June 24, 2004

Featured Organization: If you saw the news earlier this week, you probably heard about the X Prize. Well, you may not have heard that term specifically, but you probably heard about the first commercial space launch. It's actually part of a larger program, called the Ansari X Prize, the goal of which is to promote private, non-governmental space travel. The first team to send a space craft capable of carrying three people to an altitude of 100 km, and repeat the flight within two weeks with the same craft, wins the $10 million dollar prize. It's all inspired by the various aviation prizes from the early part of the 20th century, most notably the Orteig prize which Charles Lindbergh won in 1927 for his solo trans-Atlantic flight. This is a very cool and exciting concept, and so far more than 20 teams from seven different countries have signed up to compete. Check out the X Prize website for more details.

Featured Website: It's that time of year again, that time being summer. The sun is warm, and the beach is beckoning. However, the tide can be an important aspect of your beach experience. Sure, the newspapers publish the tides, but who wants to have to go and find a newspaper when you want to hit the beach? Wouldn't it be easier to have a website that can tell you the tide schedule almost anywhere in the world instantly? Tides.info provides exactly that.

Featured Game: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. I've actually owned this game for a while now, but only recently did I break it out and play it. And you know what? It's really, really, good. There's a very good reason why it won top honours at Penny Arcade's 75 Annual We're Right Awards, with Best Absolutely Everything. It's that good. It remains true to the original Prince of Persia heritage, while being modern, slick, and heaps of fun. Everything that Enter the Matrix should have had, this game has, and a lot more. No other game lets you run up walls, flip over your enemies heads, jump from wall to wall to scale narrow vertical passages, and coolest of all, manipulate time. That's right, you get to mess with time. Between freezing your foes in stasis to rewinding time to correct mistakes, the fourth dimension is generally your slave. And since this game just took a significant price drop, there is no good reason why you aren't playing it.