Good news! Firstly, I’m approaching the end of my first two weeks doing Atkins and I’ve lost approximately thirteen pounds! (That’s about six kilos for you metric types.) I’m definitely going to stick with this for a while longer. And secondly… I have two job interviews lined up! One tomorrow, and one next week. Wish me luck!

Remember I told you about EyeTV yesterday? Well, I e-mailed the company asking if/when they were going to release an international version. They replied today saying, “We are working on bringing EyeTV to countries with the PAL broadcast television format. Watch http://www.elgato.com for announcements in this area later this year.” Of course, that doesn’t address the issue of whether they’ll make program guides available for every country (especially as they don’t charge any subscriptions and thus make no money off them). I hope they do, though, as otherwise it’s pretty useless.

Okay, so the other day I was thinking about drinking games (mostly because I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in two weeks, courtesy of the diet). You know about them, right? Basically the format is a list of rules for watching a TV show or movie, and every time certain things happen you’re supposed to take a drink. Yes, it’s juvenile and stupid. Pretty fun though, too. The classic example is the Army of Darkness drinking game, which has only one rule: “Take a drink every time Ash gets hit on the head.” Legend has it no one has ever made it through the cemetery scene without puking or passing out. Anyway, so I was thinking about these “games” and thinking about blogging and suddenly the two just magically merged in my head. I thus present to you The Weblogger Drinking Game. Yes, it’s incredibly juvenile and navel-gazing and everything else bad about blogging. But what can I say? It amused me. Read on to find out what rules I came up with and suggest your own.First I came up with some rules for visiting my own site.

• Take a drink every time Kris mentions “the Snook”. (There go half the contestants!)
• Take two drinks whenever Kris rants about U.S. culture versus the rest of the world.
• Take three drinks every time Kris mentions “quilting”.
• Drink everything in sight on the odd occasion Kris mentions her boyfriend’s real name.

And here are some for other sites:

• Take one drink for every silly quiz Brigita nicks from Nicci, and vice versa.
• Take a drink for every mile Jeff runs. (Ouch.)
• Finish your drink whenever Beau emerges victorious from another battle with the wildlife of New York.
• Take a sip whenever Max mentions robots, The Simpsons, Kylie Minogue, or Martha Stewart. (Make it small sips. You don’t want to get alcohol poisoning!)
• Chug your drink and sing a verse of “Mele Kalikimaka” every time Bill goes to Hawaii.
• Shotgun a beer whenever Matt digs up yet another incredibly cool link or photo.
• Everytime Nicci redesigns, slam your drink and run around the house.

Amusing, no? It’s fun because it makes you think about the unconscious habits we all have. What rules would you add, either for your own site or for others?

Okay, folks, you’ve got one more day to throw out suggestions for our first book. It’s odd; we’ve had a lot of contemporary fiction listed, but not much older stuff. Huh. Anyway, check out what’s there and see if anything strikes your fancy. You can even read introductory chapters for most of them via their Amazon links. In a day or so I’ll put up a poll and we’ll have all weekend to pick one. Sound good?

I feel pretty bad looking at all the unsuccessful searches that led people to my site. All those disappointed people! I mean, I don’t know if Anna Kournikova is ovulating. Nor do I know a website hack for Weight Watchers. But I can answer one question: Where’s Russell Crowe’s farm located? It’s in Lowana, near Coffs Harbour in New South Wales. See? I’m all about helping you folks out whenever possible.

This completely blew my mind. Okay, pretend you’ve turned to the financial section of the newspaper and you’re looking at all the stock prices. Now imagine that we took the first digit of each number and fed them into a computer and counted how many times each digit (1-9) appeared. You’d expect there to be a pretty random yet equal distribution, right? Wrong. The digit “1” will appear 30% of the time, and each of the subsequent digits in decreasing percentages. “9” only occurs 5% of the time. This works for stock prices, baseball statistics, and just about any other random collection of data you can dig up. Isn’t that nuts? Apparently it also works on accounting books, which is how the IRS can tell if you’ve been fudging the numbers. Craziness. How do I know this? The Snook randomly brought it up in dinner conversation the other night and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since. Here’s a page of more information about the phenomenon. Now see if you can sleep at night.

Cecil answers the age-old question: “Where does belly button lint come from?” Of course, this still doesn’t solve the mystery of how the Snook’s navel generates more lint than any other human being in history. (We’re talkin’ alien lint babies here, folks.)

I just found out that at least one person has received a copy of the Klez virus with my address in the “From:” field. Rest assured, I’m not infected. (I have a Mac, remember?) This particular virus just has the ability to fake its “From:” address based on the infected computer’s address book and web cache. This probably means that whoever has it is someone that’s visited my site or sent me an e-mail in the past. If you think it might be you, there are tools to disinfect yourself here. And if any of you others get mail from my address that you weren’t expecting, don’t open it. I’m a horrible pen pal and I hardly ever e-mail anyway. 🙂

More Mac news: EyeTV has been released! It’s basically Tivo for your Mac. It does everything Tivo does, PLUS it allows you to burn shows directly onto VCD (as long as you have Toast). Unfortunately they don’t offer international support right now. I’ve written to the company begging them to add it. Seriously, this is the software I’ve been waiting for.

Thanks to iPhoto, I’m finally organizing and clearing out some of these pictures that have been sitting on my camera for months. Here at long last are some pics of the Snook and I during our brief stopover in Los Angeles last November. This one here with the “HOLLYWOOD” sign in the background is my favorite. Don’t we look cool? Actually, we’re just jet lagged. 🙂