(8:04 PM CST) Mirabilis <-> AOL
The deal between America Online and Mirabilis was made official today. If you want to feel a bit better about it, read the letter that the ICQ development team wrote. If you're too lazy, here are some excerpts:

Today, ICQ is growing at the rate of 1,000,000 new subscribers every 22 days - an unbelievable rate of growth for a service of our size and staff. While we are very excited about having 500,000 simultaneous users, it presents technical challenges that almost no one on the Internet has ever faced, challenges that the largest software companies are still wrestling with. So unless we took steps to expand the financial and technical resources available to us and expand our team, the very existence of ICQ would have been at risk.

In addition to having the bandwidth, infrastructure and know how ICQ needs today, we found that AOL shared our understanding of the importance of interpersonal communication on the Internet.

And because they expressed again and again their eagerness to maintain our special spirit and culture, ICQ will continue to be an independent company, operating much the same as before, led by us, your faithful young and enthusiastic ICQ Team, who brought to you all the wonderful ICQ goodies so far.

Because AOL has asked us to continue to run the service exactly as before, we don't intend to make any changes in our policies. We will continue to offer the software and the service exactly under the same terms and conditions as before (time limited free beta). And of course, you will still be able to use ICQ No matter who your ISP is, or where you live.

We encourage you to continue your active use of and support for our service ... and to look forward with us to the many wonderful things our relationship with AOL will allow us to do that we simply couldn't do before.


(10:37 PM CST) Congrats, Louis!
Yet another driver here in Sugar Land now...Louis with his new '97 Ford Contour! Be careful near us rollerbladers, Louis. We don't have THAT much padding. :)

(10:16 PM CST) Unreal
What Louis says on his page is right - Unreal is truly amazing. Even with the lowly original Voodoo chip, this game kicks ass, graphically. It's essentially Quake, except a hell of a lot more scary (in the dark, with a surround system, yes, it really is). And yes, anyone can come over anytime to see how it looks - it'll blow you away. I recommend you come at night because a) I'll be home from work and b) The darkness will add a lot to the effect of the game.

(7:26 PM CST) Rollerhockey
The dates for rollerhocky have pretty much been set. We will play at the cul-de-sac in front of George's house every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. We would play more often, except that we get so damn sore after each game...
Oh, times are from 5:30 until 8:30 or 9, usually. The person who brings drinks will change for each game, I'll be bringing drinks for the next game. If you're interesting, come and play, no invites are required. Just show up. If you don't have rollerblades, go buy some. It's a wise investment, as you'll find that they come in VERY handy at college (much better than bikes and other inferior modes of transportation).

(7:20 PM CST) Cheap, big monitors for sale
New Dimensions just got a new shipment of cheap monitors from Gateway 2000. They're 17" and 19" monitors, the 17" ones have a .28 dot pitch and the 19" ones have a beautiful .26 dot pitch. Prices are $279 for the 17" and $489 for the 19". Yes, these prices are unheard of. The reason is because they've been labeled as scratch 'n dent monitors, meaning that some may have a scratch on the monitor casing, etc. Luckily, most of them are in perfect condition, a few have a scratches on the sides, etc. You can probably look through and find one in good condition, but the 19" ones will probably be gone in a couple of day (they sell FAST!). Interesting option, if anyone's interested...

(7:15 PM CST) Summer
...is finally here. Sorry about the website, between work and rollerhockey, my computer's been going to hell and I haven't been able to get this site updated. To make up for it, here's an interesting tidbit - the final version of Windows 98 has been sent out to manufacturing. Talk to myself or Saikotic about it... :)



(8:47 PM CST) Tired...
It's been an incredible weekend. Graduation, Pro-Grad - lazing out totally on Monday...nothing quite like it. Slow updates, mostly because I slept for around 12 hours. Oh well. To catch up on the world, Nullsoftput out an update to WinAmp 1.91 behind my back, and all sorts of other minor things happened. No news on the AOL-Mirabilis deal, it'll probably go through unless ZDNet got it wrong and it was all a horrendous joke (hope will never die!).

