Housekeeping update: This site may be down temporarily for a couple days. The server is moving, our IP address is changing, things need to propagate, etc. And then I’ll take some time off around the wedding (which is August 19th). (These two items are not actually related to each other since I don’t host my own server. I know, what kind of girlhacker am I? One with much more well-informed geek friends.)

Here is the fascinating story of the quest to burn a NeXT Cube. Well written (as it should be) by technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel, it conveys the drama and suspense of a journey to fulfill his dream of burning the entire magnesium case of the original NeXT cube. Magnesium produces a brilliant white flame, that is if you can manage to set it on fire. By the end of the tale, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is involved, raindrops threaten, and a grand metaphor for NeXT’s demise has a physical manifestation. (via /usr/bin/girl)

Thank goodness someone finally updated the MIT Gallery of Hacks. I’d been waiting patiently, and stopped checking just in time for them to catch up as best as they could. There’s been some clever activity in the past few years. Making the elevators in the student center announce the floors is probably the most electronically clever one. Wile E. Coyote is quite cute. And there appears to have been a continuing theme of black monoliths for the Class of 2001. I hope there’s more to come soon! I want photos of the parachuting beavers!

News to me: there is actually a major league baseball player of Chinese descent (I’d say “finally!”, but I haven’t researched if he’s the first one). Bruce Chen, born in Panama, is a new addition to the NY Mets and just threw seven shutout innings for them. Excellent.

Will the lights on my cable modem and router ever cease their incessant blinking? The Code Red worm has been merrily requesting away for days and days. Perhaps if it goes through the holidays, I’ll hook up my Christmas lights to blink the traffic outside my firewall.

Someone is actually taking on radio giant Clear Channel in court. Not surprisingly, the big gorilla has been throwing its weight around. They own concert promotion companies who would, of course, prefer to have their acts featured on their radio stations. And the radio stations give preferential treatment to their sister promotion companies. It’s nothing earth shattering in the dirty world of the entertainment industry (or many other industries). But the small promotions firm Nobody in Particular Presents is fighting back with a lawsuit charging anticompetitive business practices. It unfortunately takes a lot of law to create a free market.

Home of the Underdogs is a site devoted to underrated PC games. The listings by year are fun. I completely forgot that IBM, as the original PC manufacturer, used to publish games to help entice people away from the Apple ][. They also list old operating systems. DR DOS anyone? (thanks brig!!)

Japan realizes they are behind in the scientific world, so one of their few Nobel Laureates is devising a plan to get them back on track. In a NY Times article, Dr. Hideki Shirakawa offers an explanation for a cultural lack of individual initiative: “Fundamentally, Japanese culture is based on rice farming. Rice cultivation requires a lot of water, and water must be shared evenly by everyone. Planting rice also required teams of people walking from row to row, at the same speed. And all of this has meant that uniqueness had to be suppressed.” Peer reviews don’t work well because colleagues don’t wish to openly criticize each other’s work. The ministry is trying to create a more competitive atmosphere and upward mobility, but they are fighting a strong culture. Perhaps there’s a way to work within the current system? There’s some irony in the reality that Japan as a country feels competitive enough to want to keep up with the U.S. and other countries in scientific advancement, and yet that lack of competitiveness within their scientific community is what they believe is holding them back.

I used to rave about the spray gel (for styling hair) that you could get at a certain salon in the Boston area, and I just never found anything similar out here. The key ingredient was gelatin, and it wasn’t until I did a web search that I realized I could make my own spray gel by dissolving plain gelatin in water. “Duh”, said I.

I’ve been enjoying the Not Martha weblog. It’s been charming (and I don’t mean “charming” in a real estate-speak “this house is so charming none of your furniture will fit in it” kind of way). The author “trolls Martha Stewart so you don’t have to” (a very Good Thing(tm) in my book), actually accomplishes the crafts she relates (try making your own lip balm!) and gets the projects down to their basics — especially by not paying Martha prices for kits of repackaged goods you can get elsewhere much more economically. Parts of our wedding planning are like one big long crafts project, so this has been a comforting place to visit.