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© St. Petersburg Times, published August 19, 2002
Counting sheep
If this was just a screen saver, it would be cool by itself. Beautiful fractal images, or sheeps as they're known to this software, dance you into a trance, and there's not a great deal you can do to stop watching. You can pinch yourself or have somebody else pinch you at an appointed time perhaps. The grooviest bit is this is a distributed screen saver. Every 15 minutes a new sheep is created and uploaded to the network. It's good, apparently, for always-on cable or DSL connections. It's free and worth the download if you've got the bandwidth.
www.Uebersetzung.at/twister/en.htm
I'm not sure about saying some of these tongue twisters out loud. Just trying to read them throws my addled mind through a loop. Since it's Monday, you might want to tuck these away for your carbohydrate-induced, post-lunch snooze -- they'll either send you into a deeper sleep or snap you out of it. This is one of the finest collections of mouth wranglers I've come across. If you get through all 378, smarty pants, there's a set of German, French, Bulgarian and even Farsi for you to wrap your international choppers around. My favorite? Number 73. I still can't say it.
Here's a good candidate for the bookmark list for bookworms. It's a front-end search for a bunch of online bookstores. The biggies, such as Amazon and B&N, are there. But used book maven Powells and some vertical back-to-school types such as TextbookX and eCampus are there, too. It's pretty fast, and you can order by price but not by default, though. A minor annoyance. And there's a listing of what special deals the vendors are running. If you eat as many books as I do, you'll like this a lot.
Geeks are put on this planet to out-nerd other geeks. I've been searching this kind of thing lately just to see how far my technical kin will push a concept toward the goal of being completely useless. You see, that's where the serious geek credibility lives: If you're just on the right side of insane, you'll allow others to stand on your shoulders. Chances are you'll be rewarded with a great deal of beverages. In the right company, of course. To wit, here's a mobile wireless network that links two moving cars with the idea of providing Internet access to both. Don't ask why. Just ogle in disbelief.
AOL's ubiquitous instant messenger is everywhere. It's in your phone; of course, it's on your computer desktop; and it's possible one day you'll hear "You've got mail!" when you open the fridge. The official AOL client may be on many computers with Mac OS X, but it's not on mine. My 800Mhz PowerBook gets quite warm when it's asked to think hard about a certain thing and, you'd imagine, sending instant messages shouldn't require that much thought. The official AOL client has been replaced by this gem of a program, which requires much, much less processing power. And it'll do nifty things such as limit the size and color of incoming messages. It seems to be free; at least I couldn't find anywhere to pay the author.