Gazing Into The Abyss (Michael Rawdon's Journal)  
 
2004 Weblog

01/25: A Guide to Mountain View is an on-line page of notes and history of this Bay Area city.
01/25: Pibgorn by Brooke McEldowney is a serial humor/adventure strip by the creator of the popular strip 9 Chickweed Lane.
02/08: John Scalzi muses on the life of a writer. Funny.
02/08: The new collection of Sinfest is out.
02/22: GameFest.com is an on-line discount gaming retailer. Haven't tried them myself yet.
02/26: Best Photos of 2003 - I'm not sure by whose judgment, but they are pretty cool. Particularly the tiger cubs.
02/26: A nifty little animated game. Flash? I'm not sure. Reminds me a bit of MYST. The puzzles are not terribly intuitive, but it's clever and the images are cool. (via reader Staffan Kjell)
02/29: Snopes.com has the lowdown on the stunning sidewalk chalk images which have been circulating. Very cool!
04/07: Academy of Art University in San Francisco (!) expels a student for writing a violent short story and then later fires the instructor. Way to encourage exploration of art there, guys. Sheesh. (Via Neil Gaiman)
04/14: Elkit in Wonderland is the blog of a fellow Apple employee, whom I met through the listening club at work.
04/25: Music Plasma is a nifty "music visual search engine" which shows you how artists you enter are related to other artists. I'm not sure what algorithm they're using, but it doesn't seem ridiculous, and they have an impressive number of obscure artists on their database.
04/25: Paramount Releases Service Pack for Star Trek. Ha!
05/09: Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing, a guide to some of the horrible names people inflict on their children. Hilarious!
05/23: An article on knuckleball pitchers in baseball, focusing on two Red Sox players.
06/07: FAQ on the new Doctor Who series, slated for 2005.
06/27: Prog Archives is "your ultimate progressive rock resource". It's full of band descriptions and some album reviews. Suffers from not enough editing and not much guidance as to why you'd like an artist or which album you should try. Maybe it will evolve.
06/27: Angst Technology is a very funny Web comic strip, in a similar vein to PVP, but in some ways funnier.
07/05: Monique tells an entertaining story about getting to meet Bill Clinton.
07/13: A study guide for Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia.
07/13: TheatreWorks has a weblog.
08/01: A fascinating chat with San Francisco Giants trainer Stan Conte at Baseball Prospectus. (Requires paid membership to read.) Conte is one of the brightest minds in baseball today. My friend Syd and I were trying to think of people who we think are as smart as Conte, and Dodgers GMN Paul DePodesta was the only name we could come up with. There are smart guys around baseball (Billy Beane, Theo Epstein), but Conte's a level above merely "smart".
08/01: Baseball Primer at the Baseball Think Factory is a multi-user baseball weblog.
08/01: On a lighter note, it's the Apple Computer product cycle revealed! Snort.
08/22: ESPN surveys the Major League Baseball teams to provide insight on those songs played when players come to bat. Interesting stuff.
09/18: The Marvel Masterworks Resource Page has information and news about Marvel Comics' "Masterworks" hardcover reprinting program, as well as other hardcover issues from other companies. A wealth of information for those who care!
09/29: Want to see a great baseball play? Check out the 9/16/2004 SF @ Mil "plays of the game" stream here (requires Windows Media Player). The Giants manage to run themselves into two outs in three rundowns on the same play! Geez!
09/29: Who knew the hurricanes this year were God's way of punishing Florida for the 2000 Presidential election? (Well, okay, not really.)
09/29: Teaching Comics has some resources for academic instruction of comic books.
10/13: Interesting review by Neil Gaiman of The Comic Book Encyclopedia. He doesn't like it.
10/13: Technical review of a kitten.
11/13: Humorist Adam Felber's concession speech. Takes no prisoners.
11/13: A collection of maps and cartoons with insight and criticism of the election. The correlation between the Red/Blue States and the pre-Civil War Free/Slave States is especially compelling.
11/13: How "balanced" coverage in the media biases reporting against scientific reasoning. A chilling analysis of a phenomenon which further boosts the anti-educationalist agenda.
11/13: Two weeks late and more than two dollars short for this link, but here are 2004's scariest Halloween costumes. Politically incorrect, but fuckin' hilarious.
11/15: Blue states tend to have a lower divorce rate than Red states (editorial in the Boston Globe, also article from the New York Times).
11/15: David Zink has his own opinions on the US education system.
11/15: Additional illuminating maps of the US based on the election results.
11/19: Photos of the Red Sox World Series victory parade.
11/21: ProgressiveWorld.net is a progressive rock review site.
11/21: The Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock is exactly what it claims to be, albeit with contributions by a large number of authors.
11/29: David Zink provides an account of how a lot of seemingly-sensible decisions in isolation can add up to a big pain in the ass - and on my favorite computing platform, too!
11/29: An interesting account of being the spouse of a programmer for a computer game company. Especially in light of lawsuits filed recently regarding the long hours worked by many at such companies.
12/09: Very cool photos of a bookshop whose books are organized by color.
12/09: A book on the history of ultimate frisbee.
12/09: Electronic Arts responds to concerns about the pressures of working in the computer gaming industry.
12/19: Buy Blue for Christmas. If, you know, you want to. Amazon is too darned convenient for me for many books, but my musical tastes have mostly moved outside their catalog.
12/30: Take the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society SaniTest! And laugh your ass off!
12/30: How messed up is NASA? Well, one person thinks it's this messed up.

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