Archive for October, 2004

Thank God for our first amendment

I saw Team America: World Police this weekend, and the whole time I’m thinking thank God for our first amendment rights. Because it lets somebody craft a crude, raunchy satire that pokes fun at everybody.
If it weren’t for those rights, they’d never have been able to get away with this movie. They’d never be […]

Winter is coming

When I got up this morning it was a bit chilly, so I turned on the heater for the first time this season. Then of course like the lazy dog I am, I tried crawling back into bed. But it was too cold even with the heater. Because, again, due to my […]

Bare-knucle politics

One of the things that’s surprised me here in Kentucky is the bare-knuckle politics. I guess I was expecting kindof a genteel politics, people politely debating in the town square with everyone sipping iced tea.
But man, the congressional fight between Anne Northup and Tony Miller is about as close to a bare-knuckle brawl as […]

I wonder who is to blame for the PayPal outage

Boy I’d hate being the QA manager at PayPal. I mean who else to blame for the recent outage that lasted for several days. The problems occurred after a new code release was deployed late last week.
Meaning somebody didn’t do thorough-enough performance testing on this release. They wouldn’t be the first–I remember some horrible days […]

Executive Psycopaths

I read about this report from the Harvard Business Review about the psychopaths working in the executive ranks. The thesis is that true psychopaths are probably attracted to the business world–the pace and constant change appeal to them, it’s a challenge. And conversely, some of the traits of the psychopath–charm, decisiveness, love of the fast […]

I’m almost a scuba diver

Yesterday was the last classroom session for my scuba class. And it was a bear–first half was the written test, a very long affair with dozens of essay-style questions and some pressure/depth math problems. It’s been a while since I had a test quite that involved.
Then the second half was in the pool. First up […]

Another Fall festival in Kentuckiana

Must be the fall weather makes everyone want to hold outdoor festivals. Last weekend was the St. James Court Art Festival in Old Louisville, this weekend was the Harvest Homecoming up in New Albany.
Now New Albany is the little city across the river from Louisville, basically the only reason I’d ever been thru there before […]

Did Sun do the right thing in settling with Kodak?

Sun appears to have taken a page from Microsoft and learned that sometimes, money buys happiness. At least when it comes to lawsuits. Sun settled the Kodak lawsuit for about $90 million.
They claim of course that they did it to remove uncertainty about their key software product, Java. And a lot of other companies, including […]

What Halsey Minor is up to these days

Halsey Minor was the guy who co-founded CNET.com. I didn’t know him that well when he was the CEO, though I certainly knew of him. He was famous, the pretty-boy whiz kid who started CNET. He was also known to be something of a terror, though I thankfully never had to work directly for […]

Burgoo is da bomb

I went back for a second day at the St. James Court Art Festival. Yesterday when I went I had already made lunch plans so I didn’t get to eat much. I bought some baklava (really good but too rich for me to finish the small piece they give you) and of course a […]