(click for larger pic)

Yippee!  The Spirit has landed!!  The little golf cart essentially pounded into the Martian surface, cushioned by a giant air bag.  "The $400 million rover Spirit, designed to conduct unprecedented geologic and photographic surveys on the Martian surface, transmitted a simple hello to Earth minutes after landing."  This is so excellent.  Here's NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission page...

The NYTimes explains From Vinyl to Digital, Hold the Crackle.  Or how to "rip" phonograph records.  Personally I recommend PolderBits highly for recording any analog source (I've used it with cassette tapes).

While I'm at it, let me put in a plug for VirtualDub, an awesome tool for editing and converting video.  I just used it to transcode The Italian Job from MPEG to DivX.  Piece of cake.

I saw LOTR Return of the King again, today.  I like it just as much as the first time.  Awesome!

Glenn Reynolds links another excellent Michael Critchton speech, on media speculation.

Robert X. Cringely makes his predictions for 2004 (and reviews how well he did in 2003).  The most interesting: "The SCO debacle has created a crisis within the Linux community.  They pretend that it hasn't, but it has.  This will come to a head in 2004 with either the development of a new organizational structure for Linux or the start of its demise.  Linux has to grow or die, and the direction it takes will be determined in 2004."  Hmmm....

Have you ever wanted to build your own Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscope?  Aha, I thought so.  Well, here's a do-it-yourself kit.  Warning: it doesn't look trivial.  Where's Heathkit when you need them :)

Yeah, where are they?  At the Heathkit Virtual Museum...

Scoble is excited about his site optimization efforts.  As he should be.  Of course, he'd be really excited if he implements GZIP compression...