I must say that the new "Recent Posts / Replies:" section at the top, right corner is brilliant!  An efficient way to see what is going on and get there.

54500 is a cool number, too.

"...if you walk to the end of the block, there sits a Starbucks.  And directly across the street -- in the exact same building as that Starbucks -- there is... another Starbucks.  There is a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks!  And ladies and gentlemen, THAT is the end of the universe."
- Lewis Black

(Or if you’re my sister, it’s the beginning of heaven...)

"When Hillary Clinton is nominated for a Grammy for reading her book, civilization is over."
- Bill O’Reilly

Alright, Mr. 147.46.244.*.  Over the past 10 days, you’ve hit my site an average of 9.4 times per day, from six different user-agents -- four linux and two freebsd.  The majority of these >90 visits were zero-duration hits to my /stats/ page.  I can only guess that this is an attempt to increase the percentage of linux and freebsd OSes, and mozilla and opera browsers, in my statistics.

It’s trivial for me to remove these hits from my log and cause my logger to ignore you in the future.  But I’d rather not do that if I can instead convince you to stop trying to game the system here.

Is it just me, or does Michael Chiklis look way younger now, on The Shield, than he did 10 years ago on The Commish?

(I just saw The Shield for the first time last night, and it’s stinking awesome.  I’m going to have to watch it every week now.)

I had seen this on people’s profiles, etc, and I thought it was some kind of joke.  But apparently John Kerry really did say this:

I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.

Mmm-hmm...

This is pathetic.

It was a contest to see which team could build an autonomous vehicle that would travel 250 miles across the CA/NV desert in the shortest time.  Over a hundred teams entered.  Most didn’t even make it past the initial qualification round.  Then fourteen were selected to actually attempt the race.

Not a single robot finished the race.  In fact, none got farther than a few miles past the starting line.  From the videos and photos, it looks like the teams spent thousands of dollars making their vehicles look like tanks, and then built the navigation and control systems out of Cracker Jack prizes.  One team spent three million dollars making their Hummer-based robot.

Every single one failed miserably.  Half of them didn’t even make it out of the gate, crashing into walls or going in circles immediately upon starting.

This is pathetic in two ways.  First of all, each team was given a CD containing GPS coordinates of the route.  All the vehicle had to do was follow the coordinates and not crash.  The one that went the farthest, the 3 million dollar Hummer, only made it 7.4 miles.  Now, I’ve never built anything like an automaton, so I am obviously not speaking from experience, but it seems to me that thousands or MILLIONS of dollars should be enough to make this happen.  Apparently not.

But what really bugs me about this -- what’s really pathetic -- is the fact that half of them crapped out instantly, and most within a mile or so.  This is pathetic because it means that all these people on all these teams spent all this money building these machines, and apparently did no testing whatsoever.  How can you spend thousands of dollars on a project and not TEST it once before the day of the race?  Because that seems to be the only logical explanation for why half of the robots -- make that half of the ones who made it to the second round of qualifications -- couldn’t even start the race, let alone compete in it.

The beat track from Jay-Z’s song "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" is the best one I’ve heard in a long time.  It’s really a shame that all his lyrics are trash.  He released an a capella version of The Black Album; he should have released an instrumental version instead.  (Of course, J himself had little if anything to do with creating this beat; it was produced by Timbaland.)  The last time I liked a beat this much was probably either Rakim’s Guess Who’s Back or KRS-ONE’s God is Spirit.  (Or maybe The Cross Movement’s The Light.  Hmm...)

I can definitely see Dirt Off Your Shoulder becoming something of a classic, like Eric B. and Rakim’s Lyrics of Fury and Paid in Full, because it’s just so catchy.  (Paid in Full has one of the most sampled beats of all time, and it’s almost 20 years old now.)

Here are short clips of the beats, so you can sample their awesomeness:

1986: Eric B. And Rakim - Paid In Full
1988: Eric B. And Rakim - Lyrics Of Fury
1997: Rakim - Guess Who’s Back
2000: The Cross Movement - The Light (The Blazin’ One)
2002: KRS-ONE - God Is Spirit Feat. BB Jay
2003: Jay-Z - Dirt Off Your Shoulder

Update: and of course, Rock the Bells / Peter Piper.  This has probably been sampled at least as much as Paid in Full’s beat.
1986: Run DMC - Peter Piper