Archive for October, 2003

Some crazy startup in Israel has produced an optical digital signal processor that can operate at 8 trillion operations per second. Damn! Just imagine the video games I could play with a processor like that at the helm.

(from slashdot)

Daylight Savings Time is coming to a close soon; that magical time of the year when we mysteriously move our clocks back an hour. And nobody seems to really know why.
Is it because of:

	The Farmers?
	Something to do with Schoolbuses?
	Vast Right-Wing conspiracy?

Take the Quiz to find out!
If you’re like me, and decide that DST is mega dumb, go Sign The Petition and try to get it abolished.

我甘嬭

The world is a much bigger place when you know unicode.
不要

What’s the longest one-syllable word?
Scraunched?!?!?

Once, twice, thrice, what comes next?
NOTHING

How do you say the # symbol?
Hash (I always call it “sharp”, and get ridiculed.)

What’s the difference between a road and a street?

What words rhyme with this stuff?

You can spend hours here learning stuff nobody really cares about.

Here’s an interesting little editorial piece on “Utility Computing”. The basic idea behind this concept is to make IT work like electricity or water.. you just plug “something” into the wall, pay for it, and you get the goods, no problems.

What really caught my eye was the author.. a Senior VP over at Dell? I’ve met VP’s in the past, and they never really seemed like they “get it” (in the big picture sense). Take away their buzzwords, pull the straws out of their nose and grab away their play-doh and the are pretty much just overpriced MBA’s in nice suits, and that’s about it. I get the sneaking suspicion that some dirty scruffy programmer or otherwise competent tech-head over at Dell wrote this piece, and slipped it under the bosses door. But maybe I’m wrong.

Concepts like utlity computing fascinate me. It seems like the best idea ever, kinda like

“Hey wouldn’t it be cool if we could somehow get cake and muffins to travel through telephone lines, and whenever you pick up the phone you can have something to eat!”

-or-

“I want my car to run off of pee.”

Sure, these are great ideas, but when you actually start to think about the problem and formulate a meaningful solution, you quickly determine that it just can’t be done with the existing tools in this environment.

Maybe in the next decade, but definitely not now.

Anyway read the article, get educated. Remember folks: “IT” ain’t easy.

Picked a DJ! We went with the same guy that Anne and Mark got, he’s really cool, we met him last night.

FAIR is a left-wing media watchgroup that I occasionally get emails from.
They’re pretty good; they wade through the media swamp, trying to point out inconsistencies, errors, flat out lies, you get the idea. I’m going to start publishing some of the their more interesting updates here in the future.

Anyway, lately they’ve been doing some pieces on uber-conservative media commentator Bill O’Liery (did I spell that right?)

If you haven’t watched this guy’s show before, you really are doing yourself a disservice. Have a paper bag handy.

This is the first piece. This is the second piece, in response to the hundreds of letters and emails from various sources pointing out his errors.

This sucks:

You know things aren’t good when your government tries to use fearmongering to push it’s idiot agenda.

The other day I’m driving my honda civic hybrid, and out of nowhere the integrated motor assist (the part of the car that makes a hybrid a hybrid) mysteriously stops working. The car still runs, but all of the fancy hybrid battery features are gone, and the instrument panel lights up like a christmas tree. So I bring it to the dealership to get it checked out.

2 days later, I get it back, and the service dude tells me, and this is a direct quote, “The brain went bad, so we had to give it a new brain”. WHAT?!?!? Are cars so fancy now that you can actually give them brain transplants?

So now my car has a new brain. The scary part? The car actually behaves differently now! As any hybrid owner will tell you, when you actually drive the car you spend about 85% of the time staring at the lights on the car’s console (trying to minimize gasoline loss, etc..) and about 15% of the time with your eyes actually on the road. And it is definitely much different than it used to be.

Thank god it was still under warranty, they told me that new brains are not cheap parts to get.

This of course begs the question: If your car gets a new brain, does that mean you need to rename it?

I’m not sure what to do here.

Any thoughts?