I notice that I quietly let the one-year anniversary of this blog slip by nearly two weeks ago. But it's official: I've been wasting time like this for nearly a year now, with 137 blogs, an average of one every 2.6 days, which isn't too bad. It's probably a pretty crap record of a year really -- not much detail about me, not much about the world, all incidental stuff to the latest geeky site I've discovered. Don't expect things to change, either: I'm not egotistical enough to consider myself interesting enough to write about myself (*glances at the soon-to-be-renamed MetaData section*) well, not on a daily basis at least. And nor am I pretentious enough to consider myself a credible source of alternative news to the established outlets. So it's business as usual:

This girl has an interesting website, an amusing take on life, and good web design skills. Were I straight, I'd probably ask her out on a date. As, apparently, most guys who read her website do.

If you use KaZaA (and if you don't, why the hell not?), then you may be interested in uninstalling the adware that comes bundled with it. Or you might decide, as I have, to use KaZaA lite, which disables all their advertising. Yes, it's stealing. But if you're using KaZaA to download music, you've already made that moral judgement.

On the subject of file-sharing, there's always eDonkey 2000. Yes, it's just gnutella again. But it's got a funny name!

I randomly decided to trace the location of Tony Blair's original speech on September 11th. There are surprisingly few references to it, most pointing to his subsequent speech later that day, which was more prepared and thus less genuine. For an off-the-cuff effort, it was pretty good.

In a general yay-for-technology, robots are being used as orderlies in hospitals. Come on, robodocs!

There was a rather sad but interesting article about how climate change in the Arctic is affecting Eskimos. Most interesting to me was an incident mentioned as an aside in the article: in Siberia, the Soviet Union ended the nomadic Eskimo lifestyle and religion and forced them to become dependent upon food deliveries to survive. Thus, when the Union collapsed and deliveries ended, they were in trouble, as the elders who remembered the religion and how to hunt were now all dead (life expectancy: 37). Rather than ship out, they got in touch with North American Eskimos, who taught them how to build boats and hunt again. I think that's wonderful, really. I was also fascinated by references to "Whalebone Allee" (universally spelled "Whalebone Alley" by everyone else), a sort of whalebone Stonehenge of mysterious origin. I can't find pictures of it anywhere though, or I'd link to them.