What a revelation: pink was once a masculine color for boys and blue for girls. Take a look at this pink-trimmed sailor suit from the Smithsonian’s online exhibit HistoryWired. “…the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy; while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Have we flip-flopped back yet?

The Seattle Opera is in the midst of their ambitious Ring Cycle performances. Their Siegfried injured his leg, so his understudy lip-synced the role while the hurt tenor sang from a chair. That’s Wagnerian drama for you.

There are services that will watch a domain name registration “around-the-clock” and snap it up for you if it becomes available. For a nice fee of course. There are probably some rather decent ones coming up for renewal nowadays. If only we could make money off of them.

The Classic Gaming Expo was this past weekend. Take a look at the speaker list for a trip back to how things used to be done. The Wired News writeup makes the interesting point that while modern games can take days to master, the classic games take just minutes to learn and are just right for a quick diversion. I dunno about that. It’s true that you can easily pick up an older game, but it’s the addiction factor that is the true time sink, not the ramp up time.

I bookmarked Curl Corporation over a year ago because I noticed some high profile MIT types were involved with it. At the time, I didn’t know what they were up to, but they are starting to get some press. It involves a new language and a different business model (charging companies for each byte of it downloaded). I haven’t looked closely at the language, but it aims to combine the best of hypertext markup capabilities and the object-oriented ease of Java. And application download time is supposed to be fast. At least they are being realistic about having a business model, but the results have got to be extremely compelling for companies to sign on for that type of payment and a new technology to ramp up with.

I’m only linking to The Google Store to point out that the link in it says “Take me to the store. I’m feeling shoppy.” “feeling shoppy??” That just doesn’t work as well as their “I’m feeling lucky” slogan.

Paint the Moon, an incredibly optimistic project to get millions of people to point their laser pointers at the moon at the same time to create a visible field of color. It probably won’t work, but that’s not the … point. (via memepool)

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!