Here to Stay

The annoyance of the automated windows updater can be dealt with, via equally obscure command line or GUI means; this was detailed on the coding horror blog. To make it go away until the next reboot, use

net stop "automatic updates"

A random link of interest is We Tell Stories. Pretty computations can be found here on the GPU for rendering 3d Julia fractals and here on Cell for real time ray tracing. A book on Cell programming, with example source code.