Pretty much every new portable music device that comes out is evaluated for its potential as an “iPod-killer”. I’m sorry, but as long as they keep building things that look like this, they’re not the killers, they’re just a flat patch of fur on the side of the road.

Sunday was a pretty slow day, so I wrote a Perl script that generated PDF hex-maps for use in the Traveller RPG (we’re starting a D20 Traveller campaign soon). I also integrated star-system data from the standard SEC format that’s been passed around on the Internet for many years, and I’m adding an assortment of features as I find time.

Currently it prints at the sector, quadrant, and subsector level, in color and b&w, on paper sizes ranging from 4x6 to 11x17. All the heavy lifting is done with the PDF::API2::Lite module from CPAN, which has a straightforward interface.

Update: I seem to have pretty good page-rank with Google, so just in case there’s anyone else out there who’s trying to set a clipping region with PDF::API2::Lite, the magic words are:

#create some kind of path, like so
$pdf->rectxy($x1,$y1,$x2,$y2);
#clip to it
$pdf->{hybrid}->clip;
#start a new path
$pdf->{hybrid}->endpath;

Note that this doesn’t seem to work with the alpha 0.40 versions of the PDF::API2 distribution. I’m using 0.3r77.

LGF links to the mock election held by Channel One (a satellite broadcaster targeting 12,000 middle/junior/high schools in the US). Their last two mock elections have apparently matched the actual results pretty well, so who did they pick for president? The picture says it all:

That’s 73% of the electoral votes for Bush, 27% for Kerry. Personally, I’ve been betting on 60/40, but can you imagine how the wackier Lefties would respond to these results?

Dinner tonight was based on a curry mix I picked up at Mitsuwa. I think all packaged foods should include the instructions “break sauce into pieces”.

This needs to be a t-shirt, so I’ll have something to wear when Celebrate Diversity is in the wash.

“When I was your age, ‘blowing off school’ meant something entirely different.”

And so every evening Haruki's studying was prefaced by a 15-minute maternal blow job. His concentration improved; his marks soared.

"Mothers do want their children to pass those exams..."

(via Peeve Farm)

Creative Labs has announced their new iPod Mini killerclone, the Zen Micro. It comes in ten different colors (face-plate only, and they all have a blue border), is slightly shorter and thicker, adds an extra gigabyte of storage, and includes FM radio, voice recording, and a removable rechargeable battery, all for the same price as the Mini.

Oh, yeah, and it’s hideous:

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Good: releasing Aladdin on DVD. Bad: including a video of Jessica Simpson singing “A whole new world”.