For desert I poured myself the last bowl of Lucky Charms in the box, but one marshmallow got stuck at the bottom.  I pulled it out, and guess what?  It was the Pot O' Gold marshmallow.

Yes, I found the pot of gold at the end of a box of Lucky Charms.

I clearly need a hobby.

We took a ferry when we were on vacation last week...

It had an impressive steel door to the bridge...

... and an impressive security sign...

... and an impressive slide lock...

... on the non-secure side.

I guess if you're dumb enough to try to hijack this ferry you'll likely be stymied by this marvel of modern security.

Sunscreen on the arms? Check.
Sunscreen on the face? Check.
Sunscreen on that thinning spot on the top of the head?  Check.

Sunscreen on the tops of the feet?  CRAP!

Alright, you like racing but don’t have sponsors?  Does going fast get your blood going but your local constabulary has you on speed dial?  Will your mom not let you borrow the car?

Have no fear, the world of racing sims is here.  Home PCs and video game consoles are now up to snuff and can provide you with an in-home experience to rival that of your favorite arcade.  If, however, you are not satisfied with simply keeping up with the joneses and want to spray them with tire chum and leave them in your turbulence, pay attention, I’ve got the setup for you.

Gran Turismo 4 with a force feedback steering wheel?  Kid stuff.

Microsim Racebase with three 17” LCD monitors?  Go big or go home.

If you really want to go the full nine yards you need the Hexatech™ Racing Simulator.

The Hexatech™ experience is as close to a true race experience as you can get: Feel the real G-forces, battle the accurate force feedback steering and exact car dynamics.  All placed in a multiplayer arena.

Yep, this bad boy is a motion platform with a full 6 degrees of freedom.  There is enough articulation and power in the Hexatech to generate over 2 G’s of acceleration.  A Corvette with a good suspension setup and sticky tires can exceed 1 G on a good day (I’ll tell you for sure, that’s a ton of fun), so there’s no doubt that if you hook yourself into this racing sim you’re going to feel like you’re really there.  Combine the F1-like g-forces with 3 23” LCDs, THX surround sound and a bunch of other cool acronyms and you’ve got guaranteed adrenaline. Heck, if it can impress Jan Lammers it’ll be fine with me.

Are they allowed to do that?  Sure, FCS cut their teeth by making motion simulators for aircraft.  Spun off from Dutch aircraft company, Fokker, FCS has a ton of experience building high-end motion simulators.  Having the military as your customer tends to give you license to generate some really, really cool stuff.

And now for the bad news: you either need to fly to Six Flags in Holland or pony up $227,000 per station.  If, however, you have the bucks and roughly 8000 square feet of floor space you and 19 of your closest friends can get together for some real(ish) hard-core racing.  You are 100% less likely to die… you may, however, puke.
 
Check out FCS’s Hexatech site and be sure to watch the video.

Okay, this is just nasty.

Woman Finds Human Finger In Her Chili
Health Officials Confirm Discovery

Mar. 23 (ABC7) — Customers at a San Jose fast food restaurant became ill after seeing a foreign object in their chili and health officials have confirmed what that object was: a human finger. Now, a full-scale investigation is underway.

Want to curb your fast food cravings?  Read the whole story at KGO's web site.

I've been jealous of my coworkers in Redmond for a while because the Seattle-area has a very cool system for monitoring traffic status.  It now seems that the bay area may finally be catching up. 

Traffic.com now appears to have real-time traffic reporting for the south bay (read: Silicon Valley).  I honestly don't know when they started reporting in real time as last time I looked for real-time traffic in the south bay was a year or so ago.  Traffic.com offers traffic for a number of metro areas like New York, LA and San Francisco.  If your city is not explicitly listed, don't despair, look for the closest metro area.  For example, San Jose is grouped in with San Francisco. 

Where's the beef?  Traffic.com gets some of its funding from ads but it is also a marketing tool for Mobility Technologies to help drive adoption of its telematics technologies (you can sign up for news from them on their products when you register for your free access).  Mobility's travel data program gets federal funding (at $2M for specific metro areas) but they do end up sharing their profits with the government.  Mobility focuses on 3 markets: reselling data to broadcasters, selling real-time equipment to large agencies and finally telematics equipment to consumers.

Mobility's Traffic Pulse Networks® are automated systems for radio and tv broadcasters.  The material on their site reads like the brochures you might find on the desk of a tv or radio sales manager.  In short, buy our service and you'll make money hand-over-fist.

The solutions Mobility sells to businesses and government (and potentially consumers with deep pockets) are focused on delivering the same type of information you get from the web page but in a customizable form.  I could see UPS buying into this type of service to get a leg up on FedEx.

The really cool bit for me is Mobility's telematics.  This is where we should have been ages ago, having real time traffic in our cars that link into the GPS navigation to intelligently route us around bad spots.  It's not explicitly stated on their site but the 2005 Acura RL has technology from Mobility which links GPS with XM-transmitted traffic data.  Dare I say it?  That's so boss.  Now, if I could only get the service in something a little more sporty.

Sources: Mobility's web site, Traffic.com and the clever people who keep posting confidential Mobility business presentations in locations where Google can index them.

I know I could be considered a complete MS lackey (something about MS paying me has a bit of an influence in that) but I must confess... I really love my TiVo (both of them).  I purchased the first TiVo on my wife's insistence and never regretted it.  It is simple to use and packed with great features.  I also have a Windows Media Center and love the features of it as well (check out this post by Ed Bott for an superb comparison of the two devices) but was too cheap to buy a new PC and moved it away from the TV (hmm... keep using my 500MHz Celeron or steal the 3.2 GHz MCE form the living room no one is using?).

My fondness for the TiVo, I'll admit, is partially an over-inflated wish for fair play.  TiVo was the first break the ground for the DVR/PVR market only to see their share of the market slowly be nibbled away by competition and cable/satellite providers offering cheaper (and arguably poorer) solutions.  When Engadget started their TiVo deathwatch my heart sank.  It's so funny how we love to root for the underdog.

Thankfully Comcast and TiVo have worked out a partnership deal which will have TiVo writing the software for Comcast's PVR boxes.  This great news will mean I won't have to worry about replacing my TiVo boxes any time in the immediate future (and the stock market agreed, if only mildly).

Long live TiVo (but please go buy a Windows Media Center PC... it helps put food on my table ).

Omar pointed out today that Wikipedia has a good article on Hotmail.  Lots of interesting facts including the origin of the service's name, "Hotmail".

From Bengt, the original Hotmail logo: