Via RSS - 9/13/06

I'd originally planned to take a vacation from blogging this week, since I had a self-imposed RL work deadline to worry about. But it just sort of hasn't happened. I have been slacking in my RSS-reading duties, and I've been trying to catch up, really really really, when I'm not grinding out Java. Right now I should probably be writing some unit tests, but that can wait for a few minutes.

Without further ado, here's today's edition of "stuff found on the interwebs".

• The latest cool Hubble photo: A photo of the planet Uranus with its moon Ariel, with the moon casting a shadow on the planet. This from beeeelions of miles away. Wow. Admit it, that rocks.
  
• If you haven't seen it yet, here's Keith Olbermann's 9/11 piece. If you're a Dubya groupie (and you haven't already fled this blog in horror), you probably don't want to visit this link. At least if you want to keep on being a Dubya groupie.
  
• A new Hobbit movie? Can it be? I eagerly, eagerly await big-budget Smaug goodness.
  
• New info on how blogspam happens. Cheap Third World labor will be the death of us all, I tell you.
  
• I've also fallen behind in my usual practice of linking to cephalopod items on Pharyngula. So here are the latest four items. All hail the Old Ones!
  
• The latest research into the biology of B-Movie Monsters.
  
• The Belmont Station blog has a video of people diving into a gigantic pile of hops. It's like porno for beer geeks.
  
• And for Mac geeks, here's how to set up your own custom kernel panic screen. Not that I've ever actually seen a kernel panic with OSX. Sometimes I almost miss the days of "Sorry, a system error occurred. ID = -17". But the feeling passes quickly.
  
• The latest physics crankery: The upcoming Large Hadron Collider could kill us all!!! Run for the hills!!!!
  
• The Champagne of Blogs has a piece about homebrewing in the great outdoors, with tons of photos. Apparently the Metolius River makes an excellent wort chiller.
  
• Four photos of echidnas.
  
• The only known naughty limerick involving echidnas. They do have remarkable tongues, you know.
  
• A post at Humu Kon Tiki explaining in great detail how to build a Tiki Bar. So now you have no excuse not to.
  
• Baby skunks. Awwwwwww....
  
• If you had a thing for Harmony from Buffy & Angel, November is your lucky month.
  
• Slashdot helpfully points us at what was once The Ultimate Blog Post. That was until this post came along.
  
• Also from Slashdot: Ding, dong, IRIX is dead. That's one less Unix to worry about porting to. Yay!
  
• More cat-related items at Cute Overload & Pharyngula.
  

More:

• Sometimes even giant natural gas tankers need to dress up and feel pretty.
  
• A slideshow at KGW showing our shiny new OHSU tram cabins. The first photo is the only good one, and the others just show heavily-wrapped cabins (or something) being loaded onto a cargo ship.
  
• For future reference: When you're trying to subdue an escaped alligator, it helps to have a roll of duct tape handy.
  
• A couple of Blogspot referrer pages from when I hit "Publish" the first time: The Armchair Nomad and 12 Degrees of Freedom.
  
• The cephalopod items at Pharyngula are coming fast & furious these days. Here's the latest.
  
• Cleaned-up, "digitally remastered" photos of the surface of Venus, courtesy the Soviet-era Venera 13 and 14. The Venera 13 image is especially interesting, with barren, misty hills in the distance.
  
• Also, MRO is finally done aerobraking. The Bad Astronomer geeks out over the occasion. And rightly so.