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.

One of the Hubble Telescope’s three remaining gyroscopes shut down over the weekend, leaving the telescope useless. Three other gyroscopes had previously failed. NASA has a repair mission planned for early December, and astronomers have put the telescope into hibernation until then.

I’d be remiss in my responsibilities (living in Athens and all) if I didn’t link to REM’s soundtrack to the Andy Kaufmann movie. There’s a RealAudio version of their new song. When REM’s official website went on-line a few months ago, it was front page headline news in the papers here.