Man, more rain!  And more rain coming...  Whew. 

Are you like me?  I just can't believe the news coming from the Indian Ocean about the devistation caused by the tsunamis.  I read the numbers - 80,000 people dead, millions homeless, billions in property damage - and I see the videos - walls of water washing over land - but I just can't comprehend it.  An unbelievable disaster. 

The blogoshere is really rallying to help; check out the Amazon relief counter!  Over $4M!

I like Apple's home page, too.

Need another reason to dislike the U.N.?  Here we have Jan Egeland, undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, bashing the U.S. as "stingy".  I wonder at what point we get fed up with these leeches and just throw them out? 

Congratulations to Nicorette, winner of the Sidney - Hobart race.  Of the 116 entries, 53 have dropped out.  Some of the "maxis" in the race had some amazing wipeouts, with keels falling off, masts breaking, and hulls disintegrating.  Wow.  Sounds like fun :) 

This is cool!  Kaden Harris, self-proclaimed eccentric genius, makes miniature medieveil war machines - catapults, siege engines, trebuchets, mangonels, etc.  "I build antiques from...er...somewhere else.  A parallel universe where Leonardo Da Vinci, John Cleese and Jimmy Neutron spend every Tuesday night playing poker with Sherlock Holmes, and the Victorian era 'gentleman inventor' still toils diligently in his potting shed laboratory."  The perfect desk accessories!  [ via collision detection ] 

The latest issue of Wired has a nice interview with Bram Cohen, creator of Bittorrent.  "Cohen knows the havoc he has wrought.  In November, he spoke at a Los Angeles awards show and conference organized by Billboard, the weekly paper of the music business.  After hobnobbing with 'content people' from the record and movie industries, he realized that 'the content people have no clue.  I mean, no clue.  The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing.  And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they're so cheap, that pretty soon you'll have every song you own on one hard drive.  The content distribution industry is going to evaporate'."  

Wired is on a roll - their latest issue is great, coming on the heels of their previous issue about exploration which was great, too.  On the cover of Wired: Richard Branson, "rocket man", talks about Virgin Galactic, his new interplanetary spaceline. 

Stumbling across the Martian desert, Opportunity encountered its own heat shield.  The two martian rovers are still driving around, having a great old time on the surface of Mars.  And meanwhile Huygens continues heading toward Titan.  I love it. 

I want a green laser pointer.  Just because.