Archive for March, 2007

Apple Store going in next to Coach

I finally managed to drop by the Oxmoor Center today, to check out where the new Apple Store is going to sit.  I think it’s going to be next to the Coach store.
I say “think” because I’m not certain.  There was no huge “Apple Store coming right here” kind of sign.  There were, as I […]

Wal-Mart caught lying on their bank application

Wal-Mart has abruptly withdrawn their application to open a so-called industrial bank, which would have allowed them to process credit-card transactions in-house rather than paying the fees to ouside banks.  It’s typical of their focus on cost-cutting, trying to squeeze out every cost they can in the system.
Of course just about everybody in banking opposed […]

California’s early primary has re-shaped the presidential race

Governor Arnold yesterday signed a law that moves California’s primary all the way up to February 5.  As a former California resident, I understand the motivation.  It’s a huge state and yet their late primary meant that often the candidates had already been decided before getting to California.  Thus candidates could afford to kinda ignore […]

Rex’s first (IP) tunnel

I think that’s what this process is called, creating a tunnel.  Anyway that’s conceptually what it is–I’ve got a secure tunnel going from my local machine (a laptop running Ubuntu Linux) across the Internet into an Oracle server running inside the Speed Engineering School at University of Louisville.
Because of the firewall at U of L, […]

The legal claws come out — old media suing new media

Let’s get it on–Viacom has filed a billion-dollar lawsuit against Google, over copyright infringement on Google’s YouTube service.  It seemed inevitable that one of the big old media companies was going to take out the legal dagger and try to force changes at YouTube.  And Viacom seems like a good candidate, their Comedy Central clips […]

Dual-boot means dual DST adjustments

When I booted up my laptop this morning in Ubuntu Linux, it automagically adjusted the time to account for the DST switch. Lovely, except that later when I rebooted the laptop into Windows XP, that OS also detected the DST switch and adjusted the clock again. The clock lept ahead by two hours […]

LG gets an ‘F’ for most wasteful packaging ever

I could not believe it when I saw this at the store, so I had to buy it in order to photograph and document this atrocity.  LG put a tiny little USB thumb drive inside packaging that’s the same dimensions as a full-sized laptop:

That has to be the most wasteful packaging ever.  It’s inexcusable, there’s […]

Beautiful new BNET.com site

CNET just launched a re-design of the BNET.com site and damn is it beautiful. Just very well put together, you’d swear it was a pre-press layout for a nice glossy magazine or something like that.
I think what impressed me most is that a site with so many pieces floating around is done without tables. […]

Hardest. Midterm. Ever.

The instructor for my Advanced Database class released the midterm on the class page last Thursday.  It’s a take-home, due in two weeks.  And I’m starting to fear I will need every spare moment of those two weeks to get it done.
I started on it Monday evening.  In two hours I just managed to finish all […]

Comment-spammers unclear on the concept

Everybody knows I think comment-spammers are scum of the earth. There’s a special place in hell reserved for them. Still I feel kinda sorry when I notice that some of these spammers are so dumb they don’t spam the right kind of urls.
The reason you spam comments into other people’s blogs is that […]