My boss sent me a picture of an old SQL Server shirt that he had hanging in his closet. And by old I mean “SQL Server 7.0”. That inspired me to go looking through my closet to see what I could find.
The Borland Delphi 6 shirt is from a half-day presentation that Borland gave locally sometime in late 1999 or early 2000.
Yes, I can still wear the shirt.
Another entry in the continuing series of identifying applications that want to install free Internet Explorer toolbars.
There is an interesting pattern that is beginning to develop with Sun and Java updates. More about that in a later post.
A recent Harvard study discussed by the BBC confirms what I knew intuitively about Twitter: that “tweeting” is boring and doesn’t convey any useful information. There just doesn’t seem to be enough utility with the service to justify the hype. Follow the link to my Twitter and see what I’ve posted as experiments over the last couple of months. Pretty lame.
Edit: Ars Technica has a review of a report by HubSpot on the subject of Twitter users. The HubSpot report is probably a little more self-serving than the report cited by the BBC. But it’s still interesting in the details that it provides.
As I sit here working to takeover the world while wearing shorts from my Apple MacBook Pro, I just realized how freakishly hot and and uncomfortable the nice shiny case can get.
It’s interesting that the enclosure base is reported as 101F. It sure seems hotter than that. But on bare skin I suppose that is hot enough.
P.S. The cool little app that reported the temperatures is iStatPro.
For the past 8 months or so our dog has been breaking through the fence for some unknown reason. This is new behavior. a couple of weekends back we replaced the last section of fence that hadn’t already been replaced. Today, she broke through again.
Yep, that’s one of the boards she pulled off and broke.
I have yet to catch her in the act. I need to get the cameras set up.
A couple of days ago my trusted Windows XP laptop decided that it was time for me to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. I decided to go ahead with the installation because once Windows determines that it is time to install a new version of IE it won’t stop pestering me until I consent.
I must say, I’m not happy with the new IE 8.
First, the installation completely disregarded the fact that I have a different default browser set up (FireFox). It helpfully said that IE 8 would be my default browser.
So that meant I had to go through all of the excess steps of the “Choose custom settings” process. This eventually led to the “Do you want to discover websites you might like based on websites you’ve visited?” question. The installer helpfully left both choices unchecked.
Thanks, but no I don’t want IE and Microsoft keeping track of places that I go so that Microsoft’s “carefully selected” partners can tell me about all of the “wonderful opportunities” that they have available for me. I don’t mind the question per se. It just irritates me that there was no default choice. The default choice should have been “No.”
If you notice from the “Default Browser Ignored” dialog, the subject of “discovering websites” isn’t even mentioned in the list of things that the installer is going to do for me automatically. Was that just an oversight? What would the “express” setting have been? I suspect that it would have been “Yes.” But maybe that’s just conspiracy thinking on my part …
With the new version of IE, the “tabbed browsing” functionality has ceased working correctly. The new page just stays on the “Connecting …” animation forever.
Getting stuck like that makes it kind of difficult to check and see if the new post to this blog looks OK in IE 8.
My wife and I went to the PIPEX 2009 show yesterday in Portland, OR. While we were there this tacky ribbon caught my attention.
I’m sure that the show judges / organizers had a perfectly good reason for “editing” the ribbon. Perhaps they didn’t have enough produced for the Vermeil place.
This wasn’t the only example of places the were “downgraded” to Vermeil. The were several others.
The show itself was interesting. In fact, it was the first time that she actually admitted to “having fun” at a stamp show.
I saw this headline on the Fox News web site today. Read the Fox article here.
This headline isn’t funny in the “ha ha” sense. Rather, it’s funny in the “smells rancid” sense.
Why does it matter whether or not the trolley driver who allegedly caused the recent accident in Boston had a sex change? How does that have any bearing on the facts of the accident? Did the sex reassignment surgery (SRS) somehow contribute to the accident?
The article itself says that the driver “was hired as a minority because of his transgender status.” Again, how does the driver’s hiring preference have any relationship to the cause of the accident?
Would Fox News have led with the headline “Trolley-Crash Driver Was Black”?
The simple fact is that the detail of the driver’s gender transformation and sexual minority status are the salacious details that entice people to read this article. It’s gossipy and morbidly titilating to read about.
Fox News: You can do better.
I just finished reading a very strange book by Greg Bear, City at the End of TIme. Greg Bear is, IMHO, one of the best working science fiction authors today. Books like The Forge of God, Moving Mars, and Darwin’s Radio are classics. This book is very hard for me to describe without giving away the plot. So, if you want to have your mind bent wondering what sum-runners are, what are Eidolon, what noötic matter is, and just what cats and books have to do with the end of time. Did I say too much? I sure hope not …
An interesting free disk defragmenting program, SmartDefrag from IOBit, contains this free browser tool bar offer. It also helpfully offers to change my search engine.
