Month: April 2003

Emerald slams Google for phone number lookup

OK, generally, I support most anything that the Emerald publishes, but any time they slam my favorite search engine without doing their homework, then I have to gripe.

I just posted a yet-to-be-moderated feedback to their site, that basically says this:

This is NOT a Google problem. This data is 1) Publicly available, and 2) Has been available online for years. Google just makes it far easier and intuitive. Do your homework, folks, and don’t slam a search engine as something that “violates online privacy” unless you realize that they weren’t the first ones to do it.

April 28, 2003

No blogging this weekend – and slim pickings for a week or two

Just an FYI, I’ll be at secret undisclosed location this weekend, and will be shipping my computer back to get some warranty repairs done on it (and my other system is so buried in crap at home that I don’t even know if I can get to it). In other words, posts will be few and far between for the next couple weeks or so (unless Ken and Gregg want to start posting a bit more…guys?). But I will be back and posting more as soon as I can.

April 25, 2003

“What does Juliet give the Nurse at the end of Act 3, Scene 1?”

Vaseline and a paper towel and a magazine. This, along with other answers like this:

Q: Why does Juliet wonder that “heaven can be so envious”?

A: She’s on shrooms.

April 25, 2003

I’d like to see the clientele for this place

When a bookstore’s “Best Sellers List” include such titles as “Hit Rock Bottom,” “Out on the streets,” “Sold Out,” and “Up sh*t creek,” you might have to worry. From NTK.

April 25, 2003

Cops find 854 pairs of panties in college student’s apartment

A sergeant says of the alleged perv’s undies collection: “They were in containers in the closet and found in dresser drawers. We’re thinking he may have gone to different house parties and taken three pair here, four pair there. Some women might even be embarrassed even to report it.” (Check out his mug shot.) Full Story.

April 24, 2003

Sony makes Playstation 2 on one chip

From the Inq article: “Not long ago everyone was cooing at the achievement that was the Playstation 2. Its graphics chip and CPU seemed hugely complicated affairs. Indeed, there was a fear that they might be too complicated for programmers to get to grips with. Now, all of that complexity has been shoved onto a single piece of silicon. The new all-in-one chip will be produced on a 90nm embedded DRAM process. The Graphics Synthesiser will keep its 4MB of RAM onboard thanks to the process. The packaged chip will run at the 294MHz of the EmotionEngine, the CPU component of the Playstation 2.”

Screw the Playstation 3. It ain’t coming out until 2007 or so anyway. I’d like to see 4 of the Playstation 2 chips running in parallel in one box (they’ll use less power — the new one-chip solution uses 8-watts, while the two-chip solution used 37-watts), and then games would smoke (as the PS2 chip is already a really nice chip).

April 24, 2003

Free Porn, Britney Spears, KaZaa, Atkins Diet, and the Iraq War

Just as an experiment to see how much Google juice this site has (as it seems to have a bunch lately, without me trying), I’m putting “Free Porn” as the headline of this story, as well as a couple other terms from the Lycos 50 and the Google Zeilgeist. If John C. Dvorak’s experiences are any indication, the traffic to this listing should go up quite a bit, even though there is no Free Porn or any of the above crap any where on this site (Gregg’s entry is about as close as you’ll find).

April 24, 2003

Comments are slow

Yes, I know the comments are slow, and posting comments is slow as heck. I’m looking into it, and have upgraded SimpleComments to version 1.1 and that should (in theory) help. I’m working on some other bottlenecks, but the Simplecomments upgrade has helped a bit.

April 24, 2003

8 Days in an Iraqi prison

From Al’s Morning Meeting: “I put this item first today for a reason. Take the time to read this Newsday series by journalist Matthew McAllester. Matt and photojournalist Moises Saman were arrested and held in prison in Iraq. Matt says he had a moral obligation to cover this war. He is heading back to Baghdad now, as are several of the others who were arrested.”

This is a fascinating, first-person account, and well worth the read.

April 24, 2003

It’s nearly May, and there is 4 inches of snow on the ground

OK, this is just sick. I woke up this morning, and drove to work and there was 4-inches of snow on the side of the road. Amazing. When is Spring going to get here?

April 24, 2003