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Peanuts seems to be experiencing somewhat of a resurgence, nearly a decade after the passing of Charles Schulz.

For example, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! was shown on ABC on Halloween, and was something of a hot topic on Twitter for days. It has become one of the great enduring classics, along with Rudolph and Frosty, A Christmas Story, and so forth. But wait, there's more!

A new webseries based on classic strips from 1964 is being made available on iTunes (link opens in iTunes, naturally), with the first episode available for free download as of this posting. So far, reviews are very positive. The aforementioned Great Pumpkin special is also on iTunes for $9.99 (it also includes two bonus episodes).

On the gaming front, one of the more odd developments is from Square-Enix for Japan: a mini-game collection for the Nintendo DS called Snoopy DS: Let's Go Meet Snoopy and His Friends! While I have no idea whether this is destined for the States, it does seem to be geared mostly towards the younger crowd. As for the rest of us, a more appealing entry into the Peanuts franchise is Snoopy: WWI Flying Ace for PC and various console systems. It's a mashup of third-person action and air combat, and it looks like a lot of fun to play. I'll be keeping my eye on this one, and I'll probably end up picking up a copy when it's released..

For those of you looking for a little nostalgia, the entire collection of Peanuts strips is available online. That's all for now!

The lengths President-Elect Obama is going to in reaching out to the public astounds me. His campaign pulled out all the stops, capitalizing the power of the Internet to get the word out: Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and the campaign website were just a few of the avenues by which he utilized this invaluable resource to organize and get people talking about change.

With the election behind him, the President-Elect has setup an official transition website, appropriately named Change.gov, to put forth his plans for the future, from a call for service to the country through community service to proposed plans to deal with ongoing Middle Eastern conflicts. If you're interested in contributing your service to the new administration, you can apply for a job. There's even a blog!

Change has come indeed, and I can't wait to see what the future holds for our great nation. God bless America!

If you'll look to your right, assuming you have Flash installed, you should see the newest addition to the site: a Twitter badge, a sort of public metablog where anyone can post mini-rants, or just whatever happens to be on their mind at the moment. 'Tweets' tend to require less overall thought than a typical blog post (for me, anyway), and as a bonus, can be posted from darned near anywhere (by phone, BlackBerry, or via the Twitter site itself). Since I tend to post here only sporadically, you'll probably be better able to find out what's on my mind if you keep an eye on my Twitter page (linked on the right).

Yes, it's that time again: time for two and a half months of collected ranting, musing, and raving to be collected in a single, mammoth post (well, mammoth for me, anyway). There's lots to cover, so here goes...

First, the world of technology. The gap since the last post has seen the release (and in some cases, the prompt acquisition) of a myriad of gadgets of every shape and size. Recently added to my personal collection: a BlackBerry Pearl, a replacement 1GB iPod shuffle (hey, it was only $50!), and one shiny new 20" iMac with a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo. Which, coincidentally, I'm using to type up this post. I wasn't quite expecting it to be much faster than my MacBook Pro, but I've been impressed so far; a faster hard drive, full-fledged (i.e. non-Mobility) Radeon X1600, and (obviously) the newer generation CPU are to thank for that. The display on this thing is a thing of beauty, too; compared to the old 17" US Logic sitting right next to it...well, really there is no comparison, it's that much better. The new iMac is easily the best computer of any kind I have ever owned, hands-down.

I've also finally gotten around to resurrecting the old tower (with a new 300GB SATA drive that'll be going in as soon as I get around to it), bringing the tally up to a whopping five operational machines, not counting PDAs. I've practically got a full-fledged command center-type setup going on here - two notebooks on my left, the tower's LCD on the left-side rotating shelf, the iMac in front, an HP Photosmart on the right-side shelf, and finally, the MBP on my right. So, the question now becomes, what am I to do with this somewhat ridiculous collection of underutilized hardware?

The answer: Folding, of course! A better description can be found at the linked page, but essentially, folding uses idle CPU time (much like SETI@Home, or any other distributed-computing project) to 'fold' simulated proteins in a massive effort to conduct research on the causes of certain genetic disorders. As with other distributed computing projects, contributors are able to form teams as part of a friendly competition; there is no prize, other than the knowledge that one is contributing to a greater understanding of the underlying causes of disorders such as Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, and others. I'm an active member of Team AppleNova, which is comprised of AppleNova Forum members. We're #125 out of more than 2,000 teams, which is pretty impressive considering that we 'only' have 92 team members (the #1 team has over 10,000, and a fairly significant portion of the top hundred teams have over 1,000 members each).

Moving along...ah, yes, the sadly underutilized anime/manga category. I've finally gotten back into following a few series regularly again. Currently on the list: Ah! My Goddess (both the manga and anime), Aoi House, Chibi Vampire (augh, just give it back the original title, already!), Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Negima!, and the novel series .hack//Another Birth. I'm thinking there are one or two more that should be on there, but I can't remember them right now. Meh.

And now, entertainment! I've really been digging through the iTunes Store recently, and I'm pretty impressed with the sheer amount of content now available. There's more music than you can shake an iPod at, TV shows for every taste, and now full-length movies. I was browsing the iTS recently when I finally broke down and purchased a season pass for Battlestar Galactica Season 3 (the clips on YouTube from the third episode were the straw that finally broke this camel's back), and I haven't been disappointed. Yeah, the video quality isn't the best when scaled to anything more than original size (full-screen is particularly ugly), but it's convenient, and being able to watch it on my iPod is just icing on the cake. I've also been perusing the Japanese version of the store, and while I think that there could be a better variety of anime music on there, I'm still pretty impressed with their current offerings (and the recent addition of BMG Japan's library should help out a bit).

Ummm...I keep thinking that there were a few more things that I was going to post today, but I've once again completely forgotten what they were. If I remember later, I'll append them to the end of this post. In the meantime, have a great rest of the weekend, all you happy people!

...pi. Specifically, 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459.info, containing 62 decimal places of pi. Not surprisingly, the website's sole contents are a cool-looking ASCII graphic of the pi symbol (composed of, you guessed it, a long sequence of decimal places of pi) and a link to the Wikipedia article for pi.

Someone must've had a lot of time on their hands.

...CUTE OVERLOAD!!! (The site's name should be the first clue; I can almost feel the cavities growing just from seeing the first two pictures...)