Archive for June, 2006

Oracle outage is not comforting

All morning I’ve been trying to log into the Knowledge Exchange at Oracle.com, it’s a site where Portal developers can learn and exchange tips and such. But it’s been out all morning long, I’ve been trying it maybe every fifteen minutes or so.
Doesn’t exactly give you warm fuzzy feelings–Oracle wants you to run your […]

CNET receives subpoena for stock option back-dating

I guess I haven’t been following CNET stock as closely as I should, I completely missed the story yesterday about the grand jury. Seems the company has received a subpoena related to the possible back-dating of stock option grants.
Now I knew there had been rumblings earlier about an investigation, but I hadn’t realized it […]

Scientists hoping to detect gravity waves

Scientists have built several gravity wave detectors around the world, which are now operational. The reason for multiple instruments is that these gravity waves are extremely weak. Any single detection could be a false positive, since we’re dealing with such a weak signal. So they will not count it as a “real” […]

Superman Returns

Caught Superman Returns at one of the late night showings last night. As comic-book-movies go, not quite as good as Batman Returns but better than X-Men III.
Loved the little nostalgic touches, like the opening credits were done in a style very reminiscent of the credits in the first Superman movie. And […]

Landmark San Francisco bookstores to close

Well it’s another nail in the coffin for independent book sellers. Cody’s in Berkeley has already closed, and A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco will close soon if it hasn’t already.
Sad, I liked both of those bookstores when I was living in the Bay Area. I remember hours […]

Robocop is a professor of Roman Art

I was watching The History Channel last night, they had a documentary about Roman engineering. It was quite fascinating, made me definitely want to see Rome so I could visit places like the Pantheon.
Anyway, the structure of the documentary was somewhat like those “I Love the 80’s” kind of specials where they have an […]

North Koreans choose unfortunate name for new missile

The missile that North Korea may be testing soon has an unfortunate name: Taepodong. Jon Stewart on The Daily Show pronounced it as “type-o-dong”.
Now I have now earthly idea if that really is the correct pronounciation but it certainly seems like it could be. And so now, whenever I see stories about the […]

My neighbor’s crazy, or at least a little obsessed

So I get home yesterday around 5:30 p.m., and my neighbor is out mowing his lawn. It’s like 90, both the temperature and the humidity, but he’s out there happily pushing his lawn mower around.
We all know he has the best lawn in the neighborhood. He doesn’t need to put his life at […]

Getting related content from Google News

Probably everybody already knows this and I’m just slow on the uptake, but I noticed Google News has a simple way to access their “related content” mechanism. They actually use it from the front door of Google News, those links that say “all xx related”. What that link does is take the top […]

UPS and FedEx might rumble at my place

A couple weeks ago I bought two different items over at Woot.com–a pair of wireless controllers for my PS2 and a wireless headphone for my ancient iPod. They’re both scheduled to arrive today, but via competing carriers.
They were in two different warehouses, one in Texas and the other in California. They shipped on […]