I've done something insanely clever. Not too long ago I decided I needed a copy of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy radio serial. That's not the clever bit. When the CD's arrived yesterday, I listened to the first one while cooking dinner. That's not the clever bit either. Last night I fed all 8 CD's to my trusty PC and ripped 'em to AAC and stored 'em on my iPod. Yes, that's the clever bit. I now have the entire radio serial and the two bonus discs of interviews, commentary and whatnot on my favorite piece of portable electronics. So if you see me wandering around Menlo Park at lunchtime, headphones on and giggling to myself you'll know that I'm one hoopy frood.

Oooooooooh. More Kool-Aid(tm) I . . . (blinks) . . . that's just friggin' COOL. It's a 802.11g router/access point, print server, AND it streams from iTunes?

Way of the Rat brings us Paper Arcade, a set of little paper-model replicas of classic 80's arcade cabinets. I'm gonna put together Robotron tonight :-)

Bwana asks for more about Disgaea, although under confused pretences. (Weezie has not played Disgaea. We had an email thread back when it originally came out where we discussed it's hard to find nature, and he talked about buying copies for later EBayage - maybe that's where the confusion arises.) Anyway, I can talk about it some more - the obvious caveat is that I haven't played through all that much of it, and so it's not a review of the whole game. It's very much a "tactical RPG" in the Final Fantasy:Tactics vein. You have a group of characters who possess various classes, stats, and skills. You equip them with stuff and then send them out into turn-based combat. This advances the story and generates experience and money to buy more stuff. Rinse and repeat. It's in 3D but you can only rotate the camera in 90 degree increments and there are two preset zooms. The camera is static enough that presorting geometry is certainly feasible - although on a PS2 I doubt they need that. The story is unusual and told with a nice touch of humor. You start out as a prince of the Netherworld who's been asleep for two years (I have no idea if they explain why later). In the meantime, the King (your father) was killed and the nobles have begun to fight for control of the Netherworld. You set out to reclaim your birthright, kicking whatever ass that takes. The story has a fair amount of snappy dialogue and even seems to have survived translation pretty well. (The voice dubbing is slightly annoying - but I've heard a lot worse.) It's broken into "episodes" (I'm currently partway through Episode 2) and my favorite bit of humor so far was the anime-style "In the next episode" teaser at the end of episode 1. I dug around on the web and found the script for that little bit. (Duh - this is a spoiler. Think people! :-)) Etna - Finally, the time has come for Prince Laharl to pay for all his evil deeds. Laharl - Hey... Etna - Now, Etna will fulfill the late prince

Note to SFFan in Nippon: Yes, I see that work has begun on a film version of Foundation. Do us all a favor: assume it's going to suck until we hear otherwise. It's likely, and if it DOESN'T suck, it will be a pleasant suprise to all. But if you go and get your hopes up . . . well "fool me once, shame on you" comes to mind.