The Mozilla team has been clever with ads before, but their newest idea really takes the cake.

If only I were good at video games.

This is what I was talking about with CRM. Tim's got it wrong about Ruby and Perl, though. Use CRM for the datamining, and you can do this in an afternoon in Perl as well.

Making recommendations based on "people like you" isn't anything new. Think radio stations. I've recently made comments about talk radio hosts, and that's because I live in a place where "people like me" are apparently rare. Paige can tell you if that's a good thing or a ban thing. Good lettuce is rare around here, too. ...

Unfortunately, it means that I end up listening to various talk radio shows (off of two major stations, one that's conservative, and the local NPR affiliate out of Chapel Hill). The conservative station is where I get my recipes.

Today I finally found a music station I liked, but the reception was bad everywhere I tried listening to it. Apparently I'm on the very edges of its territory (or maybe its because my car's antenna is missing). Aargh. Where are the other people like me?

This past weekend we went and visited my brother and his family in Hampton, Va. We drove up there on Friday night after 8pm and got there around 1am. The late night driving can wear you down but the roads were clear and when we got to Norfolk I was glad because when I almost missed a turn I was able to take it quickly since no traffic was around. We were coming up to an underwater tunnel and Max says, “Don’t take the tunnel!” so I turn quickly to the exit before the tunnel. We called my sister-in-law and she says there are two tunnels we can take to get to Hampton. We then started driving into some restricted area so I made a U-turn and the road back to the Highway was blocked by a parked train. Well we found our way back to the correct route and at this time I was getting hungry. I pulled over at the McDonald’s and try to order 3 cheeseburgers but they said no. I had to order from the “late-night” menu which only lets you order the bigger sandwiches and value meals. They don’t let you order from the dollar menu. I didn’t want to spend that much money. I should have gone to Wendy’s. We got to my brother’s house fine and we slept okay. We were on an air mattress, which is fine, but Jayden slept in every direction he could and on top of me. I moved to the couch and let Max fend for himself.

We had a good weekend. We attended their Pioneer day activity. We did some fishing with cane poles at a park, had a cook out and ate smores. It was Max’s first time eating smores. Where have you been? The best thing was going to Water Country USA in Williamsburg, Va. A great water park because you can let your toddlers go down the big raft rides with the family. They had life jackets for everyone to wear. Jayden enjoyed the Big Daddy Falls. He was a little shocked at first but did not cry. At the kid/toddler play area he got warmed up to the idea and was sliding by himself. He really enjoyed the wave pool too. This trip helped him out a lot. At daycare this week the teachers are saying he has really opened up. This week he went down the slides at the daycare by himself for the first time. He’s done that at home but hasn’t for them. He’s participating more in other activities too. Even the speech therapist who sees him twice a week said he’s opened up this week. Shoot, if that what it takes to help my boy, we’re going to the water park every weekend. We have the Wet-N-Wild Emerald Pointe nearby.

On the way in to work, the guy spouting off on the radio said that Israel's fight with Hezbollah wasn't going well. But Syrian intelligence has taken the head of Hezbollah to Syria for a "series of meetings" with top Syrian officials. One of these things is not like the other.

Yesterday, Kofi Annan said the Israelis "apparently deliberately" targetted his peacekeepers. He didn't say why they would want to do that. Later, a General who worked with one of the dead peacekeepers explained that email sent last week strongly hinted that Hezbollah was all over the post. One of these things is not like the other. (To be fair, Annan has publicly accepted Israel's statement that the bombing wasn't intentional).

BTW, what do you think got Annan to change position so quickly? Obviously I don't have access to whatever happened behind-the-scenes, but I'd bet pictures had a lot to do with it. Not necessarily that picture, but probably pictures of the bomb site before the bomb went off.

Not only did I marry a gorgeous woman, but I also married a lady able to understand what I'm talking about. Whenever I've tried to dumb down a topic, she's called me on it.

