Interested in Katie Holmes?

There's a new place where you can get your news about Katie Holmes. Yes, I knew that would interest you.

You can find out more about Katie Holmes' marriage to Tom Cruise, if that's the sort of news that interests you.

Or there are photos of her, sotries and even video news stories.

Check it out for all your Katie Holmes celebrity news needs.

Mohels and Sex

Yes, not really the conjunction you expect to see but, does circumcision have an effect upon sex life?

Further, is the effect good or bad?

We know that it reduces the rate at which various forms of clap are passed on.

But it also reduces sensitivity.

So, on balance, is circumcision a good idea or not? Click through to find out the answer.

Breakfast in Cascais

If you're in and around Cascais you'll not do better than seeling out the Beefeater for your fry up breakfast.

Yes, OK, I'm biased, as it is run by friends, but it's Cascais' British Pub of choice.

All the usual foods, Portuguese and British, from the fry up to the cornish pasty.

They've also got large screen TVs for all the sporting events and the usual satellite services to provide them.

TinTin and the Two Directors

Looks like we're going to be getting some Tintin movies:

Peter Jackson is getting involved in another trilogy taken from a series of beloved books - Belgian comic-strip hero Tintin.

Only this time he's directing just one of the films and getting some help from a certain Steven Spielberg.

The film-makers are teaming up to make three digital 3D features using the performance-capture technology developed for The Lord of the Rings and King Kong.

The film will be made for Spielberg's company Dreamworks, which is also backing Jackson's screen adaptation of bestseller The Lovely Bones.

It's not known who will direct the third film.

OK, I know Tintin is popular, but I'd much rather see some decent Asterix movies made

Why Get a Mosquito Ringtone?

A lot of people may laugh at the thought of mosquito ringtones for your cellphone. There are a lot of free ringtones and free MP3 ringtones on the Internet, so why get a queer ringtone the sound of a buzzing mosquito in your phone?

There is actually a reason for this. Studies show that the human ears would lose their ability to recognize high frequency sounds as it ages. As one gets older, the inner ear and the eardrum are becoming less active and flexible. If this happens it can no longer recognize high frequency vibration sound. So if you were a teenager living with an adult or your grandparents, they probably won’t be disturbed with the high-pitched sounds of your mosquito ringtones.

So get the best usual free Cingular Ringtones or free Sprint Ringtones now and leave these buzzing sounds.

Mac Poker

One of the porblems we all have with this new exciting online life is that not everything works on every machine. This might seem a little silly, as most things work through browsers, so they should all be the same, right? Doesn't matter what the underlying operating system is?

Well, yes and no. There's the part where Microsoft doesn't actually follow it's own guidelines in IE, meaning that Forefox )or Opera or Safari) are rule compliant while IE isn't. But that's not all.

Many of the more interesting and exciting sites actually ask you to download software which will then operate on your own machine, not inside the browser. Poker sites, just as an example.

Which brings us to the problem of, how do we find thhose sites that do in fact work with hte OS and machines that we have? Fortunately for Mac users there's Mac Poker. It's an excellent little site that provides you not just with a list of the sites that are compatible with the Mac and offer poker, no, it's much more than that.

For example, here's a full review of Pacific Poker. Where it's good, where it's not quite so good (the reviews are both complete and informative, they're not just sales pitches).

There's also a full listing of online casino bonuses to round out the information.

All in all it's as complete a guide to poker on the Mac as you're going to find and is thus highly recommended.

Water on Mars

Nasa's made this great find, that there's enough water on Mars to cover the planet, to actually make a planetary sea.

 

MARK COLVIN: There's little in outer space that fires the imagination more than the possibility of life on Mars.
For life there needs to be water, and the latest news from NASA is that there is plenty of that.
A new radar that's measured ice deposits on Mars indicates that there's enough frozen water there to cover the entire planet to a depth of about 11 metres.
The find doesn't bring us any closer to knowing whether there was life on Mars, but it has revived the hopes of some that there could be life on the planet in the future, as Paula Kruger reports.
PAULA KRUGER: It has long been seen as the dry, dusty red planet.
But the latest discovery is pouring a lot of cold water, or, more correctly, ice on that belief.
In a joint effort by NASA, the Italian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency's Mars Express Spacecraft, scientists have discovered the frozen mass on Mars' South Pole is more than three and a half kilometres deep.
Dr Jonathan Clarke is an associate at Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University. He says the find is a welcomed surprise.
JONATHAN CLARKE: Well, people have known about the layer deposits at the pole regions of Mars for a very long time, since the early 70s. Some very spectacular satellite images have been acquired from various missions since then, but we haven't really known what they've been made of. People have suggested there've been layers of dust or layers of ice mixed with dust, or other materials. What this recent finding shows is that they are almost pure water ice, at least 90 per cent pure, which is really very amazing and quite unexpected.

Roll on hte terraforming project!

New Directory!

As we should all know by now, the success or not of our efforts on the web depends upon how well we can get our results read by the search engines. Get a decent result, high on the listings, and you can make money. Even if money isn't the aim, visibility still matters, otherwise why are we bothering to do this?

In order to gain that visibility some form of marketing is necessary and the old methods really have been tried to death. Which is why this new directory looks so interesting. Based upon Wordpress software they've been very clever in turning the advantages of blogging software into a benefit to a directory. In effect, a Wordpress Directory.

For example, blogging software includes automatic (or semi- at least) pings, which are what tell the search engines that there's new content for them to spider. The traditional directories don't so this, they are simply static and don't tell anyone at all when the underlying sites have changed.

It looks like a very interesting approach and at a mere $3 per entry into the directory I have a feeling that they will be flooded with applications. Might be worth getting your's in now.

Spam and the Superbowl

Yes, spammers will try and interrupt even that, the Superbowl:

Hackers targeted Superbowl-related websites last week in attempt to direct American football fans to sites hosting malware.

Sites related to the Miami venue of the NFL Championship game - www.dolphinsstadium.com and www.miamidolphins.com - were among a number of sites hacked into and modified to insert reference to a hostile script running on Chinese site www.dv521.com. The NFL's Superbowl.com website was not affected by the attack.

Is nothing sacred? The one day in the year that all Americans share?

 

Technorati tags: spam, trojan, superbowl

Sea Launch Zenits

Ooops! might be the correct reaction to this little mishap:

The launch of a communications satellite from a converted oil rig in the Pacific ended in a fireball on Tuesday when the rocket exploded on the launch pad, New Scientist reports.

It was the whole thing that went up.

Sea Launch has previously got 23 kerosene and liquid oxygen-fuelled Zenits off the ground, one of which quickly crashed in 2000 "after a valve problem in the rocket's second stage". Regarding the latest failure, the company said it would "establish a Failure Review Oversight Board to determine the root cause of this anomaly".

According to a report on Spaceflight Now, the Sea Launch live webcast of the fireworks featured the team announcer calling out "main engine start command" and then "go inertial". It elaborates: "But as the smoke and steam billowed from the Russian RD-171 engine firing to life, the rocket didn't begin its normal quick rise skyward. Instead, the three-stage rocket fell out of the camera view as the entire platform was enveloped in the explosion."

Why anyone would in fact launch from the middle of an ocean is an interesting question: the answer is twofold. Governments like to charge lots of money for allowing people to use their land and they also impose absurdly expensive safety restrictions. 

 

Technorati tags: Zenit, SES New Skies, Rocket, Space