August 15, 2003
Blog Stuff
I've realized two things recently:
- I'm bored of roughly 90% of the blogs that I "read"
- I enjoy life more when I tried to avoid computers on the weekend.
Therefore:
- I'm going to either read fewer blogs or find some new blogs to read. Any suggestions?
- I'm no longer blogging on the weekend. Heck, I'm generally trying to avoid the computer on the weekend. I'd rather spend the time outside or reading or... whatever. Yeah, there's the issue of the book. It's the main exception right now. Most of it happens only on the weekends. And if something really blog-worthy happens, I won't wait until Monday.
Oh, and I have an experiment I want to try on my blog. More on that soon--Monday, I guess.
What happened to Yahoo's Millionaires?
Forbes has a brief story on Yahoo! Finance called Purple People in which they track down a few of the millionaires created by acquisitions at Yahoo during the boom.
Forbes tracked down 25 individual sellers in the Yahoo deals and found that every one of them is at work on something new and vital, a few of them on several projects at once. Only five still work at Yahoo. Ten are entrepreneurs. Four are angel investors or venture capitalists, and two others are weighing new chief executive jobs. The rest are teaching, writing or consulting. Sure, for many their workdays are shorter than they used to be, but entrepreneurial drive is tough to quash.
Ahh, the boom.
August 14, 2003
Can it, dude.
Someone at work had a Really Dumb Idea[tm] and I was gonna write about it. But I found that JR did a good job of that already, so go read his comments.
Yes, apparently it was someones hyperactive brainchild to draw attention to the need for all us happy employees to recycle. Mind you, these are the same employees that stuff their Hummers into compact spots, litter the bathroom floor with print-outs from ESPN.com, leave piles of dirty dishes beneath "Don't leave your freaking dishes here you moron!" signs.
Heh.
A day in the life of a Yahoo.
Do they really work?
We've all seen the ads. And we've all wondered if they really do work. But few of us ever try them. Even fewer document their experience on a weblog.
That's right, we're talking about Penis Enlargement Pills.
Over on Do Penis Enlargement Pills Work? you can follow one man's experience, starting from day #1 when he took the baseline measurements.
Shutting Down
I expect the power outage to catch up with this machine shortly. The UPS will only last so long. So I'm gonna shut down and let someone power it back up when this is over.
That's twice in the last month.
See Also: Downtime
Happy Birthday Kasia
Everyone head over to her blog and leave a birthday comment in one of her entries. I'm sure she'll appreciate it. Just try not to spam her referer logs along the way.
No, I won't tell you how old she is now. That's her job. :-)
MovableType for Site Management
Over the past few months I've been reading more and more comments about how great MovableType is for managing stuff other than strictly weblogs. It's Perl, it's flexibly, it's hackable, etc. Spend a few minutes on Feedster and I'm sure you'll see some of it.
I believe it all. I'm a big MT fan. In fact, I'm helping someone launch some new MT-based sites soon.
But I hadn't seen much in the way of "here's one cool hack/thing you can do..." that helps to demonstrate the fact. Head over to Dylan Tweney's weblog. In his Movable Type blogroll he explains a simple trick he uses to let MT help manage his blogroll.
Dylan's a very smart guy. You should be reading his stuff if you're not already. And I'm not just saying that because I'm on his blogroll!
August 13, 2003
Just for the record...
If:
- You are foolish enough to attempt parking in San Francisco on a Saturday afternoon
- You park sloppily, such that your car is blocking 4 inches of someone's driveway
- They call the police to complain
- The police come and find your car there
Then:
- They fine you $75 for the trouble
This concludes tonight's Public Service Announcement. The check is in the mail.
Intel withdraws sponsorship of SCO trade show
From Bruce Perens:
For the past several months, Intel had been listed as "Gold Sponsor" of "SCO Forum 2003", SCO's Las Vegas trade show. Now, Intel appears to have quietly withdrawn its support for the show. SCO's web site, at http://www.sco.com/2003forum/sponsors.html , has replaced Intel with CRN as "Gold Sponsor. Press organizations like CRN generally don't have big bucks on hand for trade show sponsorship, and I surmise that they are listed there only as a place-holder to prevent embarassment for SCO.
