Misc - Update

• Via someone on the AnandTech forums (I'm a much less frequent visitor there than I used to be. It feels stale, but maybe it's just me.) - ThinkGeek's April Fools products for 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. LOL
• When we've read "All My Sons" in school, I assumed the author was long gone (Usually I'm less prone than my peers to cast everything before my time to a single time period, but it happens). Then I hear about Arthur Miller's passing and it rings a bell. At least now I've read the obituary.
• I discovered gerbils are completely unknown to my parents. You must understand my parents know everything (unless it was censored by the Soviet propaganda machine or happened after I was born so they had no free time to keep up), and finding they have never heard of the little critters was strange (they are not mentioned in the Soviet encyclopedia. Why would the existence of gerbils be hushed up in the KGB?). I learned about them in primary school, because they are a very common form of wildlife in sandy Ashdod.
• A programming idiom I've never heard before, but have frequently used: RAII. I'll have to make a little informal report at work, to stir up some thinking about a standard way to handle this in our projects, since I've already seen some less-than-perfect code.
• Have been learning ANTLR for work. Found myself reading about the halting problem for fun. Eek.
• Orson Scott Card's new book "Shadow of the Giant" will be out soon. First three chapters are available on his site. w00t!
• Latest episodes of "Enterprise" are actually better. I've been watching them as 0-day bittorrent releases for a while, and I'm almost sorry it's been cancelled.