I didn\’t watch the Grammys, but this year the president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences gave a speech about the threat of mp3s. To prove his point, he hired 3 students to download as many songs as they could. They ended up with 6000 mp3s in 2 days. Anyway, this article debunks his speech somewhat, as one of students says it was actually 3 days, and 2 of the students got mp3s from friends through AIM, meaning they could be rips of CDs they actually own.
[ From Slashdot ]

I preordered the new release of Evil Dead: the Book of the Dead and it came in the mail a few days ago. The packaging is so cool.

The one in the movie is bound in human flesh and inked with blood. The one I have is bound in smelly rubber and inked with…well, ink. And reading it out loud doesn\’t bring back the dead. But it does come with the movie.

These inversions will blow your mind, dude. Seriously, I could spend a whole night looking at them.
[ From BrainLog ]

Surprisingly, software piracy on college campuses dropped between 96-97 and 00-01. The article gives a few vague reasons like cheaper software and special licenses for college students. I don\’t believe it though. I think more students just said they don\’t pirate software.

Popular Science has a neat article about augmented reality. The user wears goggles which superimpose data over whatever they\’re looking at, sort of like the smart tags in Windows. This would be really cool if, for example, you\’re a tourist in a foreign country and you can\’t read any signs. I can\’t imagine how geeky you\’d look though.

I went out to UCLA tonight for Microsoft\’s launch of Visual Studio .NET. There was a lot of people there. Food was pretty decent, plus everyone got a copy of Windows XP and Visual Studio academic edition. So from what I understood of the presentation, .NET lets you use different programming languages in the same program. I had the same idea a few years ago. I thought it would be really cool if you could use the best language for a particular task in your program. I had no idea how to implement it though.

Anyway, I\’ll probably install Visual Studio…uh…when I get around to it. Then we\’ll see what it can do.