, will I get my underground European techno fix? 🙂

News flash: Some high school graduates have never seen record players or heard of Atari.

Wow, I’m starting to feel old. I mean, sure, I just graduated from high school last year. Nonetheless, I actually had a record player when I was young (heck, I often listened to my dad’s and my sister’s old LPs!). No 8-tracks, though–that’s just a bit before my time. But I did, however, play Pong, along with other such classics as Pac-Man and Frogger, on the family’s Atari 2600…

Of course, there are people within my generation that aren’t entirely out of touch with the ’80s. After all, I know of quite a few people who, though they’re still in high school, have seen and/or heard of most of these things first-hand.

But then again, I’ve also discovered that there are kids who’ve never heard of the Speak & Spell, or if nothing else, recognize it as “that red thing from E.T.“. How sad. 🙂

Trivial facts can be entertaining. But they’re only more entertaining when they’ve been scrambled through a Markov chain algorithm [Link changed 2006-05-24 to Wayback Machine, as the original post has disappeared]. (“What’s a Markov chain”, you ask? Well, here’s a description of the process.)

Want to create your own Markovized texts? Perhaps the most famous Markov chainer is the punnily named Mark V. Shaney, for DOS/Windows systems. There’s also a version of Mark written in the Python scripting language (note: for more recent versions of Python, you’ll have to change all occurrences of “rand” into “random”), as well as a GPLed C source by Tim Musson that’s based upon it.

Whoa. I was just looking through my server logs (as I tend to do when I’m really bored), and I discovered that, at least for the time being, I’m on the first page of Google results for “proofreader”!

Wow. I feel so…honored…or something…

While some artists and record labels are sabotaging peer-to-peer networks with inaccurately labeled MP3 files and releasing CDs that can’t be ripped without much trouble, others are very much in favor of the free distribution of their music.

So, go download some popular singles from such groups as The Strokes, The Hives, The White Stripes and Badly Drawn Boy— and show the record companies that free publicity is not a bad thing.

I know, I know, it’s the wrong time of year, but I simply can’t pass up blogging this link I stumbled across today. Suffice it to say that Christmas songs just don’t sound the same after being run through Babelfish…

And yes, “Native White Man” is in fact one of the carols listed. Hehe.

I love Windows XP, but sometimes it does the strangest things. Apparently tonight the taskbar got a bit confused and grouped one of the Mozilla windows on my desktop as if it were an instance of Windows Explorer. What’s even stranger is that the other Mozilla window I had open was grouped correctly…

A tip to idiot spammers: If you’re going to be advertising an e-text about US government grants, it’s probably best not to send your ad from a Ukrainian reply-to address (gomail.com.ua) and through a mail relay which claims to be in Japan (plaza23.mbn.or.jp)…

I just saw an MSN banner ad which promoted the fact that Microsoft’s service offers “less busy signals” than its main competitor.

Am I the only one who finds this a bit jarring? It’s fewer, people!

(And besides, I’m quite pleased with the lack of busy signals on my broadband service, thank you very much. Heh.)

Go figure; a recent study has shown that high-school students tend to know more about technology than their teachers.