While trying to get the best seat in coach class is like polishing a turd, this sites hopes to provide you with the map of the best seats on commercial airline flights.

Latin geeks never die

Novissima emissio Nuntiorum Latinorum per rete informaticum Internet audiri potest, si in apparatu phonocharta et aliquod audioprogramma (e.g. RealAudio) inest.

Text pong

The enemy, the Left Paddle, has managed to reflect your shot and send it back to you. It looks like it's going to go below your paddle. What are you going to do?

Move your Paddle Up

Don't Move your Paddle

Move your Paddle Down

Finally got around to posting this. Some charities that two of our readers would like you to donate to.

The Drew Bledsoe Foundation

The Gift of An Angel Program

Online rubix cube.

The Kikoman fish head adventure.

It's all so MC Escher (don't stare at it too long).

Driving dos and don'ts.

MONDAY, 12/2/2002, 1:45pm HST by Raul

After a long and somewhat fitful wait, I finally got my grubbly little hands on Sega's NHL 2k3, their big contender in a market typically dominated by EA sports. EA's game has gotten weaker and weaker over time, and with the rumors of 2k3 being gameplay-oriented, I was willing to wait.

That wait is now justified. 2k3 is so far beyond any EA title I've ever played I don't know how to describe it. It is frustratingly hard at first but one the old EA "shoot and pray" habits are kicked, the beauty of the physics engine starts to emerge. I do have some preliminary niggles (the goalies are TOO tough) but the ability to customize makes up for that.

Overall not as polished of a game as EA but the gameplay is there in spades. Review to come.

2k3 resources:

• Thunderpuck's Sega NHL 2k3 forum
• NHL 2k3 site at Thunderpuck with an explanation of gameplay sliders.
• Treyarch's NHL 2k2 forum, which now contains NHL 2k3 stuff. Treyarch is the developer.

So I received a little rant from Configsysboy (www.configsysboy.com) about my posting of the picture of Bush with binoculars that still had the caps on. He claimed it was probably a faked picture, and sent me an image of Clinton, purportedly with capped binoculars as well.

Here is my official response:

You neglected to note or notice that this image was part of this Snopes article, which not only cannot find any evidence of fakery in the image, but also casts doubt upon the Clinton image's integrity as well as the Republican interpretation of it.

I cannot find much evidence of manipulation myself in the larger version of the Bush image, but the compression is so high as to make determination difficult. I find it unlikely that, were the image edited, the caps would be so seamlessly integrated and the lighting so perfectly matched.

Through some research, I have found that this image may have been scanned from a Newsweek in February, and was taken by Bush's own campaign photographer. If I ever get to the library, I'll verify this but in the meantime, I both reject your attempts to impose your agenda on us and resent the suggestion that we would not tackle this subject head-on.

In fairness, I will note that Snopes reports the Bush-with-upside-down-book pic is a fake. And I do agree with Snopes that neither binocular picture amounts to much of anything, true or not.

Sharks coach Sutter, staff fired

Since taking over as head coach in 1997, Darryl Sutter has helped develop the young San Jose Sharks into a Western Conference contender.

This season, Sutter and the Sharks weren't able to produce the success expected of them and on Sunday, it cost him his job.

Science Toys is a site that's got all kinds of neat toys that operate based on some scientific principles, such as the film can cannon (above), which uses Binaca and a piezo ignitor to launch a film can across the room. Maybe I need to make me one of these things.

Here's a funny little Monster Hardware writeup: building a case out of random Lego. Not as clean as some of the other case projects I've seen, but charming in its own way.

For those of you with PocketPCs out there: cTide is a really great, free universal tide charting program. It has thousands of locations built in and gives info on moon phases and sunrise/sunset as well. The only bad thing is it's several megs large and the programmer requires it to be in the handheld's main memory. But worth the space if knowing tides is part of your thing.