April 2003 Archives

Somewhere, Rube Goldberg is smiling. [via Flutterby]

Chinese double agent Katrina Leung could give Spy Mommy a run for her money.

Here's the beauty part. This little arrangement continued, the liking and the stealing and the unauthorized trips to China, until this year, when Katrina Leung was 49 years old. Anybody can be a backstabbing double-crossing sex goddess, but a 49-year-old backstabbing double-crossing sex goddess -- well, it gives us all hope, doesn't it?

No word on whether she has any hot, ass-kicking spy children.

Paul Allen, the other founder of Microsoft, is planning to open a new Science Fiction museum in Seattle. The nomination of some of the greatest living SF writers (Clarke, Bradbury, etc.) to the advisory board bodes well for this project.

Yes, it's been sparse around here.

There's too little going on that I want to write about.

There's too much going on that I don't.

For some reason, I'm just waiting for the Administration to announce disgraced former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay's role in the reconstruction of Iraq.

I meant to post this back on April Fool's Day. Anyway, of the (disappointingly few) AFD pages I swa this year, two of them went for surprisingly similar jokes.

As my (theoretical) readers may have noticed, my current gadget obsession is with portable storage devices for digital photos. In particular, I'm interested in portable hard drive devices that can read digital camera media, freeing up flash memory to be reused on long trips. The latest such toy is the Rio PhotoPC Player, which not only has 9GB of storage capacity and a 3.8" display, but also the capability to print directly to supported printers and burn archives onto portable CD-R drives. [via Gizmodo, as usual] That least feature is especially compelling; if I took one of these hard drive gizmos on a long trip, I'd be in constant fear of something wiping my hard drive by accident. Burning CD backups on the road would be a tremendous relief.

Now that they've freed up some space in their schedule, the Sci Fi channel is working on a number of original series, movies, and — I kid you not — "reality" shows. I can feel brain cells dying just from reading the descriptions.