Bertelsmann AG to the rescue! Woo hoo! And for a while there, I was worried that CDNow, strapped for cash, was going to go under and that I would no longer have my favorite CD store... ZDNet Story: Bertelsmann buys CDNow for $3 a share

Some new mailing lists I bumped into today. I am often in the search for relevant lists that aren't a waste of time. I'm trying a few out to see how they look, and I'm sure I will make suggestions down the road.

Ask Jeeves is a search engine... sort of. The twist is that it attempts to answer natural language queries, or whatever they term a normal question that isn't just a bunch of keywords. So if it answers questions, the obvious thing to do is to interview Jeeves, right? I saw this a while ago, but I don't think I've posted it here. It's probably one of the funniest things I've read on the Web in 5 years.

Interview with the Search Engine from Satire Wire (formerly FNwire).

I swear, I am trying to be good... but it's just so hard sometimes.

Something Jay said today caught me really good... First off, this should be prefaced by a story at Salon.com.

"I think we should teach kids prostitution to prevent basketball"...

"Afterall, basketball players nowadays are a whole lot more dangerous than hookers. You never see a hooker driving a Pathfinder carrying a gun and 5 pounds of weed."

"Ok, maybe sometimes."

Regarding research into online privacy, I found a little "how-to" on ZDNet about the basics of protecting yourself online and maintaining relative anonymity... Keeping Your Private Information Private on the Web.

I've got very dark red hair these days.

"It has been found that the entire outer layer of skin is shed every one or two days."

So Gary Settles, a scientist at the Penn State Research Foundation is going to use that layer of skin and a "thermal-plume" that rises from the human body to test for illegal drugs, substances and explosives. This is a great idea for airport security, but what about the related privacy issues? NYTimes.com article

I managed to do something nasty to my neck this morning. One of those, "I was just turning around and then....". Well, to say the least, I am in a lot of pain. Digging through drawers for muscle relaxers or bourbon or something. And I was suppose to be playing Ultimate tonight!

Something I've been meaning to jump into soon is database programming. Perl.com has an article titled Short guide to DBI (The Perl Database Interface Module), which is probably a good place to start. Just have to sit down and read it.