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Every year for April Fools day, ThinkGeek comes up with some outlandish product "offerings." This year, it included the sleeping bag seen here: a Tauntaun Sleeping Bag. Among the features....

• Classic Star Wars sleeping bag simulates the warmth of a Tauntaun carcass
  
• Built-in embroidered Tauntaun head pillow
  
• Glowing Lightsaber zipper pull
  
• Great for playing pretend "Save Luke from the Wampa" games
  
• Teach your children about the best Star Wars movie ever
  
• Fully Licensed Lucasfilm™ Collectable
  
• Fits children (and small adults)
  

My favorite part: the pattern on the inside, which looks like Tauntaun entrails (just like in the movie!).

Anyway, it turns out that enough people tried to buy it and complained when they found out it was just an April Fools joke that ThinkGeek has added this message to the page:

ATTN Tauntaun Fanatics! Due to an overwhelming tsunami of requests from YOU THE PEOPLE, we have decided to TRY and bring this to life. We have no clue if the suits at Lucasfilms will grant little ThinkGeek a license, nor do we know how much it would ultimately retail for. But if you are interested in ever owning one of these, click the link below and we'll try!

The link, if you want to know if they manage to make and start selling them, is this one. Click it! You know you want to! I've already signed up and hope that the price is right for me to get one for each of the boys - I know they'll love them!

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : The vanishing personal site

Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site's disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.

Now that's pretty darn insightful. Zeldman mentions Jody Ferry's site specifically, and it's a great example: a home page, and then links that take viewers OFF the site.

I've been posting more photos to Flickr than I have to my family galleries. I spend more time on FaceBook - mindless distraction that it is - than I do posting on my own site. And I just joined Twitter, for reasons that I don't know that I fully understand. To what end? I'm not sure.

I see his point - websites used to be all about capturing eyeballs and keeping them on your site. Then people started selling adverts, and it was even more important to keep those visitors coming in and staying in - or leaving through your adverts. Now, with the advent of all these more interesting services, and the ease with which they can be used, more people are just taking advantage of that ease and moving their content elsewhere. Why try to build your own photo gallery - or install someone else's - when you can just point people to your Flickr collection? Why post regularly when you can Twitter? Well, that's not quite the same, but it's similar.

I myself discovered del.icio.us and have all but stopped using the bookmark feature in my web browserS. Why? Part of it is the ease of having my bookmarks so easily available - especially from the multiple platforms and browsers. It's also a lot easier to find bookmarks when I need them - I tag everything going into del.icio.us, sometimes over-tagging them, but it's really easy to find stuff now - rather than spending 20 minutes trying to remember the name of a site, I go to the page for the tag that I believe is the right, and I usually have the link right there.

What does this all mean? I myself have been farming work out to others - and didn't think too much about doing it. Due to the nature of the internet, and the way my account is setup, my photos are public, my Twitters are public, and most of my bookmarks are public. Do I care? Well, sometimes I wonder if I'm sharing too much. But at the same time, I haven't done anything to lock down my family photo gallery - although it would be trivial to do so. I make an effort to keep my bookmarks private when it's not something I want shared with the public. I can do the same thing with my Flickr photos - and have done so in the past. Twitters, well, I guess that's more than a bit like this blog - I can, and do, self-censor. If I didn't, life might be more than a little awkward.

But where does it all lead?

Today's fun ride into work was brought to you by Chaiyya Chaiyya, a fun little song from the movie Inside Man (Widescreen Edition). It's Indian or Pakistani or something - not really sure to be honest - but it's kind of fun and helped kill 6 minutes, 54 seconds of my commute this morning. I particularly like the percussion work, as it's rather complex at times.

Oh, and if you just mouse over one of those links, you should get Amazon's fancy new product preview pop-up. It's kinda cool. And speaking of Amazon, did you know about Amazon MP3? Among the best reasons to patronize them is that, like the iTunes Music Store, you can buy just one song at a time if you so choose. You can also - get this - copy the song to any device you want. How? No DRM is applied to the songs. Madness!

