General

Corey Feldman: forever.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but AIM has been royally fubared for the last week. Today I’m getting a ‘Bad Database” error. Since AOL owns the other good messaging service, I’ll be switching over to another monopoly‘s service. You may reach me at Unxmaal on MSN.

Brian is running a webserver off his Dreamcast.

It’s bad enough that AIM has been utterly unreliable this week, but what most of you probably don’t know is the likely reason for the brokenness. AOL is trying to kill interoperability of other messaging systems with AIM. So far GAIM and Jabber have occasionally been able to work around the restrictions, but AOL keeps moving the targets. I strongly suspect that in so doing they have broken their own official clients. If they’re going to play that way, I don’t want to play with them. Unx suggested getting on MSN Messenger; I have a better suggestion that’s not run by an evil empire: go register with Jabber. It’s open, free, and interoperates with Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and (sometimes) AIM if you have accounts on those systems.

You may have noticed: across the country, traffic lights are undergoing a slow transition from inefficient bulbs to retrofitted LED systems. The LED replacements are much brighter, up to 90% more energy-efficient, and will last far longer than regular bulbs.

Ain’t It Cool News has some sneaks on the upcoming Matrix sequels.

There may be some hope for you after all.

When I was at the Powertel store on Sunday, waiting on Kayvan while he got his new phone, I saw some little postcard ads for Electric Fuel disposable batteries. When exposed to air, these disposable cellphone batteries are supposed to last as long as your regular rechargeable battery, which is great for emergencies.

The zinc-air tech is also very interesting, and Electric Fuel has a lot of info posted.

HotbuyStation has lots of neato faceplates for the Nokia 8200-series phones. This includes metallic black and red copper.

Auto-generated sky maps for the Atlanta area.