Making no sense

Yes, I admit, this post doesn't make sense. But it doesn't have to, given the time of the day. It's just an odd collection of things.

First, unless you read this on a news feed, you will notice a new Google advertisement in the sidebar. Don't worry, I am not becoming ambitious here - I've just played around with Google's ad services for a bit recently, starting an ad campaign on something else (a prize to whoever guesses right!) The concept of search sensitive ads is quite fascinating, so given the strange searches that sometimes end up here, I'll try this. If there's something interesting for you there, please do not hesitate to click on it - I am actually getting paid if you do!

The next item on the agenda is a pointer to this new (well, not really, it's been released in April) P2P file swapping service called BitTorrent which is also available for Mac. Appears to be a quite different architecture from the Poisoneds, Gnutellas etc - but hey, it works, and it works well! Check it out. The only thing is, it takes an awful lot of system resources, so you don't want to have it running in the background.

Right. Finally, I watched 28 Days Later. Fairly disconcerting movie about a London bicycle courier who has had an accident and wakes up after 28 days of coma to an empty, deserted central London. There has been an outbreak of a highly contageous virus which makes all infectees go berserk and very aggressive, but apparently doesn't kill them. The guy bands together with some other non-infected people to look for safety etc etc - no spoilers given. Actually a really good movie. The only thing that I am not quite sure what to think of is the fact that there is a strong notion of residual optimism even in the face of such a catastrophy. Ultimately, civilisation prevails and slowly begins to reassert itself. Realistic? You tell me ...

BOTD: "When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were," he said. "It was us vs. them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there." - Iowa Western Community College, Jan 21, 2000