Gazing Into The Abyss (Michael Rawdon's Journal)  
 
2003 Weblog

01/08: It took me well over a year, but I've recently been reading Patrick Nielsen-Hayden's weblog, Electrolite avidly, and contributing a bit to the comments. It's quite a thoughtful piece of work, with a rather large commenting community.
01/19: The hilarious Web strip Sinfest has been collected in book form.
01/19: Here's a huge index of comic book anootations on the Web.
01/19: Hame designer Greg Costikyan has started a Weblog.
01/19: The Unseen Gulf War is a hard-hitting photojournalistic Web site about the 1991 Gulf War and the casualties suffered by the Iraqis.
01/26: My friend Syd wrote a humorous explanation of what it means to join a Salsa band.
02/03: The Charles M. Schultz Museum is now open in Santa Rosa, CA.
02/18: The All Music Guide is a pretty neat informational database of musical artists.
02/18: Trish Homis has a new journal, Demi-Geek.
02/18: A computer simulation of the prospective war in Iraq. Make noises. Funny. A bit long. ("But isn't all war like that?" asks a friend of mine.)
02/18: Amusing set of posts about our (and the government's) attitudes towards race. Link courtesy of my Dad.
02/23: Google Watch nominated Google as Big Brother of the Year. Some interesting things about Google you may not have known. Possibly motivation to stop using Google. If nothing else, I've disabled my Google cookies.
02/23: This Modern World is the Weblog of left-wing cartoonist Tom Tomorrow.
03/30: A warmonger explains the Iraq war to a peacenik.
04/03: Comic book fans may want to check out this montage of covers from John Byrne's Generations 3 series. The 12 covers have an image of the head of the villain Darkseid embedded in them; can you spot it?
04/15: I-Box Publishing is Mark Oakley's small press for his great comic book Thieves & Kings. The Web site is worth browsing if you enjoy the book.
04/15: Rube Goldberg eat your heart out. This ad for the Honda Accord uses pieces of the car to create a crazy contraption reminiscent of the classic cartoonist's creations.
07/27: Collen Doran, creator of the comic book A Distant Soil, has a Web page, including an on-line journal in the form of a bulletin board.
07/29: Although Bob Hope has gotten all the press, also noteworthy is the passing of Matt Jeffries, designer on the original Star Trek series, and for whom the "Jeffries Tubes" on the Enterprise were named.
07/29: Comic book creator Bill Willingham has an on-line journal. Willingham is perhaps best-known for The Elementals, but his current series Fables is popular and quite good.
08/04: Pete Townshend has a web site, including a rarely-updated on-line journal. Of more interest is Eel Pie Recordings, which sells Townshend's albums, including some which are otherwise out-of-print. Will he ever release a new album? C'mon, Pete, it's been ten years since Psychoderelict!
08/16: A 1950s-era proposal for a freeway system within San Francisco, and a history of some routes in the city, including proposed and defunct routes. Interesting stuff for those of us relatively new to the area; maybe even more interesting for people who have been here long enough to remember the way things used to be.
09/07: A few yuks for the progressive rocks fans out there: Rush on the Muppet Show!
09/07: The Who: Recordings 1964-2000 is an excellent reference for the band's songs. Especially handy if you want to know when and where various tracks were released.
09/07: Wikipedia is a public-domain encyclopedia, written and maintained by us, the general public. I myself added some substantial information on Jethro Tull this evening.
10/08: A gallery of Blue Screens of Death in various Windows applications from around the world. Tell me again why anyone bothers to buy software from Microsoft?
10/11: An account of an amusing encounter with a so-called "software legend" named Juval Lowy (who?). How anyone associated with Dot-Net could reasonably be considered a "legend" is hard to credit. Can you say "marketing ploy"?
10/25: Men Without Hats have re-formed and released a new album.
10/25: Ground and Sky is a music review site with an emphasis on (guess what?) progressive rock.
11/02: Shameless plug time: "Ten Things I Dig About Xcode". (Not me personally; it's an article on the O'Reilly Network.)
11/02: Well-done Flash slideshow of scenes shot by the Hubble Telescope.
11/18: The Wingnut Debate Dictionary, featuring a few good Ann Coulter digs, if nothing else.
12/14: Worried about buying an iPod because of rumors of battery life? Well, worry not.
12/14: Lego's Orient Expedition line seems like their most inventive product in years. Not that I'm a conoisseur, but I appreciate that it's not a licensed product (though it's clearly based on the Indiana Jones films) and the sets seem rather clever. I bought two at Disneyland.
12/28: Wikipedia is looking for donations so they can make their system tolerant of hardware failures. Yes, I donated.

  e-mail me My Home Page