If you live in the Memphis area, and would be willing to teach a beginner (i.e. me) how to play Go, please contact me.

The latest Toast-O-Meter is up with a special Valentine’s Day theme, courtesy of Steven Taylor. As always, it’s the comprehensive review of everything you tried to tune out about the primary campaign over the last seven days.

I’m off shortly to Memphis to argue with Best Buy for what should be a new laptop, probably something Centrino-based (woo-hoo!).

Update: Well, that went well… not.

Here’s a short poem I wrote in grad school.

I gave my love an emerose
Upon a summer day,
While all around us in the grove
The gavagai did play.

“I’ve never seen a hue so green,”
My love did say to me.
“My dear,” I said, “it’s shmolored gred,
Just green until time t.”

Apologies to Nelson Goodman, Joseph Ullian, and W. V. Quine.

Seen in my Apache log file just now:

172.200.37.120 – - [14/Feb/2004:01:07:25–0600] “HEAD / HTTP/1.1” 200 – “http://www.drudgereport.com/” “StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004”
172.200.37.120 – - [14/Feb/2004:01:07:28–0600] “HEAD / HTTP/1.1” 200 – “http://www.drudgereport.com/” “StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004”

Now it’s possible that someone is doing this to discredit Drudge; the IP resolves back to an AOL dynamic IP address, a Google search turns up several sites where anyone can download this tool, and Drudge has plenty of Google PageRank™ already; he doesn’t need to use a referral spammer to boost it.

In any event, I have reported this incident to AOL’s abuse system. Those with particularly devious minds may want to see if this robot will follow a HTTP redirect (301/302) to a bot honeypot or follow an infinite redirect loop.