JarJar Extreme: Check out JarJar at Lollapalooza.

Walrusman Online: Dedicated to the alien cruelly disfigured by the savage old Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Is it art or is it merely frightening? Check out numbers 9, 13, and 21.

Weak spoilers about Harsh Realm.

Yes, we had an internet outage over the weekend.

Get your webpage's Wank Rating.

Haven't had your fill of snarky British flames about the internet?

I was wrong. The articles on Go Corp. (see yesterday) were really weak.

Special Edition

Which one of these pitches for a new television series is the fake?

MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE (or, What would happen if Doogie Howser finally got lucky?) Nine-year-old Malcolm, the middle child, has a genius IQ, brothers who tear each other apart and parents who struggle to keep it all together. Welcome to MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE, an edgy new family comedy seen through the eyes of a highly intelligent fourth-grader. To say the Wilkerson family is unconventional is putting it mildly, but despite the insanity, Malcolm is insightful, precocious and above all, normal. In fact, young Malcolm is perfectly content playing with his brothers, skateboarding or avoiding the school bully - in other words, being an average kid. His world is suddenly turned upside down when he is forced into the "gifted" class and finds himself surrounded by a group of exceptionally talented outcasts. With his endearing yet cynical wit, Malcolm navigates his way through the sometimes treacherous, always entertaining waters of the adult world.

RYAN CAULFIELD (or, What do you get when you cross 90210 with NYPD Blue?) Nineteen-year-old RYAN CAULFIELD enjoys hanging out with his best friends and his girlfriend, CASEY, at her college. But instead of continuing his schooling, Ryan has opted for another form of education - the Philadelphia Police Department. Still living at home with his weary, widowed mother RACHEL, Ryan is determined to make a good impression on his first day with the force. But as soon as he arrives at the precinct, he's whisked off by his partner, a veteran cop, to a gruesome murder scene where six bodies, lie strewn across a street. Suddenly, the harsh reality of police work makes Ryan question whether he's cut out for the job. While his fellow cops are supportive - especially the attractive KIM VERAS, who has taken a liking to him - Ryan feels caught between the gritty streets of Philly and the carefree lifestyle of his friends, feeling out of place in both worlds - and at home in neither.

HARSH REALM (or, What do you get when you cross VR.5 with a story line?) HARSH REALM explores a highly-advanced virtual reality world - where anything is possible. After seeing the horrors of war in Sarajevo, LT. THOMAS HOBBES is finally ready to settle down with his fiancé SOPHIE (Samantha Mathis). But the military has one more assignment for Hobbes: test out the newest in military combat training - a top secret computer simulation known as Harsh Realm. Inside Harsh Realm, Hobbes immediately finds himself fighting for his life, forming an uneasy alliance with a virtual character, MIKE PINNOCHIO. But as he pursues his mission - beating the highest scoring player, OMAR SANTIAGO - Hobbes begins to realize that Harsh Realm is more than just a game. And what's worse: he's trapped inside this world, which is without rules and without mercy.

As if you didn't already guess, none of them.

I've always dreamed of the "clipboard" computer; I remember talking about it with a friend of mine (Dave Rodger) in 1986 or 1987. I wanted something which would simplify my note-taking in college. (Stop laughing, I took notes at least as often as I wrote haiku.) I took notes on white photocopy paper in a clipboard (with some graph paper at the back in case I needed it). I then filed the loose pages into folders for each class. This let me carry around a single notetaking device instead of one for each class. Also, it let me lay out multiple pages at once to study for tests. (Also (Frodo) falling asleep on them didn't put spiral notebook ring imprints on my face.)

Anyway, I remember a couple things which were key with my concept of the e-clipboard. First was that it didn't convert your handwriting into text on the screen. It left it in your own handwriting. Behind the scenes, though, it would recognize and index it. I recall thinking that handwriting recognition would never work on individual characters; that it would probably have to work on whole words.

It would understand gestures for commands. I remember suggesting that circling and writing a question mark over a word might search for occurances of that word and related topics. Related topics were determined by what else was on the page with (or nearby) that word.

Finally, my device was also supposed to learn how you took notes. (e.g. if at 1pm on Tuesday, you wrote something "Diff Eq, 24 Mar 87, 1" it might learn to do it for you.)

So why tell you of all this? Well, there's what looks like an interesting set of stories on the unfortunate death of Go Corp. Go was trying to make a handheld computer which you could write on. I thought that they had some good ideas in their OS.

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