Regret The Error: "Quite the Industry Advocate"

 A story in Tuesday's Tropical Life section about the safety of personal-care products misstated the views of Irene Malbin of the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association. She did not suggest that shampoos and hair dyes might have cancer-causing ingredients.

Oops :-D  This was Miami Herald's screwup.  Here's the link.

–YY

Dammit!

I was keeping my new gmail address pristine – I was keeping it far, far away from any hint of spam.  Now that's gone – someone went ahead and sent me an Evite at that address.  I can hardly wait for the crapola coming from them, not to mention that evite can now link my spam-friendly address that I use for that sort of thing with my gmail address.

Note to anyone reading this – DO NOT SEND ME E-VITES!  If you want to invite me somewhere, put the damn details in the e-mail directly.  Don't force me to give my personal info to a stupid company to read where your party is.  Dammit!!!

–YY

C# Programming Contest

http://csharp-home.com/index/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=151

Let's see what you can do!

–YY

La Vida Robot – Wired Magazine

This story from Wired is freakin' cool:

How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from MIT in the national underwater bot championship. By Joshua Davis from Wired magazine.

–YY

Why I Hate World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft is apparently the best online role-playing game out there.  Its sales are through the roof, and the demand is overwhelming.  All of which are reasons why I HATE this game.

Honestly, I'm not about to spend $15 a month and countless hours “leveling up” my alter ego by killing bunnies.  It just doesn't interest me that much.  What I do like to do is play the single player Warcraft and Starcraft games.  But since WoW is such a cash cow for Blizzard Software, it's in their best interest to keep producing online games, probably at the expense of the single player games that I love.  I'm not sure this is how it's going to play out, but why would Blizzard spend time and money developing a game that sells for a one-time price of $50 when they can develop a game that sells just as many copies for the same $50 plus $15 a month?  It would be crazy of them not to!  Oh well…

–YY

What's On Google News?

This site will tell you a good number of their sources.

Some Wacky Stuff Involving Genes

I'm too tired to read it thoroughly, but The New York Times has an article on “a startling discovery [by] geneticists at Purdue University”.  It's on the front page, so it's probably big.

–YY

Google News' Sources

A lot of obviously justified noise has been made of Google's inclusion of a White Supremacist website (no I'm not linking to it) as a “news” source in Google News.  It's hard to maintain the aura of true objectivity (after all, they're not reporting – just aggregating) when they do crap like this.

I agree with Jeff Jarvis – Google, release a list of your news sources!

–YY

Tragedy in Minnesota

From the New York Times:

“In northern Minnesota, a student killed his grandparents, five fellow students, a teacher and a security guard, as well as himself.”

My heart goes out to the families of the victims of this senseless tragedy.

–YY

Beware the MS Marketplace

WorthPlaying has an article about Microsoft's plan to add “microtransactions” into games.  The idea would be that you could spend extra money for better virtual gear (like $2 for stronger armor, let's say).  This is causing a major brouhaha across the gaming world, so discuss!

So far, PressTheButtons is against it.

–YY