Just want to bring everyone's attention to a friend of mine doing some really amazing research over at Stanford. Bjoern was instrumental in helping get the latest incarnation of buzztracker off the ground. During Christmas 2003, after climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with his dad, he pumped out the PHP routines to grab the news off of the Google pages in about two days. He also helped make sure the servers didn't die during the first couple of months of collection, that data backups ran smoothly and that MySQL played happily with the scripts.

He has some insane projects in the pipeline that, if I mention here, he may have to kill me. Or maybe some small, pasty white bald man smelling of a computer lab will show up late at night, standing at the foot of my bed, glaring down at me through coke-bottle glasses, teeth rank with rotten fillings like the employees of Yodobashi Camera, blood and Cheetos staining his lab coat, breathing deeply, erratically from walking up my steep stairs to the second floor — glaring long and hard at my sleek, tanned, 6'3" physique, my diamond naval piercing, a nude model next to me in bed, another nude model on the futon on the floor next tot he bed, a tattoo of Kuhaku on her left buttocks — he'll open his mouth and say, "This is for Bjoern. This is for revealing his insane projects," as crusty, dark spittle soars in all directions and he plunges into my thick, chiseled chest a PPro 200 processor, screaming, "THERE IS NO FLOATING POINT ERROR!!!"

I do not want to be assassinated by the Stanford undercover comp-sci version of Leon. So I will say, just keep an eye on Bjoern's blog.