For those who care, Metallica's new album is streamable from their site in its entirety. People like Metallica for very different reasons so I won't comment on whether it's "good"—you'll have to decide for yourself.

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"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."
—Eleanor Roosevelt

Anybody want to buy a computer?

• Athlon XP 3000+, ~2.17 GHz
• 512 MB RAM
• 150 GB RAID 0 disk space
• 16x DVD burner
• 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disk drives
• 500 watt Antec power supply
• 17" CRT monitor
• Wireless keyboard and mouse
• Very quiet operation
• $200 (negotiable)

Feel free to comment for more details.

I also have a somewhat noisy (due to one of the fans being off-balance) BFG GeForce 6600GT OC AGP graphics card that I'd sell for $30.

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"A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities; an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties."
—President Harry S Truman

Slashdot posted a story about the best sport ever today. I am only half kidding—I would love to try it!

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"To kill a man in a paroxysm of passion is understandable, but to have him killed by someone else after calm and serious meditation and on the pretext of duty honourably discharged is incomprehensible."
—The Marquis deSade

For those of you saying D&D 4E is too much like WoW, James Wyatt has written a rebuttal to justify a lot of the choices they made when designing the system:

http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1044100

Wyatt's comments after the post are also worth reading, particularly his comments on character roles—he implies that four clerics is the "best party in the game" in 3E :-)—and product maturity:

You're comparing the PH of 4e with the mature product line of 3.5. Just with the PH, you can build different fighters with very different feels. When you add Martial Power to the mix, those options will expand dramatically. When you add PH2 and its eight new classes, the game expands greatly again.

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"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
—Oscar Wilde

"One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure."
—Gertrude Stein

On my system the video gets out of sync really quickly, but it's still pretty awesome. Makes me want to learn to play all those riffs.

Hocus Pocus!

1) Make sure you have Flash Player 9.
2) Click this link.
3) Look, it's Van Vleck.
4) Drag the image with the mouse to pan around and check out Van Hise.
5) Click the arrows to drive yourself around the roads.

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"Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin."
—John Von Neumann

Eclipse drives me fucking batty. I could write a big rant about it, but this guy explains it pretty much perfectly (just global replace Emacs with Vim for me).

Apparently IntelliJ is pretty good though; maybe I should try it some time. But it is tailored toward Java (not that Eclipse isn't), so it's not exactly generic like Vim.

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"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
—Albert Einstein

You guys like video games, right? I know you do.

I have been pondering how to get more of us together more often to play console games, both old and new. (Why console games specifically? Well, manbegetsgod already hosts a semi-regular LAN party for PC games, so I'm not sure PC games require further representation. Also, keep reading...)

( My dubious idea )

Maybe no one else is inclined to do this. But even so, I also want to let you know about my other crazy plan. I have a copy of Super Smash Bros Brawl preordered from Amazon. The game is released on Sunday, March 9, so hopefully I'll receive my copy by the evening of Monday, March 10. I am going to take some days off work—probably March 10-12—to feast on the game. During that time, my house will be open for anyone else wishing to play. The game has both PvP and co-op modes, so should be fun times no matter what your inclination.

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"There is no right and wrong. There's only fun and boring."
—The Plague, "Hackers"

I saw a statistic today that Madonna is the most successful (as far as record sales go) female recording artist of all time, according to the Guinness Book of World Records (though some say it's Celine Dion). This led me to wonder: what about the most successful male recording artist?

Obviously, it's the Beatles, but they're not just one guy. So who's next?

Elvis Presley? Michael Jackson? MC Frontalot?

Nope, none of the above.

Go country...