(10:57 PM CST) NO! FOR THE GOOD OF ALL THINGS HOLY! AAAHHHH!!!!!!
*sniff* *sniff*

ZDNet announced...
*waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!*

...that America Online, maker of all things busy and annoying, will be...will be... BUYING MIRABILIS!!!

NNNOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here...I can't type anymore - I'm feeling very empty right now....

America Online is about to buy Israeli Internet company Mirabilis, creator of the popular ICQ e-mail service, for $300 million, Israeli's Business Arena reported today. Most of the deal will be in cash, while some of the payment will be made in AOL (AOL) shares, the Business Arena reported.Sources said Mirabilis last year had buyout talks with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Hotmail and Yahoo! (YHOO) The deal would be a phenomenal success for a company that has no revenues. Mirabilis Director Joseph Vardi said earlier this year that Mirabilis has deliberately chosen to not make money by selling ads or subscriptions to keep from being distracted from its core task of building value as a media property by attracting a large base of users.


Why? Why, Mirabilis? Didst thou believe you couldn't just charge $10 a month and make over $300M every three MONTHS?!? NO!!!!!!!!!!!!

It is a dark day, indeed.

(9:50 PM CST) Winamp 1.91 Released!
Sorry, I'm probably way too late, but yes, Winamp 1.91 has been released. You can download it directly from simplenet. It even supports Line-in and wav's now! Very interesting application, now...

(8:15 AM CST) Intel Pentium II - 450MHz
Just got news on availability of this chip - it's going to be released on July 26. Pricing for the new chip is $780. Just for your entertainment, the Pentium II Xeon with 2MB of cache will be released on the same day - for a price of $4,500. Pentium II 400MHz will be $590, and the 350MHz will be $430. I wouldn't really go lower than that, but if you must, the 333MHz chip based on the old 66MHz system bus will have come down to $320 by July 26. Enjoy the wait!

(11:05 PM CST) Slow updates
There isn't much going on - except everything in school, of course. APs are coming to an end (finally!), the last major one waiting to kill us all is the Bio AP on Wednesday. Photoshop 5 is cool, btw. I like it. Umm...oh, I'll start work on the Colorado and Prom sites whenever I get done being sick, which should be something early in the week, but then the Bio AP is around then so I guess it'll be later in the week. Nasser and I went to go get a gift for Tina and stopped by Dynamic Audio & Video. It's a high end audio store that changed my plans for the summer a bit. I'm going to try to get as much money as possible - audio equipment is expensive. But some of the lower high-end stuff sound wonderful...oh well. I'm tired now, so I'm going to sleep. Hope everyone enjoys the movie, if Steve and George get around to planning it. G'night!

(6:49 PM CST) BulletProof FTP 1.07!
BulletProof FTP 1.07 was released just today - go get it! The new version features:
* Log entries are colour coded (blue for commands, green for responses, red for errors and black for general info).
* There is now no set limit on the number of lines in the log window.
* Raw list information can now be optionally displayed in the log window.
* URLs can be extracted from within other URLs. This helps BPFTP on download sites that use redirection to download, it'd work anyway but one step is eliminated thereby making things faster.
* 'Monitor clipboard for URLs' can now be toggled and options changed from the system tray.
* Option to export sitelist to a text file (comprising of standard FTP urls).
* Other minor bug fixes & improvements.

(10:36 PM CST) StarCraft
Louis, Steve, and I just finished game of StarCraft on Battle.net...we died. Badly. Look for screenshots on Louis' page.

(9:43 AM CST) Birthdays!
Today, Bono of U2 turns 38, and Krist Novoselic of Nirvana is 33. Old geezers....

(9:35 AM CST) PCI modem!
Norm showed me something extremely interesting yesterday - a Diamond Supra 56k modem. PCI. Too bad nobody makes a motherboard that only has PCI slots yet...

(2:56 PM CST) Windows 98 - Final
Microsoft's release to manufacturing date is in exactly one week...which means that in one week, Win98 is done. No more release candidates - only the gold release will remain. For those of you who've held off installing the beta copies of Win98, this will be the one to go for. Interesting that it takes nearly a month to get the software onto CD and stamped a few million times and shipped around the world (Microsoft is releasing it into stores on June 25).

