Mood: Positive

Outlook: Positive

Kelvin's Xbox hack adventures
Living with a game programmer roomie definitely is interesting if you enjoy watching someone hack apart a perfectly good games system so they can things like install a 120g hard drive and load it up with thousands upon thousands of MAME titles. Earlier, Kelvin already enabled our PCs to share hard drives to it so we could project our downloaded videos onto his big projector. Today, he was playing the original Williams classic "Defender" on a larger screen than it was ever designed to be displayed on. Lovely, simply lovely to see that game and hear those primal sound effects. MAME or Multi Arcade Machine Emulator has become wildly popular in the many years it has been around, enabling enthusiasts to port a huge number of arcade games that would otherwise never be saved except in a handful of collector's cabinets. My brother Kevin has an actual arcade cabinet that has a PC running MAME in its innards. Read more about MAME here >>

Even the rich and powerful have a depressed outlook this year
This is an extremely interesting report by someone who was invited to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (one of those events that is always been stalked by anti-WTO protestors). Interesting to know how the rich and powerful hobknob, but also, their very bleak outlook on the world economy and politics this year. One of the chilling passages relates how some U.S. representatives expect the Iraq war to be just first step in a global campaign that will take years, 'cleansing the planet'. Read it here >>

More Iraq news links
In case you don't know me from Delphi and want to follow the Iraq pre-war news more closely, you should know that I moderate a running news thread on Dan Evan's Sk8 Jesus forum where everyone is invited to post any relevant Internet news links they can find on the crisis in the Middle East. It would be redundant to post them here. Once you get on Sk8 Jesus, look for the thread: "The "pre war" news thread. Delphi membership is free >>.

Refutation of al Qaeda - Iraq links
The BBC has an article that examines the evidence available so far that Saddam might be iinvolved with al Qaeda, something that the Americans and British governments are trying desperately to sell to the public, especially in light of the alleged tape message sent to al Jazeera TV by bin Laden yesterday. A British reporter at today's Straw-Rumsfeld press conference point blank asked Straw if he thought bin Laden was just trying to provoke the attack on Iraq by the west as bin Laden also calls Saddam an infidel. Straw basically ignored the reporter's question with a non-answer.Germany has replied to the U.S. assertion that the bin Laden message was proof of an alliance. This post by Matt Adler on the Steven Grant Forum is an excellent review of bin Laden's emnity with everyone in the region including Saddam.

Ramayana Bridge
Photos from space have confirmed the ancient Hindu legend about a bridge spanning India and Sri Lanka. Archaeologists have placed human existence in Sri Lanka at more than 17,000 years ago while the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, is also said to be 17,000 years old. Who knows, but this photo from space is pretty cool. Click to see a larger version >>

Anti-war rally set for Saturday in Vancouver
Another anti-war rally is set for the day after Valentine's Day on the 15th. The chance of war has increased dramatically over the weekend after UN chief inspector Hans Blix said that Iraq had made improvements in their cooperation but still not the 100% demanded. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been pulling all its NATO strings to get support on the Security Council for a second ultimatum which would give the Americans the paper legitimacy for an invasion. France, Germany and the Pope have come back with their own proposal which has angered the Americans and has strained the NATO alliance. I'm sure Osama bin Laden is just chortling over this (if he is still alive).