The World of Croquet is your stop for croquet on the web. Rules, organizations, equipment, and a photo gallery (with action shots!) can all be found here.

There has been some difficulties with my work email over the last two days. Most email in or out bounced around due to DNS lookup errors. If that happened to you, please resend – it all seems better now.

Back in January, I wrote of a movie filmed from a kestrel’s point of view called Kestrel’s Eye. It’s not been shown here in Athens, of course, but the publisher has it for sale on their website. Only $285… it looks like I’ll have to wait for the “priced-to-own” $19.95 realease a while longer.

A peek through my refferer logs found this interesting personal portal. One click opens several of Toby’s favorite sites each in its own window. I found it interesting because it mimics my own browsing style of having a handful of browser windows up at once and trickling through them while I’m at work. While waiting for data to extract, for example, I can quickly read a news story that caught my eye earlier in the day and then get right back to work. Quick burst of web browsing followed by a couple hours of slow digestion. The only trouble is when my laptop crashes (say, when I’m alpha-testing new code or, oh, using a Microsoft product), I lose all of my unread windows, and I rarely remember what I had waiting for me.

My very first weblog entry was James Gleick’s collection of on-line essays. You won’t find the original post here, though, as Kestrel’s Nest didn’t exist then. I fed it to Peter Merholz for posting on peterme. Anyway, I bring it up again because James has now published an excellent essay on the collapse of our patent system. Like me, he faults the system much more than he does Amazon, though he did throw a few zingers Bezos’ way.

Introducing the Porta-John Comfort Station: All the comforts of home, “out-standing in the field”. (No, I didn’t make that slogan up.) If that’s far too much comfort for your tastes, perhaps you’d be interested in the Kan Du or the Tote-A-John.

Outlet for a sudden cash windfall #672: Clearwater Hats. Hats from the 1700’s through today.

The Mission to Mars movie is providing Richard Hoagland with all sorts of ego boosting.

I saw Paris, Texas on the big screen last night. What can I say but “wow”. Wim Wenders uses his usual brilliance to deliver a film about communication while hardly using traditional face-to-face dialogue. My dreams all night had a running bottleneck guitar soundtrack, which was more than a little creepy. This page is a tribute to the film, though it seems several links took me to a French 404.

A word of caution: sourdough starters like fresh whey a little too much. Mine erupted last night and my kitchen table is covered with drying starter. Enough stayed in the crock to keep me going, but it sure made a mess.