For instance, one time we were talking about peer-to-peer networks. After going 'round in circles for some time, she said "but the way you're describing it doesn't make sense; whoever's offering the file is a server, and whoever's downloading it is a client." Yep, spot on. So I said "yeah, but the server can also be a client of other computers in the network, and the clients can be servers themselves."

To which she replied "but isn't that what happens when you upload a picture to a website, or even when you type in email on a website?" Yep, right again.

The big deal about P2P networks isn't the technology, which has been around for ages; it's the fact that you feel like peers in the network. Your computer wears whatever hat it needs and plays whatever role it always plays, but you feel different. That's the secret.

One of the big secrets in computers today is that the cheap stuff will do what you want. My personal computer is the slowest processor I could buy seven years ago. It's done well. I admit that I don't play games, and I'm not a fan of the upcoming Windows' need for superpower graphics hardware.

I'm not even a fan of Windows.


And while I can explain why using Linux means that I can keep old hardware running longer (because I don't upgrade X Windows, GNOME, or KDE; if I upgraded those I'd be in the same boat as the poor Windows schmucks), I won't brag today.

What I will brag about is that when I took the clothes out of the dryer today, I found one-third of my USB thumb drive. Then I found the other two pieces. I snapped them together and things are working just fine. I need some superglue, but that's it.

The thing is, like my computer, this drive was the cheapest, slowest, and smallest one available a year ago. When I saw what the dryer had done to it, I felt (1) sad about the lost information (which, of course, turned out to not be lost), and (2) kind of happy that I now had an excuse to get a better drive -- whatever is the cheapest, slowest, and smallest today.

By the way, more comics are available at es.comp.os.linux.*. The artist has granted some permission to reproduce them.

On to something serious, the national debate is returning to the minimum wage. And although the two most popular arguments are "you can't raise a family on minimum wage," and "increasing minimum wage doesn't increase unemployment rates," the history of minimum wage laws implies something's fishy with those claims.

By the way, not everybody making minimum wage is poor. Many well-to-do high school students have minimum wage jobs. I don't know of any decent arguments why high school students need more money. If you want to target the poor with more money, consider increasing the Earned Income Credit, which has a better chance of actually reaching the poor (although your definition of poor may be different than mine).

However, I find it very interesting that two credentialed liberals got the New York Times to publish an incredibly racist editorial in support of raising the minimum wage.

I felt a little guilty yesterday. I wanted to make those apple pancakes again, but we were out of apples. So I grabbed a handful of change and went to the store to get some. Granny Smith apples cost a little more than I expected, so I could only afford one apple with the change I had. I felt like a bit of a putz putting back that second apple while the store manager was making sure the produce section looked good.

Since I wasn't buying anything else, I went to the self checkout. Weighed my apple, and my total came to 80 cents. Put in my change, and oops, I only had 75 cents! Since it was a self checkout system, I couldn't ask for it to let me slide. So, I paid the nickel with my debit card.

I feel guilty because I know the bank will charge the store something like 50 cents to process that debit card transaction. So, while I spent 80 cents on the apple, the store's only going to get 30 cents.

And to top it all off, I didn't pre-cook the apple when I made the pancakes this morning, so that didn't turn out too well either. Oh well, one more day 'till the weekend.

OK, one more and then I'll call it a day.

Monopoly has gone all high-tech on us. At least in Europe.

One more and I'll call it a day. In November of last year, there was a memorial service for Barbara K. Olson. Mrs. Olson was the wife of Ted Olson, the former Solicitor General. She died on the plane that hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

The memorial service included a talk I found very interesting about what might have been. One of the most respected US judges of the 20th Century was Henry Friendly. Three years before Roe v. Wade, Friendly was one of three judges to hear a case challenging New York's anti-abortion law. One of the other judges voted for the law, and one against it. Friendly would have been the deciding vote.

Judge Friendly eventually decided to uphold the anti-abortion law, but by then New York had changed the law so the decision was never published. A few years later the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, based on reasoning that Friendly's opinion tore to pieces. If Friendly's decision had been part of the discussion during Roe v. Wade, things may have turned out very differently.

