When there was trouble in the world, Vishnu would allow a portion of himself to be incarnated as a mortal: a fish, a boar, a dwarf, a semi-human semi-man, heroes like Rama, wise men like Krishna and Buddha. These were his avatars. […]

Musikkonline.no sells digital copies of music (9,50 NOK a song) where copyright is held by Norwegian companies. Ridiculously they’re not selling them as mp3s, but insist that you use Windows 98 or newer, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Still, if you’re […]

I got a new webcam today, and immediately discovered the coolness of streaming icons in iChat. Now in iChat, your icon gets attached to each thing you say, like in a cartoon conversation. You can change your icon as often as you […]

So it’s true: I took a job writing spam headers, Oblivio writes. I’m not convinced that anything he writes is “true”, exactly, but I love his stories. Just the idea of that for a job!

Oh, what a gorgeous librarian!

The recent Onion story “Mom Finds Out About Blog” echoes a line from an (apparently genuine) web diary I came across in 1999, where the writer actually considers having two diaries, “so I can have a slightly censured version for my mothers […]

Our new fagreferent buys every book I ask for. Good thing, too, cos the list of new books I want is far too long for my personal book budget. My latest list is below, and do you know, hardly any of these […]

I wanted to find out more about the religious use of “avatar” (it comes from Sanskrit, a deity sends his avatar to our world, avatars cross boundaries between worlds) and instead serendipitously found an article about female golems, dolls and cyborgs in […]

Three students in Sydney are facing jail sentences for having shared mp3s on the web. A primary piece of evidence against them is the essay the student who started the filesharing site wrote for his information technology law course. The essay topic […]

“So is it possible to fail, once you’ve made it to the defence?” I asked, hoping the answer would be no. “Oh yes!” he answered with glee. “Absolutely! Actually, there was one particularly bad case in medicine a while back. Everything looked […]