Remember “Life”:http://abc.net.au/science/holo/lablife.htm – one of the only game-like things you could do with early computers? Someone has updated the idea and come up with a Zombie Infection Simulation. Silly but amusing…

I just installed more iBook RAM (bought it from the US for half the Apple preinstall price) and managed not to break the machine (thanks to Apple’s commendably detailed instructions).

P.S. If you don’t know what 31337 meant check out “The Jargon Lexicon”:http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=elite and browse around…

It turns out Roddy Lumsden of “Vitamin Q”:http://vitaminq.blogspot.com/ is the partner of one of my fellow PhD students. His is a slightly unusual blog in that it refers neither to the author’s life nor to world events – it is a daily-updated collection of (very) miscellaneous trivia, which has now been made into a “book”:http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/catalogue/0550101454.php (available for £7 from Amazon UK) just in time for Christmas. Although I am studying people whose sites say something about who they are and his gives little away on that score I found it v interesting to talk to him nonetheless about his relationship with his audience – he might turn out to be pilot interview #1 of my thesis…

If you want to collaborate in real time with other people online on something visual rather than something textual here is a pair of options. Imagination Cubed provided by GE (I don’t know why – they certainly don’t seem to promote its existence) is for more business-like uses, “isketch”:http://www.isketch.net/ is for fun – each player gets a chance to draw a word which the other players will try to guess. Both in their different ways seem like interesting and useful Internet tools and both are free…

A cute link for someone feeling a little lonely or un-loved guaranteed to make them feel better. (I don’t usually pass this kind of thing on but this is inoffensive – indeed a little heartwarming – and only takes a few seconds of your day to check out…

P.S. If you are an academic who reads blogs this may be the 100th time you read about this but Google has just entered the scholarly research market with “Google Scholar”:http://scholar.google.com/. There’s a short article about it in the “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/18/technology/18google.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

I was pleased to discover that according to Google Scholar the one article I am known for so far – ‘Lost in Cyberspace’, which I wrote while at New Scientist – has been cited 25 times online and in journal articles.

Tom Steinberg pointed out a while ago that the “Daily Mail”:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ – arguably the most dangerous newspaper in Britain – now has “message boards”:http://chat.dailymail.co.uk/dailymail/index.jsp. A chance to get a peek into the heads of their europhobic, often paranoid readership? Or perhaps an opportunity to change a few minds?

P.S. To get an idea of the Mail’s point of view on the world and get a good laugh at the same time try the (satirical) Daily Mail headline generator.

The Wordcount site is an interesting art project and trivia goldmine in one. Did you know that ‘internet’ is the 30525th most used word in the written English language? On the other hand it is the 66th most popular word searched for on Wordcount according to its companion site, “Querycount”:http://www.wordcount.org/querycount.php

Thanks to Yahoo’s “Pick of the Week”:http://picks.yahoo.com/picks/ feature for the tip.

P.S. I just noticed that the right hand column of my weblog sometimes gets shoved to the bottom of the page when using Internet Explorer (though it displays properly in Mozilla). Can anyone suggest why?

(Or to be more precise Onion-esque humour about a particular kind of teen blogging) from Modern Mirth Magazine. OK it’s a bit obvious and shooting-fish-in-a-barrel-ish but it did make me chortle. Don’t forget I – like ‘Jennifer Meyers’ – allow comments, “so that when you read my thoughts, you can have a place to agree with me and add additional support for what I said.”

We Are What We Do is a book with accompanying website that offers 50 suggestions for small things you could do to help others and/or the planet in your daily life.

Something a little odder but in the same vein is “Join Me”:http://www.join-me.co.uk/ – an international movement started by a British comedian, Danny Wallace, who simply asks its members to do RAoKs (random acts of kindness) on Fridays (hence Good Fridays). You can buy his book and listen to a radio interview made with Danny in Wisconsin (of all places!) “here”:http://wpr.org/book/040328a.html. What I find truly heartening is that thanks to something Danny started as a joke over 100,000 good deeds have been inspired. I must get around to posting him a photo and signing up…

I am 30% geek according to “this online quiz”:http://www.thudfactor.com/geekquiz.php. ‘You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.’

Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend.
You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You’ll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines!
Geek [to You]: I’m givin’ her all she’s got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals!
You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Thanks to Lois for the link

I haven’t really found ways to earn a lot of money being a geek liason – I think I would earn more if I knew enough programming to be a ‘pure geek’ but I just don’t swing that way 😉