I'm gonna learn the best way to walk
I'm gonna search and find a better way to talk
I'm gonna spit and polish my old rough-edged self
Til I get rid of every single flaw
I'm gonna be the World's best friend
I'm gonna go around shaking everybody's hand
Hey, I'm gonna be the cotton-pickin' Rage of the Age
I'm gonna be a diamond some day

Old Chunk Of Coal

And it's way, way down inside

From the editorial review at Amazon: "Even listeners who don't share the faith expressed in these songs will have trouble resisting the unflinching intimacy of the performances."

ITMS has the standard 30-second samples. Tracks 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 are the uptempo gospel songs.

'I've Got That Old Time Religion In My Heart' - Iris DeMent, Lifeline

This is the website of "MetaCortex", the company that Neo worked for in the Matrix. There's a lot of info here, and evidently multiple puzzles waiting to be solved. It's one of those "Alternate Reality Games", like Majestic. I'm way too busy with Kryptos & Cyrillic Projector stuff at the moment to dig into it, but it looks like fun, so I wanted to at least meme it.

More info is here:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~mlpatter/matrix/

Enjoy,

Elonka :)

Matrix Puzzle - MetaCortex Headquarters

Neal Stephenson has a new book, "Quicksilver", coming out next week.

Pursuing the 17th-Century Origins of the Hacker's Grail

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. "

This poem makes me think of Saddam Hussein..

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias

] "They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell
] you. Meat made the machines."
]
] "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're
] asking me to believe in sentient meat."
]
] "I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are
] the only sentient race in that sector and they're made
] out of meat."
]
] "Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based
] intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
]
] "Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied
] them for several of their life spans, which didn't take
] long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"

Before The Matrix, There was Only Meat