Ah, yes, the holidays. Everyone is traveling, this time including me. I shal be spending the next two weeks up in cold Minnesota, near Brainerd to be exact. The coldness sounds worse to me because of where I am native: Arizona.

I will be gone from tomorrow, December 23rd, and will return on January 4th. During this time, as you may have already guessed, I will be unable to post any entries to my blog. I will try to pop something good off before my departure, but I make no promises.

Happy Holidays, and have a good New Year!

I’m headed out on a family trip this Saturday.  We’re going to see Arizona’s Grand Canyon and then enjoy the entertainment in Las Vegas.  What are some fun geeky things to do there?

This is not my first visit to the sights.  When I was thirteen or fourteen, Nanny (Grandma) and I went to Las Vegas as an extension of a larger tour that included Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon.  In Vegas, I got treated to comedy shows and saw the construction of the Mirage.

Five years later, I still not eighteen, we went again to Las Vegas with my nuclear family.  The best thing we did was watch a magician get hazed by a drunk.  When “The Magnificent Steve” vanished and re-appeared —"Steve, oh my G-d you’re alive!"—Steve even picked him as a volunteer.

Then we went to the Star Trek exhibit at the Hilton.  When you enter the area it is like stepping into Quark’s bar on Deep Space: Nine with space-themed slot machines.  Everyone lines up for his or her tour:

From Wikipedia: “Initially, a group of about twenty visitors enter a rather confining room… Once inside the room, one of the ride directors begins speaking…
(Continue)

As you may or may not notice, the site’s backend has been upgraded (meaning some new features in the future), and I have taken the opportunity to revise a few things.  URL’s should be more intuitive now, the sidebar has been revised and the index page is completely new.

Please leave your feedback in the forum.

Today was a very good day for Deep Thought. It started when Nick posted the news article about Apple having an entire category devoted to them on Jeopardy. It spread like wildfire. So far we have documented coverage on digg.com, Arstechnica, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog. As a result, we broke our previous concurrent visitor record. We had 746 visitors at once, which, as you can imagine, is a pretty big number for us. The date has been immortalized (at least until we have another whiz-bang day).

I’d like to extend a personal thanks to Nick for watching Jeopardy that night and deciding it was newsworthy, as we’re hearing many people say “why’d I have to miss Jeopardy that one day?!”

Since I feel that general attitude toward everything has gone down, I shall adjourn all further weblog entries with a smile (even when I’m angry).

As CNN reports, the event I posted about earlier, in which Wikipedia’s publishing policies were tightened after an article falsely implicated a former Kennedy aid in his assassination, turned out to be a really bad joke.  It turns out that the article was posted back in May by Brian Chase of Nashville, Tennessee, as a prank on a friend of his who was acquainted with the Seigenthaler family.  Chase promptly resigned from his job.

Unfortunately, this is not going to change the new Wikipedia policy whereby one must be a registered member to publish new articles.  Considering that almost every topic imaginable is already on Wikipedia (at least almost every one I ever look up, including about this incident), this policy will not significantly curtail the amount of information being published.  However, it still rings against the ethos of freedom of publication that Wikipedia was originally founded under, and it still does not solve the problem of people being able to falsify any information they wish, with almost no accountability.