Curious George: Organizing my bookmarks. Any good programs (Win) out there that will help me maintain a succinct, nicely-formatted HTML link list with comments? Firefox bookmarks aren't very usable for me. Non-bloatware is a plus.

Eurovision winning songs: all the the kitsch and talent of Eurovision winners going back to 1956. [Each song is streaming/.wma format] more inside

Curious George: Log file analyzer. Any recommendations for a low-cost/free server log analyzer for Windows? Nothing fancy; I mostly just want to resolve IPs to domains and see what corporations/agencies are visiting my site.

<i>When your freight's destroyed</i>, and it don't look good, who you gonna call? Country & McDaniel! Their business is shipping disasters. Neat gallery of foulups, like the Sealand grounding nightmare, an Iraq missile hit on an Airbus freighter, the worst pothole in the world, and what happens with there's a fire on the fireworks freighter. [Bad web design alert -- their huge menus are top-posted on all the pages and you have to scroll past them to get to the content]

Curious George: HTML coding. I'm hand-editing an HTML document and it's corrupt because one of the tables is not closed off properly. Is there a utility that can help find the mistake, perhaps by indenting all the code? I find that the online validators aren't very helpful for this.

Curious George (yes, another): Wiki Do any Wikis support data fields, or are they all just blobs of text? Reason being... more inside

Russian jokes. True, Yakov Smirnoff is known for that annoying Slashdot meme, but he also brought morsels of Russian humor to the West. Russian humor is especially rich and draws on the country's diverse politics and culture. Yet translated into English, many of the jokes vary from delicious, to absurd, to puzzling.

When Microsoft Flight Simulator's not enough. Some guys in L.A. built a 737 simulator in a home garage. Scroll from bottom to top on the updates page to watch three years of progress as panels, avionics, visual collimators, and other gadgets get added.

Curious George: Remembering the dotcom era. What are your memories of the dotcom era? Did the boom of those years affect you directly? Was life better for you back then? Did the times seem more optimistic? (granted, there wasn't all this 9/11 stuff) more inside

Curious George: Computer security. Can anyone point me to a geeky resource that shows all the points to hit for hardenening a personal Windows 2000 computer from exploits? more inside

Stratellite blimp, floating at 65,000 ft, may allow WiFi in cars and in rural areas that DSL doesn't reach. The first airship underwent trials a few months ago, according to press releases. Whether Sanswire can field the blimps remains sketchy, but with crowding and latency problems on satellites and telcos doing little to reach the boonies, this technology may hold promise.

Database of inflight incidents (via FAA/NASDAC). Pilots and flight attendents can get immunity from FAA sanctions by filing an report. Colorful searching shows not just technical reports that help improve safety, but bizarre incidents involving nude sunbathers, drunk passengers, and crew falling asleep. (more) more inside

Curious George: Message board elitism. I am curious whether you all have had experiences with elitism and "inner circles" within any online communities. more inside

Rainbow cracking. Passwords are almost universally stored on computers in an unreversable hashed form. Traditionally the cracker has had to generate billions of passwords to match the hashes. But the falling cost of storage has outfoxed computation speed: just precompute it all in advance. What used to require weeks now just takes minutes.

Prelude to Journey to the Center of the Earth. Next month, Japanese scientists plan to start drilling 4.3 miles (7 km) under the ocean floor to reach the Earth's mantle. The effort, as part of an international drilling research program, hopes to not only recover core samples but also to find exotic bacteria. The project promises to overshadow Mohole, a similar effort that consumed $36 million in the early 1960s and fell far short of expectations.

Curious George: Who gets se.xxx? I hope this isn't too lame of a question but when ICANN opens TLDs, how does the lucky person who gets se.xxx, my.tv, news.info, etc finagle it? Is it truly who can pound out the form and submit it fastest once a TLD is open? Or do these people negotiate for it well in advance? (No, I'm not settin' up no porn site!)

Curious George: Too many files, can't burn a DVD. I'm doing data archival and there are 15,000 files in my directory. All of them must be put on the DVD. Nero Express's "Select Files" menu grinds to a halt because it can't populate the list with so many files. Is there a different DVD data authoring program for Windows that might be slick enough to not get bogged down by something silly like this? Does anyone make a command-line burner? Thanks, fellow monkeys.

Diet Coke and Diet 7-Up with Splenda are rolling onto store shelves across the U.S. this week. It reflects a growing market shift in sweeteners for the first time in 20 years. There are widespread claims that Nutrasweet, said to have been rushed to market in 1983, may be a health risk. However, Splenda is not without its share of victims, critics, and those on the fence. Maybe this is a better idea?

Curious George: Circumventing domain blocks. Every once in awhile over the years I've run across a website that won't let me look at it unless I'm in the .gov or .edu domain. more inside

Curious George: Alaskan products? I like to look at labels and see where stuff is made. OK, granted, I have no life. However I realized today that I've bought items made in virtually every state except Alaska. more inside