Recently discovered Comet Linear may produce a “suprise” meteor shower Thursday evening. Most meteor showers are caused by the earth passing through the path of a comet, and comet Linear passed by just 40 days ago. By the way, Comet Linear was discovered by a telescope in Socorro, NM (home of my alma mater) searching for near-earth asteroids .

My company got DSL today. The days of all of us sharing a 56kbs dial-up connection are over!

Just a reminder: according to Richard Hoagland (the face on Mars guy), three objects will strike the Earth tomorrow. He states that “everything south of the Chesapeake is toast.” That includes me, I’m afraid, so there may not be any updates for a while. It depends on how high the splash wave is…

I’ll be away from the computer for most of the day.

Linux got me kicked out of Wal*Mart details the story of a laptop running linux, a quick-cam, and movies filmed at a Wal-mart. The movies themselves aren’t that exciting (unless, perhaps, you’re a Wal-mart junkie), but technical know-how that went into it and the run-in with the security guard make a good story.

Bob the Angry Flower shows us that L.A. has the worst godzilla selection in North America. I used to read this every week, but hadn’t been by in months. Looks like I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

Intel has developed a digital microscope, marketed for kids at home. I saw this in a catalog (Sam’s Club, I think) and was really excited. An educational computer toy that is fun! You can capture images from the microscope, edit them, print them, email, etc. Fun stuff. But then I found the official homepage and now I’m much less excited. It never comes out and says what the actual magnification levels are (Magnification levels are approximate and have been measured using a 15 in. (38cm.) monitor. Actual magnification will vary according to the size of your monitor is as close as they get.), but all the screenshots look like less than x10. Less than x5, even. Very disappointing, I think.

The more I dig through the BBC web sites, the more I like what they’ve got. I’m listening now to the dramatized diary of a woman living in a village ravished by the Black Plague (1348). They also have a viking attack (645), the Highland clearances (1816) and many more. They require RealAudio, but the scripts are there for the reading as well.

On the subject of searches, you can search many weblogs at once here. You’ll find that often several weblogs will be talking about the same thing at the same time. Some say this is a negative point against weblogs, but the only people that notice the repetition are those who frequent many different logs. I’ve seen that most of you reading this are people that know me from back when, and I’ll assume that you don’t read all of the logs. When I do comment on something that is “making the rounds”, though, I’ll try to do it in a way that doesn’t bore those of you coming in from the other logs.

I’ve played with the format a bit. The most obvious change is the search feature over to the left. It’ll search through the archives, which have really started to pile up. Also, I’m phasing out one statistics counter for another. You’ll not notice, unless you scroll all the way down and see the buttons on the bottom left.