O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.

Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.

The Hoke, the poke -- banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, 'tis what it's all about.

  -- by William Shakespeare

...and other "banal instructions in the style of some famous writer" from this week's Style Invitational

Get up off your video-playing ass and grab a new Garmin GPS unit which has games that make you move:

In its version of Whack-A-Mole, called GekoSmak, the player has to smack a virtual lizard before it disappears. That means walking or running to the nearby coordinates displayed on the device and hitting the OK key. Other games involve finding your way out of a virtual maze and navigating point-to-point without crossing your tracks.

Yet another online museum of old computers... including the NorthStar Advantage I used in seventh grade, the Timex Sinclair 1000 I borrowed from a friend of my father, and, of course, the first computer I actually owned, the Commodore 64.

In case you're not actively reading slashdot, here's a nice rant from a random geek on The Tyranny of Email.

This could be all sorts of fun, open source home automation with MisterHouse. You can even demo the product with a little monitoring of the creator's house (sadly with only limited access).

Here is a person who is big on lists... What I Have Read Since 1974. From his FAQ:

Q: Waaaaay too much time on your hands to be keeping those kinds of stats on the number of goddamned pages you've read and how many books you've devoured. Don't you care about content? How the book impacts you personally? Is it a mere stats race for you? A mere ego game, where you can prove to your friends how many books you own? I congratulate you on your literacy. I wonder if your favourite authors would be impressed that you finished the whole thing? (geeksrus@interlynx.net)

A: Yes. Yes. No. No. Thanks. Probably not.

More ways to have fun and prove your geekiness, keep your home directory in CVS.

Roll call! The tracking tool I once used to let me know that people occasionally read this is now off-line. Before I pester the previous hoster to add it to his new site, please let me who is listening. Do you like the stuff I post here? Is it different enough that I should continue? Is there some stuff that I post that you'd like to see more of? More narcissistic stories about my cute daughter? More tech tips (like my recent discovery about ncftp)? Click here to send me email but please remove the "NOSPAM" from the address before you send.

Slashdot posted an article that I submitted (and my slashdot karma is now "excellent") - Why (FM, Not XM) Radio Sucks. Having actually read the article and then reading the comments, it gives me a sense of how many slashdot readers never bother to read the article.

ncftp is just the best way to do big ftp transfers. I've used this for a while and I already knew that it knows how to do wildcards and filename completion. Last night I wanted to download ISO images of Red Hat 8.0. I was working on my laptop with an ssh connection to a desktop machine with oodles of disk storage, but I didn't want to leave my laptop on for the download of three cd images, each >600MB, so I read the ncftp manual. It turns out you can use a command bgget to place downloads in a queue. Then, when you're ready for it all to start, use bgstart which starts the downloads in the background. Exit your ncftp session, close ssh and laptop. Go to sleep. Wake up in the morning to find that everything downloaded successfully!

Via memepool... HELLO, my name is Scott!, a site run by a chipper young man who thinks he is making the world a friendlier place because he always wears a nametag. I think he's right.

Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002