"We would not wish our refusal to declare New York's abortion law unconstitutional as in any way approving or 'legitimating' it. The arguments for repeal are strong; those for substantial modification are stronger still. ... But the decision what to do about abortion is for the elected representatives of the people, not for three, or even nine, appointed judges."

Judge Friendly then predicted the issues that would arise if a court ruled the other way, issues that have plagued the Supreme Court ever since it did just that three years later in Roe v. Wade. For each of his points, I could drop a footnote citing one or more of the dozens of Supreme Court decisions that came after Roe. ...

Judge Friendly ended his draft with his view of the proper role of the federal judiciary. "An undertone of plaintiffs' argument is that legislative reform is hopeless, because of the determined opposition of one of the country's great religious faiths. Experience elsewhere, notably Hawaii's recent repeal of its abortion law, would argue otherwise. But even if plaintiffs' premise were correct, the conclusion would not follow. The contest on this, as on other issues where there is determined opposition, must be fought out through the democratic process, not by utilizing the courts as a way of overcoming the opposition ... clearing the decks, [and] thereby enabling legislators to evade their proper responsibilities. Judicial assumption of any such role, however popular at the moment with many high-minded people, would ultimately bring the courts into the deserved disfavor to which they came dangerously near in the 1920's and 1930's. However we might feel as legislators, we simply cannot find in the vague contours of the Fourteenth Amendment anything to prohibit New York from doing what it has done here."

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a journalist. However, it looks like USA Today (yes, the USA Today that broke the news that the NSA looks over calling records) has started making up details when reporting on some stories.

Eight employees were stabbed Friday by a co-worker at a Memphis suburban grocery store, and four were seriously injured, police said. The victims were identified only as six females and two males who worked at the Schnucks grocery. ...

The suspect was tackled by a witness as he tried to run from the building and was held until officers arrived, Higgins said.

What's wrong with that? Well, other newspapers reported on what happened, and they said:

Cope said he grabbed a 9mm semiautomatic pistol from his pickup truck when he saw the attacker chasing the victim "like something in a serial killer movie."

"When he turned around and saw my pistol, he threw the knife away, put his hands up and got on the ground," Cope told The Associated Press. "He saw my gun and that was pretty much it."

After getting a ribbing for it's inventive way of using "tackled by a witness" to mean "decided to wait for police when a witness pulled a gun on him," USA Today eventually came clean and mentioned the missing details.

It's a good thing Enron's not manipulating California's energy market any more, so that there won't be any blackouts this summer. I mean, if it weren't for Enron, somebody would have to figure out why the state-run Public Utilities Commission can't get enough power for 30 million people (and why they have a wall with lights telling them the state of the power grid when I could write up a Java Applet they could look at in their browser).

For the record, I think PUC does a great job handling a nearly-impossible task. I also think that California needs to fix some problems with its system. Right now Californians (1) blame Enron, (2) blame environmentalists, (3) blame Gray Davis, and/or (4) blame Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not to say that they don't deserve some blame, but let's fix the problem now.

TJIC makes a good point about being "greeted as heroes".

A while ago, I wrote about a particular guy who was messing around with his laptop's motion sensor. Turns out he's also tried messing with his laptop's light sensor (I honestly didn't know they had these sensors).

But the coolest thing he's done is getting UNIX to run on a Game Boy Advance. Which reminds me of an old project I imagine working on but will probably never get around to -- putting eCos on our old Nintendo 64 (yes, the modernized version of eCos that I want to write when I get the time). Problem is, I don't have access to the equipment to make game cartridges I can put into the Nintendo 64. Oh, and that lack of time thing.

But, for anyone interested in reading a technical chapter before it was edited (that is, when it had 140 pages of detail instead of the 40 or so that it has in the final book), he also wrote about the technical history of the Apple's verious operating systems' internals.