Well, I observed the Leonids for about four hours last night, and saw roughly four meteors. It might have been three, as they were all very dim, and I could have imagined one. Apparantly at the same time I was watching, observers in Spain saw one every second or so.

The thing that I noticed most was the extreme amount of airplanes in the sky. At one time, two dozen were in my field of vision at the same time! And the sound of engines was steady, a constant deep droning. I guess that’s what happens when you live within 100 miles of the Atlanta airport. Too bad, really.

I spent many, many hours a few years ago lost in the worlds created by Trilobyte software. 7th Guest, 11th Hour, and Clandestiny were superb puzzle-based games, and still rank among the best I’ve ever played. I was wondering today what they’re up to, as I’ve not heard of anything from them in a while. Turns out they closed their doors this year, after falling from about as high as a software company can possible get. Their defunct homepage linked to this excellent article from GameSpot that charts the rise and fall of Trilobyte. It’s over 20 pages long, but does a great job of describing what was happening there. As an employee of a software startup myself, the article was all the more pertinant.

My much missed friend from college Randy has a series of pages up including a weblog/journal. Looks like he’s making a batch of apple jack, which would taste mighty good right about now. Too bad he’s so many miles away.

From Ed’s Weblog comes four supposed photos of Hobbiton from the Lord of the Rings set.

CNN is running a story about breaking Microsoft into three peices: one for Windows, one for applications, and one for internet business. Of course, that’s not a good idea for a number of reasons (some mentioned in the article). What sounds much better to me is James Gleick’s proposal, first made back in February, that Microsoft should be split into three equal clones, with full access to all intellectual property the one company has now.

NASA’s Leonids, Live! website will start showing live images of the Leonids in about twelve hours, if you can’t get out yourself. Among the many interesting resources here is an article about watching the moon for impacts to help prospect for specific molecules, similar to the experiment that crashed the Lunar Prospector onto the moon.

This summer, news made the popular press that a physics experiment scheduled for this month in New York could destroy the planet (see my September 16th entry). The laboratory commissioned a study to see what the possible effect might be, and they have found that the acceleratorwon’t destroy the world after all. The accelerator will go on-line by the end of the year.

I just discovered abada abada, a journal/weblog in Vermont. Start at the bottom of her page and read up, so to get the full effect of four truths and a lie, Vermont style.

How to Manage Geeks: I read this in the print magazine when it came out, and was happy to find it on the web. I used to get a lot of flak for being a geek myself, but I’ve since accepted and become proud of the title.

We may be in for quite treat this week as the Leonid meteor shower may be a storm. The shower peaks every 33 years as the parent comet orbits the sun, and this is the year. Due to quirks in orbital mechanics, it may be the last storm for over 100 years. The peak should be Wednesday evening at 9pm eastern looking to the east, though the best viewing will be in the Middle East. Note all the qualifiers – predicting these things are very, very tricky. Still, I’ll be outside each evening for the rest of the week, hoping to watch a storm.