Easy Money

Katherine says I can never die while working at Google, because no matter how or where it happens, the authorities will blame her.   We have suitable term life insurance out on each other to cover loss of future income (kitten farms don't keep the lights on and the kibble flowing on just purrs), but Google's benefits dwarf that.

Not even mentioned in the article is the actual term life insurance they also pay for, which is generous but more mundane.

Boston, You're My Home ...

The NY Times has an article on the Boston area which actually starts across the river in Cambridge, to where Katherine and I went on our early dates.

It makes me miss that Dirty Water.

PSA time again

Just a remember, the real blogging action around here is over on our other blog, the Summerhill Kitten Farm. Just trust me on this one, okay.

Y'all Come

For one brief shining moment in my teens, I was on the rolls of the Skaneateles Fire Department. (I never did anything useful before leaving for college, so don't bother to applaud).

Like most departments, they were part of the mutual aid system for NY State, where neighboring departments assist each other during major alarms, be it at the scene or standing by at the requesting station in case of a second unrelated alarm. The slang term for a really big alarm was Southern Mutual Aid (Y'all come).

Alas, Katerina adds new to meaning to this. As reported by the Wall Street Journal's Evelina Shmukler and Peter Sanders reporting from Mississippi's Gulf Coast:

It's easy to get a little lost in Mississippi these days. The influx of rescue, law enforcement, utility and other support crews from all over the country can mean some surreal moments. On Interstate 10, a Miami police cruiser flies by, lights flashing. A New York Police Department vehicle drives down the beachfront road in Gulfport, as does a search and rescue crew from Salt Lake City. The North Charleston Police Department is directing traffic in North Biloxi. A Georgia Bureau of Investigation officer sits across from the Harrison County emergency operations center.

A review

A new local rib joint (it's part of a chain) opened, and Katherine and I stopped in as part of the we-hate-to-cook June tour. (Not be confused with the upcoming too-hot-to-cook July tour, the we're-on-Vacation August tour, or the recently concluded too-busy-to-cook May tour.)

My review is best summed up by I should just gone ahead and made the Hamburger Helper I had planned. The rib joint was not so much bad as just not worth going over there ...

AIM terms of service, Revisited

From News.com:

America Online said late Monday that it plans to revise its user agreement in response to concerns that instant messages sent through the company's service could be monitored.

The new policy for AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM, will stress that the company does not eavesdrop on customer's conversations except in unusual circumstances such as a court order, an AOL spokesman said.

Never Been to Spain

Blame my sister the Bluegrass Mama for this one as well.

States I've visited, not counting airport layovers. I do count the states I have only driven through.



create your own personalized map of the USA.

Oddly enough, a text variation on this almost went into my 10 Things list, in particular that I've been to all the states from Tennessee north and/or east.

From those nice folks at World 66

The Golden Age of blogging

The Register, while quite legit, may not be the best journalism on the web, but they often take the prize for most quotable, like for this survey of broadband users:

A recent survey in the UK discovered that one in four Britons acquired broadband so they could get to the filth. (It may also have discovered, as several readers suggested, that one in three British broadband users lie to surveys about why they get broadband).

On a more serious note, the same article has some interesting insights into how blogging encourages narrow mindsets:

"Eleven people of like mind talk to each other. They had the same views before, they end up with the same views after. But every single one of those eleven people says 'I convinced 10 other people'. Then the blog-boosterism runs 'Aha, we have 11 people who each convinced 10 other people, so that's *110* more votes from BLOGGING! Feel the power OF THE BLOG!' In reality, nothing changed. The choir preached to itself. But everyone got to think that they were an influencer, a kingmaker, even if just for a tiny kingdom," observed Seth Finkelstein

It's not always like that -- I've stumbled across self-contained communities of friends that support each other warmly and graciously. But one does need to remember there is a great big world out there, and our information needs to come from multiple sources.

*sigh*

Hello, sister ...

It's sad when most of one's communications with your own sibling are via blogging.

It's sadder that she gets around to posting on her blog more than I do.

It's saddest when I post more on her blog than I do my own!

mew?

Another month, and another reminder that I really spend more time posting to the Summerhill Kitten Farm than to this fish wrap.

The Turkeys at the Keyboard

Holidays are coming; and that means it's time to fix family computers.

Be careful what you ask for ...

Real Networks set up a petition asking Apple to open up the iPod. The results are not what Real expected.

This is not a shock to me, given Real's heavy handed Internet marketing of the past several years and their general tin ear. My (least) favorite example of Real's handwork is the monthly subscription fee to use their software for ripping your own music as MP3s, whereas iTunes does it for free.

SHA-1 broken?

There's a rumor circulating at the Crypto conference ... that somebody is about to announce a partial break of the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function.

As the quoted link describes, SHA-1 hash functions are critical for password protection in many, many computer systems.

Intel 64 bit Extensions - Spin Cycle

The nice people at The Register (be careful, those people have the one true Bastard Operator from Hell) have an article on how Chipzilla is rolling out 64 bit extensions quietly. Really quietly, because their competitor AMD did it first.

My favorite part is not the technology, but the spin:

...the usually brash Intel has shied away from direct comparisons between its 64-bit extension line and competing processors from AMD. In press materials, Intel benchmarked the new 3.6GHz Xeon chip to its own, older Xeon processors. When asked about this, an Intel representative briefly stood by the line that "Intel does not compare its product to those of competitors in this type of presentation."

Really? What about all these slides reporters receive showing how the Itanium processor beats out Power, UltraSPARC, PA-RISC and Alpha chips on benchmarks?

After being reminded of this, Intel later admitted it does compare its own server products to those of competitors. Just not the new Xeons, apparently.

Consult an adult if you don't know how to post ...

Someone likes certain a Boston Globe columnist less than I do. Unfortunately for her, she regretted her crude hyperbole, especially when Boston Common pointed people to her post and she suddenly had her 15 minutes of fame.

All of which reminds me of why I try avoid cursing in print, and always avoid venting in any way when writing code comments. (Comment should be insight for what the code does. Not what it did last week, but why it does what it does now, and perhaps the occasional suggestion as to how to make it better.)

My gift and my curse is that I try stick to the truth, to the point of bluntness. Not that it improves my professionalism, but at least it's an easy story to stick to.

Later:

The point of this post is that we are responsible for what we say in public, and that the Internet, at heart, is a very public place with a long memory. The scribe at Boston Common didn't go searching for her post; the Internet served it up on a platter because she had told it to.

The author of the post which started this requested I delete the link to the post. I have done so, leaving to a generic pointer to her blog. I've also edited out the magic word from her comment (hey, this a family blog, more or less).

I'm not deleting her comment or the link to her site; she's welcome to secure the site if she doesn't want anonymous visitors.

Your Every Need

Stolen from my spouse Katherine's blog is a link to this story about Microsoft Money's online component having a multi-day outage.

Is Microsoft less reliable than other software companies? Probably not, but their breath and depth of market share makes them more visible. If they are less reliable, it's not any one KLOC is worse than anyone else's, but that their attempts at tight integration cause the failure to be seen in more programs.

The Eye of the Tiger

You don't want to be here. Go read our more light-hearted web log on our cats