42%

Mingle² - Free Online Dating

I think I scored so "poorly" because I decided should Zombies attack, I'd try to save Jen and the kids. Obviously when I say "save," I'm referring to non-zombie attacked people - if they're bitten/infected/touched (a new variant of zombie, apparently) then I'm not going to be in denial and hope they can be saved. Zombie lore says that once they're infected, they're done for. Sad but true!

NASA - Opportunity at Crater's 'Cape Verde' (Annotated):

Some very nice hi-res photos of the view of the rover Opportunity and where it's been/what it's been doing.

I'm hoping to do something with this in the "I promise, I really do plan to redesign the site at some point" redesign, but in the meantime....

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Woody from Dateline Hollywood managed to get into the media lineup for the "Snakes on a Plane" premiere. The results? They boggle the mind:

All Your Snakes are Belong to Us

Brickshelf Gallery

The third rendition of my BTTF Delorean. A newer and more detailed model is now up.

If you haven't seen this, check it out - a model of the DeLorean from Back to the Future made out of Lego. It's quite impressive.

YouTube - The Pipettes "Pull Shapes"

When I first got this link, I figured it would be usual YouTube fare. And it was.

But the video, which at first seems to just be a movie clip they stuck in for the video, actually seems to be the video for the song - so it's either from some movie in the 60's or a well done spoof video. Either way, it's kind of enjoyable. The song is kinda "pop"-y, and spunky to boot.

Having just received confirmation that it's an actual group and this is them having some fun. Nice.

It has apparently become all the rage to put together a map of where in the US you've been - so here's mine.

create your own personalized map of the USA or check out our California travel guide

According to the site used to create the map, I've been to 19 of the 50 states, or 37% of the country. Amazingly, only about two of the states I've visited have only been for business only. And then there's Illinois - I've only ever been there to spend time in Chicago's O'Hare airport. Oh, and then there was also a frantic trip from O'Hare to Midway to make a flight. Of course, now that I think of it, Texas may not count either - but I happen to feel that 5+ hours on the tarmac of Dallas-Fort Worth airport in a plane with a pregnant wife, no air conditioning and nothing to do qualifies for a visit. It's not like I was in and out - and clearly we weren't having much fun...

Where Are They Now - The Great Gazoo: Where Are They Now?

The Great Gazoo? You know, the green alien who always managed to get Fred and Barney into trouble? Yeah, I figured you'd forgotten him, just like I did. He's not the only one listed on this site - there's also Punky Brewster, Snarf (from "Thundercats!"), Scrappy Doo, The Fonz and many more.

So, I'm watching an episode of "Space: Above and Beyond" and they keep using an acronym I'm not familiar with: CFB. I've heard it before on the show and in one or two other places, but I was never sure what it meant. So I turn to google.

And I find it in about 5 seconds, and the link - fifth on the list of results here: CFB (defined) is from the show I was watching. How cool is that?

Engadget reports on Nike and Bausch Lomb's MaxSight performance-enhancing lenses:
Ok, performance enhancing drugs, bad; but once we start getting into the realm of installable body mods things get a little sticky. We've got a feeling the jury's still out on MaxSight lenses though; codeveloped by Nike (who else?) and Bausch & Lomb and just about ready to market, they're designed to help players better track the objects and movement, increase contrast, and reduce glare (we're trying to avoid the obvious 28 Days Later/zombie jokes here). And they're apparently already making their way into MLB by way of the Orioles' second baseman Brian Roberts. But you know, it's all fun and games until somebody's down in the outfield on all fours screaming, "My contact, my contact!"

Aside from the sunglass/contact lenses, I think it would be cool to do other things - like some kind of IR sensitive contacts for nightime use - that would be cool, eh?

Montage-a-google:

This is way fun: type in a search term and it will create a montage for you. Fast, clean, fun. My only problem is that you can't save the resulting montage....

Need Some New Luster? Try Rosie O'Donnell's Method: Create It by the Blogful

So, she's got this haiku sort of thing going for her - and that's nice and all - but c'mon Rosie, wtf? It's just hard to read. Granted, it's her site and she can do what she wants, but.... well, again, it's hard to read and/or process. But good luck!

