Saturday Morning Wrap-Up
Selected items from today’s news and RSS feeds:
An article in today’s Washington Post provides some insight into how we’ve assembled a high-performance team to rebuild Iraq. Things are proceeding as might be expected.
Programming has changed since the days when I was punching cards for an IBM 370 at Boeing. In related developments, researchers say that watching NFL games can make you tough, and having a porn collection may someday be considered sexy.
This week IBM, Intel and Sun started a web site for developers working with Open Document Format, much like the web site I’ve been running for developers working with the Open XML formats. I’m signed up to their RSS feed and eagerly awaiting some content that will teach demonstrate details of working with ODF. So far I’ve just seen a bit of chest-beating, but with any luck some meaty technical content is sure to follow.
I was telling Megan last weekend the amusing story of a 260-pound nurse who came home to find a 180-pound burglar in her home and killed him with her bare hands. But wait, there’s more to this story: now it turns out he wasn’t a burglar, but rather a hit man hired to kill the nurse.
How did this guy miss his calling? With that kind of results-oriented approach, he should have been safely running some big-bucks governmental program in Baghdad’s Green Zone.
Finally, here’s something I don’t understand: blog spam. Why have so many similar ads targeted this post on my blog?
Have a nice Saturday, everyone. I’ve got work to do, and if I get it done Megan’s going to let me go try out my new Nickent 3DX 4-hybrid.
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 11:34 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on September 16, 2006 at 3:43 pm Tom wrote:
As I understand it, the blog spam is for search engine hits. If someone types in “cheap cell phone” they would theoretically be taken to the spam entry, which contains a link to some damned cell phone place in the UK (in the case of the spam I get). I guess they use older posts so you’re less likely to notice or something. Or maybe it’s just random, and the odds of them hitting the most recent post of 200 just aren’t that big.
I’ve noticed a big increase in traffic to my site AND my blog since I started the blog itself. Since search engines and services can see the blog entries, I can only assume that if you COULD spam the dickens out of a blog it would get you some sales. And hopefully arrested and run through with a stake, the bloodsuckers.
As for the Green Zone link, that’s fascinating. I haven’t really looked hard for any of the online entries by soldiers on the ground there - I’m not generally in a mood to get even madder at my government, and I think what I’ve heard about the chaos and confusion over there (being called “peaceful transition” by our federal dingbats) would only make me anxious.
And as for the ODF stuff, there’s a long way to go, from what I’ve read. Everyone’s willing, but their motives are so varied that it’ll be hard for them to focus, I think. Some want to get into the deep details of ODF, some want to wipe out Microsoft, some want to wipe out Sun, some are scared of what SCO will claim ownership of next, some die if exposed to sunlight, and so on. In theory, it’s a great idea, and I’m glad people at Microsoft are paying attention to it, too.
Actually, since you started working there, I’ve started paying a bit more attention to MS again, and I must say, there has been a very obvious change in attitude coming from Redmond. It feels like something shifted - Apple took a bit of a bite AND threw some curveballs (iPod), Linux attracted a few (and made some news), Firefox has about 10% of the market, and OpenOffice has put forth a concept (if not a competitor) that is beginning to get some media attention. And it seems like MS is responding by trying to meld with some of these things instead of wipe them out like in the old days. I do wish Office 2007 allowed me to open OpenOffice documents, but I suspect that will come as OpenOffice gets more press and users.
How’d the hybrid work out for you? Hey, learn to golf right-handed, wouldja? You keep getting these cool clubs that I’d like to try, but I can’t swing them without biting my tongue and falling down. In all fairness, though, when I was a smoker I smoked menthols. I did so because I liked them, but it was originally because no one would bum a menthol from me. Then I moved to Rogers Park and stopped going to Lincoln Park Trustifarian bars, and my theory crashed down around me. All the local smoke-bummers on my block knew me as the Newport Man. One even tried to get me to switch to Kools because he liked them more.
But I digress. All I’m saying is that I guess it’s nice to know that no one else in a foursome can give you the puppy eyes for one of your clubs.
on September 16, 2006 at 9:34 pm Doug wrote:
You know, I never thought of how cool it is that not a single person has ever wanted to hit one of my clubs, or buy one, or steal one. That is cool!
As for the new hybrid, I’m in love. Had a spectacular round this afternoon — even par through the first six holes, then the driver got hot on the back nine. More later. This one deserves a post all its own.
on September 17, 2006 at 5:46 am Dave Fourputt wrote:
Good lord, how many clubs do you have? Do you carry two bags with you?
Never tried a hybrid. I’m not sure if those would work out when the ball is not in the fairway. Of course you would not know since you are *ALWAYS* in the fairway.
I’ve tried following the OpenXML/OpenDoc thing and I am still very confused. If I had to pick one and run with it I would go screaming into the night.
Tom, I do run OpenOffice especially at home since I have to send stuff to family/friends that do not have MS Office. The builtin export as PDF feature is a godsend for that.
I enjoyed this post Doug and hope you do it every Saturday.
on September 17, 2006 at 8:08 am Doug wrote:
Thanks, Dave. I can see how you’d think I’m carrying a lot of clubs, but I don’t mention the ones that quietly slip out of the bag. Right now it looks like this: driver, 3-wood, 5-wood, 4-hybrid, 2-iron, 4-9 irons, PW, LW, putter. Merely 14.
We’re off to play Mount Si today, more later …
on September 17, 2006 at 9:01 am Tom wrote:
Mount Si looks beautiful. Any chance it could be one of our destinations? It looks narrow and unforgiving, too - maybe later in the visit, after I’ve gotten a bit back on track after so many months of minimal golf.
And Dave, I’m glad to hear OpenOffice is making the rounds among the Seattlites. Personally, as a guy who uses QuarkXPress as a word processor* because I simply can’t work in any of the conventional word processing environments, I think Word 2000 and OpenOffice 2.0 are pretty much equivalent in features, bloat, and look. I love that you can un-jar an OO doc and edit the contents, too (and automate that process), but that’s really a deeply geeky thing that average users don’t care about. So really, for most people, they’re basically equivalent. One is free with no support, and one is not but has support. Not a bad set of choices (both have merit), in my opinion. And OOo’s PDFs seem more stable, too.
Granted, the upcoming Office 2007 is a pretty significant departure from all of this, and I must say that I’m quite impressed. The OOo people are going to go nuts trying to mimic it! And in my own very unscientific testing with the betas of both, it seems to run like lightning under Vista.
* actually, even sillier is that I do my writing in a text editor (typically Crimson Editor in Windows, Kate on Linux, or jEdit on the Mac), and then dump it into Quark and format it. I’m sure if I took an afternoon to learn Word more completely, I could save about twenty steps. But this makes more sense to me. Go figure.