I really like what Lou Brothers has done in his <a href="http://www.loubrothers.com/selfproject.html">Self Project</a> page.  If I started one for myself (which I just might), I would want to learn basic/intermediate Korean, maybe some Russian to communicate with Annie, read books in Spanish, learn auto-mechanic skills, and duplicate his goal of learning XML/PHP.  All that, and install/run Linux on a computer I built myself or with a friend.  (The rest of <a href="http://www.loubrothers.com/">Lou's site</a> is recommended, as well.)

Some cool stuff is happening on <a href="http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/">Simon Willison's Weblog</a>.  He has a cron job to grab an XML document with update times for his favorite blogs from <a href="http://blo.gs/">blo.gs</a>, which he uses PHP to turn into an HTML list sorted by last-update.  He used this to create a Mozilla/Netscape sidebar.  Neat!  I suggested using the CSS <code>:visited</code> pseudoclass to style the links of visited blogs, but a <a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156011">Mozilla bug</a> prevents that from happening.

The closer I get to going back home, but more anxious I am.  One one hand, I can think of a million things I will enjoy back in California (eat at Taco Bell, not worry about mosquitos, drive a car).  On the other hand, I can think of a million things I won't be able to do (eat kebabs on the street corner, order my favorite eggplant, train it to Beijing for sightseeing).

I'm supposed to come up with a list of candidate domain names for the website of CRIS Elementary School in Tianjin, China, which will be moving to the Binhai area later this year.  Any original ideas?  I'm currently looking at other schools for ideas.  I believe both top-level and <code>.cn</code> domains are acceptable.  Lawrence didn't like <a href="http://china-domain.net/english/apl/app/whois.asp?domainname=crisschool.com">http://www.crisschool.com</a>, and I agree.  At the moment, I'm looking into <a href="http://www.edu.cn/20010815/188548.shtml">CERNET</a>, the Chinese Education and Research Network.