"Captain 'Lucky Jack' Aragorn paced anxiously on the foredeck of the Ungainly...."

Oh, this is the funniest thing I’ve read in weeks! Teresa linked to a thread on the Straight Dope Message Board where people are writing bits of what Lord of the Rings would have been like if it had been written by other authors, like JK Rowling and James Joyce and Aaron Sorkin and Ernest Hemmingway and Rudyard Kipling and Tom Clancy and Doc Smith and dozens of others.

Groovin' on tunes

I’ve finally got the bandwidth to hop on the net.radio bandwagon, and iTunes makes it pretty darn easy. I’m currently boppin’ through the “Eclectic” section of the listings. I’m liking erika.net, but I’d like it even better if they’d stream me track and artist names along with the music so I’d know what I was listening to in case I like something so much I wanna buy the CD. At least they provide a playlist on their website.

Chris is raving eloquently about “The Ketchup Song” over in her blog. She also says I’m not right about everything. I’d giver her a sound thrashing, but I think she can take me two falls out of three. Half my size and twice as mean.

Stuff in my MacOS X menubar

From left to right:

Youpi Key: Gives me a menu I can toss all sorts of neat stuff into — application launchers, terminal commands, keyboard macros, net and system actions, etc. — and asssign them keyboard shortcuts. I can even define different sets of menu entries for different apps.

Searchling: The power of Google, but not quite in my pants. Click the icon (or just type the redefinable keyboard shortcut) and a little window pops up that you can type a search string into. Also does dictionary searches, eBay, IMDB, Barnes & Noble, etc. Results get directed to your browser.

WeatherManX: Talks to a weather server every ten minutes, displays curent temperature and precipitation in the menubar with more info (including forecasts) in the menu. There’s also a classic Mac version.

Computers rock when they aren’t sucking.