Hari and the Mule.

On the heels of the Rings trilogy, Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation gets the green light, with Jeff Vintar writing (with I, Robot, this will be his second Asimov project) and Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth) directing. I’m down, although I’d think much of the first book will be particularly hard to translate into cinema.

Lost in Translation.

So I finally received the Bowlingual translator that Berk earned a few months ago and…well, as you might expect, it’s a bust. Unless I’ve been wildly misreading Berk’s behavior for years now, the translator appears to be randomly guessing, with the same string of barks eliciting diametrically opposed emotions. In other words, it’s useless, unless you really want to interact with your dog via a Tamagotchi. (Although, to be fair, when I just had to crate Berk for a slew of barks at a dog on the street, the Bowlingual responded, “You just don’t get it.”) That might in fact be true.

All this Useless Beauty.

A long-time Elvis Costello fan sours on North. “Now he’s a navel-gazing romantic who apparently let all those Gershwin comparisons go to his head.” Well, I haven’t heard Costello’s latest yet, but I dunno if this is really fair. As the article notes, Elvis was superb on tour last year, and he still seems miles away from Billy Joel country.

Fire in the Hole.

The source code of the much-anticipated Halflife 2 is stolen and pirated online, knocking back its release until April 2004. Hmm, that’s very annoying, and particularly if, as feared, the leak allows unsavory types to exploit further the myriad holes in Valve’s new STEAM launcher. As it is, the DoD servers I admin for are being overrun anew with h4x0rs, teamkillers, and other FPS annoyances, who’ve all received a new lease on life in the shift from WONID to STEAM. I shudder to think what will happen if the smartest of the bunch get their hands on the code and find ways to hack directly into players’ PCs.