I can see it playing out like a movie. The head muckety-muck over at Google emails the big cheese over at mapquest. The mail says, simply “Good morning. I believe I’ve just put you out of business. No hard feelings.” The big cheese at mapquest runs home, only to be found by his wife later…
Upcoming Final Exams :-(
Sorry for the recent silence. I’ve had a rash of smaller tests at school, and now I’m prep’ing for finals. I took two classes this semester. Computer Science 102 (basically, a class in how to program in C++), and College Algebra (er, that’s essentially Algebra II). I have an “A” in both classes right now,…
Opera 8: the "almost soup" release
For my non-tech friends: Opera is a web browser, and it runs under Windows, Mac and Linux, and some other stuff, I think. It’s a pretty good browser — certainly better than internet exploder. Some time ago they added a mail client that really rocks, but I tend to really want more out of it…
Ongoing war with my lawn, and harvesting rainwater.
The war with my lawn has resumed with the arrival of weather warm enough to stay outside for more than an hour without various extremeties changing color on me. I was out there all weekend, and discovered that, for each separate area of my lawn, there are different issues. I’m pretty much at a loss,…
My pool game still sucks
Well, I’m getting a lot of what I lost over the years back, but I still basically suck. I’m back to the point where, in 9-ball, if I can put start the cueball wherever I want after the break, just for the first shot, I can usually either clear the rack, or come damned close….
Opacity in KDE 3.4 and NVidia is SWEEEEEEET.
I should say up front that I am *not* a slave to eye candy. I’m a system/network admin, so if there’s any eye candy around, it’s likely to be various monitors that alert me, visually, to trouble of one sort or another. However, I’ve found a really useful piece of eye candy in KDE 3.4,…
Excuses for my poor pool game
Once I had a pool table in my house, it didn’t take me long to realize that my pool game is not what it once was. Lucky for me, I have one huge glaring issue I can blame it on: lighting. Most people don’t realize when they see pool on tv that a lot of…
Laughing in the face of digital danger
A recent BBC article reports that network security researchers have discovered that over 1,000,000 home user PCs have been hijacked by viruses/worms/trojans to collaborate, forcibly, on bringing down websites, spread spam, and propagate viruses. Networks of collaborating “zombie” computers called “botnets” are formed from these machines, the largest of which was 50,000 computers working in…
AMD64? Why Bother?
First, for the non-technical: AMD is a company. Explaining the “64” opens a whole bucket of technical jargon, and it’s a source of confusion even (er, especially) for those who think they’re technically savvy (I don’t totally exclude myself from that group). Anyway, AMD makes a CPU (just like Intel makes CPUs), and the ones…
Why Gmail is kicking butt
I have a beef with free internet mail accounts in general. I have one at mail.com and another at Yahoo.com. Both say they do all they can to make my experience wonderful and eliminate spam, but meanwhile, the only part of those services that works flawlessly are the ads. Enter gmail.Yesterday and today, I couldn’t…