Riverside Cafe is Back Online

My linux server, an AMD Duron 1200 at the end of a consumer DSL line, hosting riverside-cafe.com, was off the air most of the weekend.

I had occasion to reboot and the system wouldn’t come up. Wouldn’t even POST; it just sat there. I quickly figured out that clearing the CMOS …

Windows XP Southern edition may be recognized by the unique opening
screen. It reads: WINDERS XP, with a background picture of General Robert
E. Lee superimposed on a Confederate flag. It is shipped with a Dukes of
Hazard screen saver.

Please also note: the ‘Recycle Bin’ is labeled “Outhouse”, ‘My Computer’
is called “This Dern Contraption”, ‘Dial-up Networking’ …

There are some flash applications that are truly cool, and the geoblog site hosts one such example.

Displaying a cool world map (it shows the current daylight area), the application monitors a list of recently updated blogs generated from weblogs.com. It checks for new blog entries every minute and then fetches and …

Just the thing for Monday: an exploration of The Principles of Artistic Illusions.

This site, enriched with many illustrative examples, reviews a few classic Escher works as well as exploring the general topic by describing a wide variety of visual illusions.

The review is continued on a second page which focuses …

From Gastronome, a cool foodies web site, (self described as the gossip of a gaggle of gourmands), comes an excellent recipe for chocolate cookies (the dough is chilling as I write):

Chocolate Crackle Cookies

8 oz bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup Dutch-process cocoa powder (regular cocoa works if that’s all you …

The sheer magnitude of the loss of the cultural artifacts and antiquities during the looting of museums in Iraq is close to incomprehensible.

The fact that more attention was paid to saving oil wells than to saving items comprising a large part of the earliest history of western culture is equally unforgivable.

A rather in-depth review of …

From Tom comes word of yet another example of the limitless creativity and cleverness which serve as hallmarks of the human race.

To be honest, I’m not 100 percent convinced this isn’t a hoax; vinyl record sound production via a scanner and a custom program? With no turntable and no needle?

You be …