My new wireless router came with a coupon for 50 free downloads from eMusic. Is there a particular strength that store has? It seems like mostly the usual unfiltered jumble of unknowns, with no good way to see what gems others have found and Todd Snider is the only one I know at all, with shovelware albums from some bigger-name artists mixed in.

Any suggestions for an artist or genre I could try out, or a better way to browse? The site also has a lot of scripting that my Firefox doesn't like.

I'm running a contest to re-design the UI for my random name generator. I don't expect to get as many submissions as Slashdot did when they solicited entries for a re-design, but I figure some aspiring Web designer wouldn't mind having their signature on my site as a resume item.

I've been tracking Google's stats for some 2008 Presidential Election-related searches in an effort I've been calling "Google the Vote". The results have really helped to keep me in touch with how the election is shaping up. My blog entry on the topic is titled, "Using the Web to predict elections." I touch on a few ways that people are tracking Web-based data for the election such as Google Trends and Intrade.

I really do think that the Web is going to become a more and more accurate predictor of elections over the years, and eventually live-polling will be an antiquated and moot factor.

I'm not qualified to have an informed opinion on the bailout bill, and I certainly understand the skepticism and hostility towards it. But I get the feeling that this was a huge missed opportunity to avoid disaster...

Anyway, Shanah Tovah to all Jewish readers!

houghi and mr.witherspoone, a couple of comments down on this exchange from the Saudi supercomputer story.

But I see Frank Mundus died yesterday. I read Monster Man as a kid, and remember it almost verbatim today.

I'm still not entirely sure what that commercial is selling (Oreos, right?) but I wonder if I'm not the only person who watched it and thought "The four of them of them totally ought to date!" They seem like they'd hit it off, actually, and it might be the only way the Brady-Bundchen/Monahan kids will get any serious competition.

Remember when there used to be those window managers whose big selling point was that you could do things to them in LISP, back when people still cared vehemently about window managers. We now have qtile which now allows the same thing in Python. I'll give it a try to see why anyone would want that, which I never understood for the LISP browsers.

Either I'm easily amused today or there's a lot to post about: Hal Porter on the Las Vegas Star Trek exhibit.

Chinese lab chooses abbreviation for their newly-invented copper nano-tubes -- points if you've already guessed where this is headed...

Fallingcow, on a pretty dumb Ask Slashdot. (Not dumb of the questioner, necessarily, but you'd think Timothy would know better.)

This deserves a front-page link but Friday afternoon at 4 isn't conducive to my composing a blurb: sudoku solving using Debian's package dependency resolver.

GMail's displayed ad:

As I read a news alert from Forbes: "Making Money Doing Nothin - TheRichJerk.com - I Cracked the Code to Making Money. Now I'm Rich and You're Not."

As I move on to the table of contents from Nature: "Labmeeting - www.labmeeting.com - A new free tool for scientists that organizes your paper collection."

badboy_tw2002 on Collimating Semiconductor Lenses.

Anonymous Coward, on liquid metal CPU cooling.