HP is still listed as "Premier Sponsor" of the SCO event, despite criticism from just about everyone associated with Linux and Open Source.
Nice.
These are not the droids you're looking for...
Move along.
(...waves hand...)
August 12, 2003
That Annoying E-Mail Your Family Sends
Over on a Word Soup, Karl rants about that stupid e-mail. You know, the meaningless time wasting crap that some of my friends and family seem all to happy to send me.
No, asshat. Playing with lesbians in jello is fun. What you sent me is fun if you're a slightly retarded third grader so pumped with Ritalin his eyes look like storm clouds. You might as well have sent me a "Hello Kitty" screensaver for all the difference I can see.....
I understand you're amused. Good job. But know your target audience. We've spent billions on fiber optic network infrastructure and you, with the intellectual capacity of a pine cone, use it to perform the electronic equivalent of a fart joke. Well established. But please; don't e-mail me anymore.
Go read the whole thing. It's classic.
So Tired
Don't know why.
So I'm being unproductive.
This sucks.
Grr. I have much to do.
August 11, 2003
Trying KDE for a while...
For reasons of laziness, I've switched to using Debian's
default KDE setup on my Linux box at work. (I'm still using the
custom-designed FVWM2 setup at home.)
You know what? I like it. By and large it doesn't feel like it's getting in my way at all. And that's not what I expected. There are a few things I adjusted (mouse focus issue--I can't stand click-to-focus). And there's one annoyance. Every time I highlight something URL-like, to put it into the X clipboard, this stupid little applet thing pops up and tries to "help" me decide what to do with it.
Anyone know what it is and how to disable it?
And for some reason it seems to ignore part of my ~/.Xdefaults. I haven't quite sorted that out yet.
Other than that, I'm sorta liking this. It's a bit more pretty than my dull-ass FVWM2 setup. And it's not sucking on my productivity at all.
Talk Directly to the Unix Yahoo! Messenger Team
The search group isn't the only one with a public forum. If you're a user of Y! Messenger on Unix, you can talk directly to the engineers who build the software in the ymessenger group:
This Yahoo! group is dedicated to enabling users to interact with the development of the Unix version of Yahoo! Messenger. The scope of this list involves but is not limited to:
* Beta Releases
* Feature requests
* User problems and solutions
Not only that, but one of the engineers now has a public web site where you can get more information, downloads, and more. There are RPMs (Debian packages coming soonish) of the 1.0 client available there.
Check it out.
And be on the lookout for new of more Yahoo! groups who are using Yahoo! Groups to talk more directly with our users.
Bay Area Traffic
Phil experiences Bay Area traffic and notes:
Traversing a few miles of I-80 here (the Bay Bridge) took 2 hours, longer than flying over the entire stretch of I-80 that traverses Utah (from Wyoming to Nevada). No accidents; just a normal flow Sunday around noon.
When people used to ask me if I liked living in the Bay Area, I always said: "I love it, except for two things... The traffic and the cost of housing (not living)." Traffic isn't nearly as bad as it used to be in 1999 and 2000. You really can tell that a of of people moved away and/or are not working. The morning commute is much easier.
There still are times and places when it's still quite bad. I experienced the Hell that is I-880 near Berkeley yesterday evening. And I don't see that really changing unless something dramatic changes--like getting much better public transit around the Bay Area. Yeah, getting to and from San Francisco isn't bad, but there are a lot of other places that public transit really doesn't serve too well.
Andrei is a Yahoo
Yup, we've got a new PHP Hacker working at Yahoo now. Welcome, Andrei.
I hadn't realized that he started already. I walked over to Brian's cube a few days ago to ask him a question, knocked on the wall (there's no door, of course), and Andrei turned around. I wasn't quite paying attention yet and said something like "Hey, you're not Brian." And then realized that I knew Andrei was starting soon, so they must be sharing a cube for now.
It's funny when stuff like that happens.