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This shouldn’t be news to any regular MMORPG player. It certainly isn’t for me. I’ve seen this happen since the early days of Ultima Online. Yet, even though we players know that the female avatar we interact with on the screen has a good chance of having a pasty male user controlling it, we still don’t assume as much.

Hell, I know guys that only play as girls in MMORPG’s. The slight-to-infinite increase in monetary gains, combined with the ease of getting into groups makes it a no-brainer. I tried it a few times, but since I like to create characters that reflect my personality as much as possible, I just didn’t feel comfortable with ample hips and swinging bosom (or is that ample bosom and swinging hips? …no matter!). Although, I must admit, the female models in WoW look much better than the male ones.

Mission: find out which local lawyer plays as Oola:

A 36-year-old female attorney from Austin, Texas, is the real-life person behind the sexy and smart female Oola and the bruiser male Smotis in NCsoft’s “City of Heroes” but she said the differences between her avatars and herself didn’t go far beyond physical appearance.

“I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t branch out more. I think it was a lack of originality on my part,” said the lawyer, who asked that her name not be used.

read more on c|net.

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  except for the Tori Spelling
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  It appears you can learn your way to uberness!

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• Hi-tech bikini has built-in exposure warning - Technology - smh.com.au »
• Solestrom’s new UV-detecting bikini - Engadget » the $190 Solestrom UV-metering bikini, which happens to look like something straight out of a Bond film, tells you where the sun’s at on the UV scale from 0 to 20

I sent a support email to Technorati a few weeks ago. It seems my site would not get indexed by the service no matter how or when I pinged it. After a few days of no response, I googled to see if anyone else had the problem, and it seems as though this happens to even the most active of blogs.

It was disheartening to hear stories of websites continuing in this state for longer than 140 days. Those website owners never got any response from Technorati’s support. But some did. I was beginning to think I got myself banned or put on a blacklist. Prior to this, Technorati would update within 30 minutes of a ping.

Technorati is a great place to reference blogs and personal websites. It has a great tagging system and I though it updated continuously. I would find all kinds of gems on there. A lot of traffic to drzy came referred from Technorati, as well as many crosslinks and trackbacks.

Today, I finally received a response from Technorati support, and my site has successfully indexed. They didn’t spell out the problem, the email just indicated that they “adjusted something on their end”. Many other people with the problem got the exact same response with the exact same results, but over much different time frames.

I’m glad. I had almost written Technorati off. I even removed their link from my page. I’m not confident that they have the problem resolved, but am content that their band-aid for it is working, for now.

She went on to star in (a) French Film, Bed and Breakfast.

beep beep beep beep

Awwww, she’s all grown up. (At least her eyes have cleared up.)

• Metallica Caves, Joins iTunes - Jul 26, 2006 - E! Online News » Metallica sells out for the millionth time, Oh how far they have fallen from their pompous diatribes.
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First up, a bikini from Solestrom that has a UV meter in its belt. It will tell you on a scale of 0 to 20 how much you are getting sautéed.

And also, the FDA finally approved a sunscreen ingredient that has been in use around the world for many years now. Mexoryl SX is different from sunscreens currently being sold in the US in that it blocks all forms of UV radiation. Up til now, the only UV rays that were successfully blocked were both types of UVB and long-wave UVA. Short-wave UVA is not blocked in these, and many doctors consider this form to be the most harmful of all the UVA due to its high penetration into skin.

• Shawn Hogan - hero » Software Developer will not settle with the MPAA.
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• AMD officially purchases ATI » A trump move. The second largest CPU maker buys one of the largest GPU makers.
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A trump move. While I haven’t personally purchased an ATI product in over a decade, I do use AMD processors in most of my built systems… for over a decade. ATI has made great strides in the past 5+ years and their cards are arguably neck and neck with NVIDIA’s products.

The merger excites the gamer in me, as the possibilities of CPU-GPU sharing, cooperation, and even on-chip die-level integration can come from this. AMD already produces it’s own chipsets and motherboards, so we could easily see an entire integrated motherboard fully manufactured by AMD.

Intel’s answer? Pulling licensing for ATI to make Intel chipsets. No real shocker there.

One of the recurring musings I’ve had over the years is what would life be like if near-humans had survived until modern times. By that I mean species such as Neanderthals, Java men, “cave men”, or other species sharing our genus. Unfortunately, my cynical side eventually takes over these thoughts and reminds me of how humans have treated other humans over the course of history. Still, my whimsical side imagines other alternate realities.

Maybe a world with evolutionary “robots” would have evolved, with Neanderthals taking on physical and repetitive tasks for which their mind and bodies were more suited. Homo sapiens would pick up the planning, engineering, and design aspects of society. A sort of symbiotic relationship. Not very romantic.

A little better to imagine that cavemen evolved rapidly alongside us. That we were competitive and fully aware of our differences, but existed together on the planet in separate countries or localities. I think this shows that I watched too much Star Trek : the Next Generation when I was younger. Next will be a diatribe about a prime directive.

Not really. But, what if they surpassed us, both physically and mentally. Then we became a pet race, existing in relative luxury, but spayed and neutered with our lives existing primarily to entertain.

Or, what if we intermingled after many years of separation. The mind can imagine great and terrible things, and I think of a new races that form… dwarf-like, troll-like, even elf-like that also show I played too much Dungeons and Dragons.

Ah, the magic of what-ifs!

These thoughts brought to you today by the birth of the Neanderthal Genome Project. Scientists are now working hard on limited DNA samples to decipher the entire Neanderthal genome project, in hopes to show the causes and roots of our own evolution.

And, also by that damn Geico commercial… “I think I’ve lost my appetite, thank you”

(If anyone has some good SciFi that addresses these issues, please feel free to suggest some! I’ve always loved novels and stories that address “social” SciFi… such as David Brin’s Earth and Startide Rising, and Orson Scott Card’s Ender series.)

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