hier bist du richtig!! I've been thinking a lot about the proposed opening of ANWR to oil drilling lately, and I think I'd put one extra condition on it that Tom Tomorrow doesn't mention. If we allow the oil industry to drill there, permission is the only thing we give the oil companies. I'm beginning to wonder if the oil there is really worth the cost the industry would need to build to drill there, if the government doesn't subsidize the necessary infrastructure.

We are all going to die. Apparently, the automobile industry has decided to take all the worst aspects of computer interfaces and add them to our cars.

The New 7 series BMW no longer has all those knobs and buttons that clutter up the dashboard - you know, where each knob does one thing that you can count on. Instead, it has a single controller located on the center console that "functions similarly to a computer mouse." It drives a display in the center of the dashboard. It is called the iDrive: i for "intuitive". (Don't get me started on intuitive. You know what's intuitive? Fear of heights. Everything else we call intuitive, such as walking or using a pencil took years of practice. Is that what we want? A control that takes years of practice?)

Just what we need. Somebody being distracted from the road just to figure out how to turn on their windshield wipers. Update: To get a taste of the true horror, go to BMW's 7 Series page and click on "Ergonomics".

Department of Redundancy Department Steve Jackson seems to detest Wizards of the Coast, but it looks like even his company is jumping on the d20 bandwagon.

My TV is watching me. Interactive television isn't waiting for some new gadget to hook up to the TV; it's already here.

And indeed, the online fan base does occasionally have a direct effect on the show, in the convention known as the "shout-out": a character named after an online poster, a playful reference to an Internet joke, or occasionally, a direct satire of the online herd. ("Worst! Episode! Ever!") The most startling such shout-out occurred just last week, when Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing creator who sparred with posters on Television Without Pity (back when it was called "mighty big tv"), struck back at his tormentors—by enlisting them in a subplot on his show. When White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman discovers a critical Web site devoted to him, he becomes tangled in its byzantine internal politics, then (like Sorkin) sees one of his posts end up in the newspapers. Lyman's special tormentor, the moderator of the site, is portrayed as a muumuu-clad, chain-smoking dictator—a nasty slap at Sorkin's own nemesis at Television Without Pity. The majority of the site's posters were amused, but a few took umbrage. "Glark" (the technical director of TWP) responded online: "If 'we' at TWOP are the TV critic terrorists and we've gotten under his skin enough that he's changing the way he writes and shoe-horning these plots into the show then—ladies and gentlemen—the terrorists have already won."

The recap of the West Wing episode in question is here, including the recapper's "Aaron Sorkin is not laughing with you" rant.

Microsoft brand dog food As a testament to the "ease" of divesting your company of those troublesome UNIX systems, Microsoft's anti-UNIX site is back on line. It had previously been running on a BSD/Apache system itself, and it apparently only took the better part of a week to switch this one site to Microsoft's Win2K/IIS combination. It's still iffy whether Microsoft is now limiting its diet to its own dog food, though; the server in question seems to be running some sort of open source SQL backend.

Sci Fi series selections I'm pretty impressed with the "ambitious slate of original miniseries and movies" that the Sci Fi channel has just announced. The very idea of a Chronicles of Amber miniseries blows me away, as long as they don't try to cram too many of the books into four hours; Amber could make for a great series. A couple of these project descriptions raise questions for me, though. First, does this Battlestar Galactica project have anything to do with the trailer that Richard "Apollo" Hatch was pitching at SF conventions a couple of years ago? Second, the proposed On the Seventh Day series sounds exactly like Philip Jose Farmer's Dayworld series, yet the article doesn't mention him. At any rate, I'm looking forward to seeing what becomes of these projects. P.S. Has anybody heard any news about the Buckaroo Banzai TV series that was supposedly in development a couple of years back?

Redmond landscape, with Apache. Given the date, I have to remain open ot the possibility that this news is just a joke, but apparently, Microsoft's anti-UNIX website is running on a FreeBSD (an open source UNIX) server. (Which reminds me: Has Microsoft ever successfully migrated its Hotmail free e-mail service off of FreeBSD?) By the way, Kevin Fox has some good commentary on Microsoft's anti-UNIX claims.

If it's too bloody, you're too old. I went to see Blade II this weekend, and I can hardly recommend it. While the acting, stunts, and plot were a cut above (I'm sorry — no, actually, I'm not) the original movie, this is the first movie I've seen in a long time that exceeded my tolerance for gore and violence. Aside from monster designs that would probably leave H. R. Geiger wondering what the hell, I can't remember seeing more gruesome deaths (or in too many cases, "that thing can't possibly still be moving" reactions) on film. Of course, there's always the disturbing possibility that I have to admit that I'm outside the "target demographic" these days.

AFD Happy New Year, everybody! Sorry I haven't had time to do something special for today. P.S. According to Firda, chunshek is tracking today's mayhem. Better him than me.