(10:59 PM CST) Bio2 Field Trip
I must say, the trip was a wonderful experience. Although it started out slowly (expansive lectures on the various incredibly interesting facets of blood donation), the day instantly improved when we entered one of the several observation decks of an operating room. Surgeons were performing open-heart bypass surgery, something that was sweet to watch. It's cool to see how callous surgeons treat their patients once they're under...I wonder if the surgeons who did my appendectemy were tossing it around like a baseball while they talked about their cars, planned golf games, etc. :)

But the chest surgery was by far the most interesting - the visible, beating heart was awe-inspiring. Hmm...8+ years? Doesn't sound all that bad anymore....
Cheesy, but I like it.

(10:54 PM CST) BX Motherboard Reviews
AnandTech released an article on BX motherboards, comparing the qualities of each. Useful reading for those of you who will be getting a new computer in the summer. Oh, and guess what? I won't be among you. I realized that there isn't anything that I really can't do with my current computer, so there's no real reason to upgrade - and as far as Voodoo2...well, I don't use the Voodoo too often (Starcraft doesn't utilize/need 3Dfx acceleration), I don't see the point anymore. When the Voodoo becomes outdated, then I'll buy it. And no, this is no joke. Really! :)

(1:30 AM CST) Wait a sec!
I just wandered over to Louis' page...what the hell?!?
Et Cetera now has a file archive, graciously provided by Nikhil. In the archive, you will find assorted files (duh) that have, at one time or another, been mentioned on this web page. Enjoy!
Ahem. Louis: You only asked if you could store that one video of the freaky lady with the Swati ability. Now your taking it a bit too far...

(1:23 AM CST) sleeeeepy....
I spent another couple of hours working on the data for the soon to be available summer computer parts, features, and price list, which will be updated as new products come out, prices drop, etc. It's a little something for us to plan out the computer most of us will build before we leave for college. Each piece of hardware you'll need is on there, as well as links to good reviews of the project. I tried to find the best products at various price levels, so if something isn't on there, either I don't know about it or it's not recommended. After sifting through virtually every offering in all of the basic areas, I think I've found the componants that will make for the most economical and powerful systems overall. Frugalness is accounted for, as well as curiosity of the top end systems. I'll try to get this out ASAP, but time is running very short as APs loom up ahead...

(6:56 PM CST) Louis' Public Board
It's back up again, access his page from here.

(6:36 PM CST) Confused FrontPage user knocks out hard drive
Damn, people are dumb. ZDNet released an article about a user who...well, just read this:
"The problem occurred when a user changed the default setting for a Web site he wanted to store on his hard drive. But to replicate the problem, a user would have to delete by hand the default location for the Web site, turn the entire C drive into a Web site, then delete the site. The user also would have to ignore explicit warnings popping up on the page, including one that asks users if they really want to convert the whole C drive into a Web site.

Microsoft is not posting any patch for the problem because it's not a programming glitch. Rather, the company is warning people not to turn their entire C drive into a Web page, but instead give the program a more specific location for the Web page, such as "C:\mypage... "


(7:30 PM CST) A Cure for Cancer?
CNN released an article detailing a new method of fighting cancer. Using a dual drug therapy, researchers found out that cancer was totally erradicated in mice and rats, even those afflicted with large tumors.

(6:38 PM CST) Great...ANOTHER 3D chip...
S3 released information on a new 2D/3D chip they've developing, dubbed Savage3D. It's supposed to be wonderful...aren't they all? For now, stick with Voodoo or G200 when it comes out, until we find out how this chip actually rates...

(4:15 PM CST) Wow.....
It's been an incredible weekend for me, and it's finally settled down. Prom was excellent, the DJs actually played songs that I knew and liked. Everyone went through a lot of trouble to get ready for this, but it was worth twice that work. Sorry for the lack of updates over the last few days, but I simply haven't had time to work on this. To make up for this, I'll let you know that we may get a public board again, if I can get the script fixed up for this site...as you may or may not know, Louis' public board server went down, and might be out for a little while, so I might start one to hold us over until his gets back up and running. Have a nice weekend, everyone!