Wired News: If You Come, They Will Build It

PORTLAND, Oregon -- Making things out of Lego bricks can be a lonely task, with many small hours of the morning spent relentlessly slapping pieces of plastic together. It doesn't have to be like that, at least not when BrickFest hits town.

I should totally join this group - when :noah: gets a little older, I'll be taking all my old Lego out and hooking the boy up!

CNN.com: TSUNAMI PHOTOS RECOVERED

Recovery efforts in the affected area continue, and they've found, among other things a digital camera. It's only a few photos, but it's pretty powerful stuff.

BBC NEWS | In pictures: World press photo award 2004

Some really good photos in there - worth a look.

Interesting search strings....
Hackers use Google to access photocopiers - ZDNet UK News
geocamming — unsecurity cameras revisited - hack a day - www.hackaday.com

I've done this before to find routers and whatnot - fun. If you're an IT person, you need to go out and make sure that your printers are secure - or off you external interface - otherwise someone's gonna print a hundred pages of black to your printer when you're not looking.....

Here's some of the more interesting cameras I found...
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

a hallway petrol station? ski slope office? "Big Sky Resort" http://www.dalane-tidende.no/ PGA Golfcam Park St Cam a radio station? Niesen kamungus forskningspark japanese laundromat fishbutt polisciquadcam cafe cam hot wax surf shop

Some URL's:

HHGTTG Movie Blog

Production Photos

Yahoo! Movies Exclusives

HHGTTG Movie gallery

Looks like the movies on track to be released sometime next year - hopefully sooner rather than later. My only issue at this point is how they handle some of the humor - mostly British, you know - and if Disney will muck it up in the process....

20Q.net

A website where the AI will try to guess what you're thinking of. I've tried it a few times, and it's always right - pretty impressive.

forum.woot.com :: View topic - Dell A940 Multifunction Printer:
"They sell palletes full of these printers on eBay. They must catch on fire or something.
I bought one anyhow. I can use the excitement."

Woot! is an online store of sorts. They usually offer one deal for about 24 hours - the about because if they run out, that's it until the next offer, which usually starts around 1:00 am CST. On Friday they did a "Purple Light Special" - when something sold out, a new Woot! was available five minutes later. They ran through a DVD with surround sound speakers, several printers, a stack of 100 blank CD's, and several other things.

While it's against my nature to share a deal this good, it's such a great site that it's worth maybe missing out on something. The forums - a sample of which is above - are pretty hilarous too.

VOTE or NOT? - www.voteornot.org:
"We want you, and every person that is eligible, to vote."

By telling folks about this site - which encourages them to vote - you can have a chance to win $100,000. And if someone you referred wins, you win too - pretty cool. And worth a look.

Oh yeah - don't forget to VOTE!

FARK.com: (1147806) Photoshop what Bush and Kerry were writing/drawing in their notebooks during the debate:
"Photoshop what Bush and Kerry were writing/drawing in their notebooks during the debate"

Some great work done so far - go check it out.

I'm curious to see how this thing works, but don't know anyone using it. So....

I'll be online for another hour or so.

But you just didn't really want to believe it.
"ATHENS 2004 Organising Commitee for the Olympic Games -Website Hyperlink Policy"

So, I can't just put "Olympics". Nor can I make the link "A bunch of peeps doing stuff and being competitive about it".

But I can do this:

Now then. I know that they mean well, but..... C'mon people, what the heck are you thinking?

The Norm is playing dodgeball against GWB and his "team". It's an interesting take on the Presidency....

cyrkam airtös

I have no idea what the name means, but it's plenty of fun!

When you go out to the beach.... PUT SUNBLOCK ON!!!! Not just once, not just twice, but every 30 seconds or so.

Jen and I were in Narragansett for a wedding (which was in Newport), and we had a few hours on the beach on Saturday - a few hours that I might regret for the next week or so. Narragansett is a great vacation spot - it doesn't seem like there are millions of people on the beach (even when there are), and it's not like the whole town sold out - it still seems like the nice, small coastal town that it is.

The Crunge [dot net] Presents: ROFLattack!

Very nice rendition of Choplifter, complete with some music from Top Gun (via Kenny Loggins).