My girlfriend and I are going vegan and all-around substance free for the month of February. To kick off the month, we decided to have a goodbye party for the proscribed items. So I made a roasted red pepper cream sauce to cover some fettucine, and toasted kalamata ciabatta bread covered in melted parmesan. I washed it down with La Fin Du Monde, while Shayla enjoyed a raspberry Lambic. I had tiramisu for desert. I’m going to miss the sweet, sweet animal products but it will be an interesting challenge to make tasty food without them. I decided to make my first project Tom Kah, which is hands down my favorite vegan food so far. I also got all my biking gear together, and I’m going to try to ride 200 miles this month. I figure 5 miles per day, five days per week (to and from work) will make 100, and I’ll do some biking on the weekend to get the other 100. For inspiration, I’ll be dropping some Minor Threat into my MP3 player. w00t.

The Mac Mini is getting lots of attention as a possible killer app in media centers. Engadget posted a blurb this week.. Robert X. Cringely pointed out that it’s already possible to use it as a HD video player without the need to wait for the dust to settle in the upcoming Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war. The troops are already mobilizing to make the software necessary to convert the little box into a killer media hub. The Mac Media Center project was started shortly after the release of the Mini, and got 150k members in their first 24 hours. Their GUI thread is up and running, and they’ve got some very impressive ideas. I think we’ll end up seeing a broad array of third-party options springing up in the near future. I really like it, because Apple’s approach to DRM and such is much more user-friendly than what’s being offered by Microsoft. Apple seems to take the side of the consumer, offering options that make me happy. Microsoft appears to be taking the side of content distributors, who would very much like me to pay as much as I can, and wouldn’t mind making me pay for the same media many, many times. I don’t like it. I’m really hoping that Microsoft’s DRM-infested Media Center flops and the third-party options for the Mac Mini take off. Competition will be a good thing, and if Microsoft gets trampled by the masses of people staying away from their product, it might send them back to the drawing board to come up with something that doesn’t suck.

I had a conversation with someone the other night about Beck. The girl I spoke with was saying how disappointing and weird it was that Beck was into Scientology. I personally thought it was an Andy Kauffman-style joke, but the evidence seems to be inconclusive.

This is really a side note in a more interesting point I found about the faux-religion. Scientology is a genuine religion according to the U.S. Government and the government of Australia. Wikipedia provides the following:

In 1982, the High Court of Australia ruled that the State Government of Victoria could not declare that the Church of Scientology was not a religion (Church of the New Faith v. Commissioner Of Pay-roll Tax (Vict.) 1983, 154 CLR 120 (http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/high_ct/154clr120.html)). The Court addressed the issue of belief, rather than possible charlatanism: “Charlatanism is a necessary price of religious freedom, and if a self-proclaimed teacher persuades others to believe in a religion which he propounds, lack of sincerity or integrity on his part is not incompatible with the religious character of the beliefs, practices and observances accepted by his followers.”

Huh? So basically, if you knowingly fool a group of idiots into following your genuinely fabricated and fraudulent system of belief, and they believe it, it’s officially a religion?

The interesting thing about this is the possiblity, nay the probability, that the U.S. government has the same idea. I have one word to describe that: awesome. I’m going to start my own crackpot religion. This is just too sweet.

PostSecret sent stacks of cards to random people around the country asking them to reply anonymously with a secret. The results are impressive.

Certain groups are up in arms over the latest in stem cell research. Scientists have been doing research projects involving animal embryos fused with human stem cells.

Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University in 2003 successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were reportedly the first human-animal chimeras successfully created. They were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory dish before the scientists destroyed the embryos to harvest their stem cells.

When asked whether they were trying to make a rabbit like the one in Alice in Wonderland, the researchers had no comment.

This is very troubling to religious medical groups.

“We must be cautious not to violate the integrity of humanity or of animal life over which we have a stewardship responsibility,” said Cheshire, a member of Christian Medical and Dental Associations. “Research projects that create human-animal chimeras risk disturbing fragile ecosystems, endanger health, and affront species integrity.”

At least it takes their mind off of human cloning. According to orthodox christians, clones would have no soul. Does that mean it’s not wrong to kill a clone?

A9 is whipping out a really interesting feature today: block search. Do a yellow pages search. Go on. Not only will if find the contact information for the business, but it will give you a photo of the business. In fact, it will give you a series of photos of the street that the business is on. They sent a squadron of SUVs with high definition cameras, terabyte disc drives, and GPS receivers all over the country to gather the photos, then integrated them with the address date to patch it all together. It’s really nice to see innovation marching along.

This is seriously turning into the wild west. My referrer logs are going crazy with spam sites. Others have noticed this, too. What’s going on? I suppose this is the flipside to the freedom the internet provides, but it’s still pretty silly. There are probably a few thousand h4X0red boxes out there working in unison to pull this crap, but it’s seriously getting annoying. I’m still wishing that the Lycos spam-killing screensaver hadn’t been so zealously shot down. It was a great idea, and now instead we’re dealing with the opposite: leaving our collective pants down, asses in the breeze. Nice.

In case you’re just totally cracked on cuteness, take a moment to surf over to the cuteness blog. It’s in Japanese, of course.

I’m having second thoughts about the Mac Mini now that I’ve seen the Google Mini.

The funny thing about the release of the Mac Mini is the way that the Craigslist tech ads exploded with Macs for sale. Clearly Applephiles are cleaning out their old gear to scrape together a little dough to buy one.

This is seriously going to be the deepest market saturation FreeBSD has ever had, period. I’m pretty excited about this little dude, not necessarily because it’s going to make Apple get its claws into more homes, but because it’s going to send the x86 side into overdrive trying to make knockoffs. It’s going to be pretty interesting to see how long it takes for southeast asian electronics manufacturers to beat it. The most interesting possibility will be the micro, high-capacity PVR. I’m sure even more interesting ideas that I haven’t even considered will be springing up, too.

I think the best idea is to max out your credit card buying up Minis, and starting eBay auctions before it’s released. It’ll be good times when the shortages start.