I'm glad California has finally caught up with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. ;)

Damned if that isn't one of the most gol-durned condescending manuals I have ever laid my eyes upon, I declare.

"My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts"

Listen. Love.

I had the pleasure of working with Steve Meretzky at WorldWinner.com (fellow game designers) and to this day he apologizes for the babelfish puzzle.

Also, Steve is about 200 cm tall and Douglas Adams was no little guy -- so they must have seen eye-to-eye.

Didn't this used to be called a terrarium?

This sounds nothing like Hamlet.

I would think the child market for this would be tremendous. No bed monsters could possibly get at you in this thing. No more sleeping with your head under the covers!

blogmother:

Isn't that Isambard Kingdom Brunel?

It sure looks like it (and I think I see the Great Eastern in the background).

It looks like a piece of lead flashing...

The amount of folding makes me think that it has to be a rather malleable metal.

#1 - Satellites crashing down on to your house or other property are usually not covered by standard insurance policies.

The better term for these skills would be obsolescent. Some people still do these things on a regular basis, but they are passing out of use.

I think obsolete would apply to things like rendering whale fat in a try-pot.

Nothing an IR LED headlight and some spraypaint couldn't fix.

'The Look Out boiler company'

I'm not so sure that's the best name for a boiler company...

Are the bugs pictured above actually those pesky Asian Lady Beetles?

Also known as Pumpkin Bugs?

5 km is nowhere near orbital (or even sub-orbital) altitude. Be that as it may, the technology is still pretty awesome.

From Wikipedia: The Kármán line lies at an altitude of 100 km (62.1 miles) above the Earth's surface, and is commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space.[1] This definition is accepted by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), which is an international standard setting and record-keeping body for aeronautics and astronautics.

Wonderful! Congratulations on your new addition!

Oh, and 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368, 75025, 121393!

Every 4th of July, the Declaration is read in its entirety at the Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, MA.

It can be especially entertaining as the crowd hisses when George the Third's name is read. "Huzzah"'s are shouted for all the good points.

At the end, when the delegate's names are read, visitors from the delegate's colony are encouraged to shout out (which can be funny because sometimes there isn't a representative and an awkward silence follows).

The reading is followed by cannon volleys, a parade and then a nice game of rounders.

Dan: I find that if someone asks about the location of crazy sculptures, I can answer by saying either Berlin, Prague or Cardiff.

The first thing that came to my mind was Berlin!

Cory,

For having missed the opportunity to purchase one of these, you must be pithed.

You'll definitely have to try one out with a real laptop. The trike design just makes me think "tippy".

Eh

Carpet shampoo. I see a great need.

YES. Ugh!

Actually Einstein already disproved Newton's theory of gravity...

No, he amended it.

I believe VLC ignores all the DRM crud.

VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

I can only imagine trying to build a system around infrared would have been much more frustrating for designers and end-users both.

Not to mention extremely slow. I don't even want to guess what the bandwidth was.

I remember that the PCjr had and infrared keyboard and there were always alignment issues (it did run Turbo Pascal though).