The Orb of Hotep continues to reveal:

Torme, de facto King of Illinois

Items from the Orb of Hotep become more clear:

Neurts to lovemaking
Bored with life?
GigaPharms are real

MP3.com gets sued for My.Mp3.com.

RIAA's open letter to MP3.com.

MP3.com's response to the RIAA.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

MP3.com, which generally toes the line with the recording industry has done something a little subversive. They've created an app which will look at the ID of a CD loading into your computer and make all of its tracks immediately available to you via streaming MP3 off their servers. So, if I "beam" up my CD collection at home, it'll be available (through MP3.com) at work.

Try out MP3.com's most recent subversion to intellectual property rights. Pretty neat, all you need to do now is have everyone share a username and password to get access to everyone's CDs.

I may weep: Fragment of a Greek Tragedy.

OK, I rewrote the camera from a Microsoft sample in order to get rid of the irritating "Supervision Cam" banner. Also, it no longer hogs my CPU all the time.

Another irritation is the web server (IIS) our company uses (and hence serves my website) keeps the most recent webcam file served up open for longer than it should. This means that if someone looks at the webcam page, I can't update the image for some unknown period of time later. Why, Microsoft, why?

From Michele "Word Bender" Liguori:
Neato retro-future signs and toys from Futurama.

For Mom and Iwan:

Yes, that's crazy-mummanshantz-head Craig. I'm waving but my arm was cropped.

Apple's plans for Net-PC integration:

Second, Apple's new Internet services lack banner advertising entirely because Apple doesn't intend to make money from eyeballs, they want their Internet services to increase the overall value of a Macintosh. Buy a Mac with Mac OS 9 and you have access to all of Apple's services for free. Users of other operating systems need not apply. [...]

Christohper Alexander (of A Pattern Language fame) expects the web to abolish boring housing in the years to come.

Just as we can go into a store and have a computer custom-built to our specifications, Alexander foresees a time when we can go to the Internet for information that will allow us to build custom dwellings. "My organization is about to put out a Web site to help people do this on a massive scale," he said. "The essence of this Web site is to create a means for millions of people to do their own thing."

Naked Programmer Cam is on its own page as well.

I fixed the Y2K glitches on the TotemBar to the left. Woo. hoo.

Naked Programmer Cam is now updated every 30 seconds or so for your voyeristic pleasure. Am I at my desk? Now you know.

The Orb of Hotep wasn't feeling very well (edits weren't working corrctly) but it should be glowing nicely now.

Here it is: Naked Programmer Cam!

I'm back from vacation. Many thanks to the hosts and everyone who showed; I think it was a record year. It was really great to see everyone.

So, hiring practices in the Capital District are kinder and gentler.

"If someone stays in town, you may get him back," explained John C. Haller, one of MapInfo's founders. "If he goes to California, he's gone forever."

And no, the Totem is not Y2K compliant. (Look under Flotsam to the left.)