There was a story a few months back about a Microsoft employee who stole software from the company and sold it himself. The guy managed to make a few million dollars before Microsoft caught him.
According to Yahoo News, the man has died before he even got a chance to stand trial.
Now that seems like an odd coincidence…
It’s funny, everyone made a big fuss about Ellen Feiss, the girl in the Apple “Switch” commercial who looked stoned, but no one ever said anything about Steven the “Dell Dude”. I always thought if anybody was on drugs, it was him. It seems that I was right, according to CNN.
I wonder how much longer Dell’s “Who is Steven” web page will be available? Oh well, maybe Dell will start including free Twinkies with every new computer instead of a free CD Burner…
I haven’t said anything about the shuttle yet, so I guess it’s time I posted something.
I still remember when Challenger was lost. I was only 10 years old, so I think I was in the fifth grade. I remember being in a class room and someone rolled in a TV and we all watched in horror as the shuttle exploded. I went home after school and that’s all that was on TV, just the shuttle exploding over and over. My mom bought a copy of the newspaper with that picture on the cover and I’ve kept it to this day.
Things were different back then – I never thought about war or terrorism or anything like that. These days we see terrible things on TV every day. It’s almost common now to see something blow up, or at least see the aftermath of destruction. But watching Columbia break up on reentry was very different. Not only were 7 lives lost, but the future of our space program was again put in jeopardy. Humans are natural explorers and investigators, and I believe that space exploration is one of the most important things we can do. Hopefully this event will spur strong support for NASA and we’ll be able to finally replace the 20+ year old shuttles.
If you haven’t been following the investigation, there’s an article in Aviation Week that sums up the progress so far. It’s worth a read.
I guess I need to put the newspaper article from this tragedy in the scrap book with my clippings about Challenger. Hopefully I won’t have to open that book again for a long time.
I’m really tired of looking at that soup everytime I come here. It was good soup, but it’s time for something new.
I came across an article today on Slashdot explaining why we hiccup. Anyone who knows me very well will understand that this is particularly interesting to me because I seem to get the hiccups all the time. The article indicates a relationship between hiccupping and suckling. You can draw your own conclusions about what that says about me since I hiccup all the time.
My birthday is only three days away. I’ll be 28 on February 9. I was planning on retiring by the time I turned 30, so I guess that means I need to really start investing soon. My birthday present came in the mail today. It’s a GeForce3 Ti 200 video card. It’s not exactly top-of-the-line, but it is the best card you can buy for under $100.
Classes are chugging along pretty well. I’m building circuits and programming PICs in Advanced Electronics, planning complex software to solve business problems in Systems Analysis and Design, and doodling in Introduction to Statistics. This is my last big semester, so it’s all down hill from here.
When Paige and I first started going out, we spent a lot of our time at China Star. In those days, it was a completely different restaurant. Back then it was run by a really neat old Chinese guy. When we came in he knew us by name, and he always knew what we wanted – Paige had Empress Chicken, I had Pepper Steak, and we shared a War Wonton Soup for two. The soup was great, it had wontons, shrimp, snow peas, cabbage, and more, all in a great broth. I have lots of fond memories of those days (and not just the soup). Unfortunately, the neat old Chinese guy sold the place to someone else who turned it into a “Super Buffet”. So now there’s no more War Wonton Soup or Empress Chicken.
I’ve been casually looking around for a recipe for this War Wonton Soup for a long time. We’ve tried to make it once before with pretty good results, but it just wasn’t quite right. The other day on Slashdot.org, they were running a poll called “What’s your favorite Chinese soup”. In the discussion that followed, several people posted recipes or clever ways of using Google to find recipes. After reading this I resumed my search. I discovered that what we had been calling War Wonton Soup was more commonly called Wor Wonton Soup (note the ‘o’ instead of the ‘a’), and I found a few new recipes. Here’s a picture of the end result –
It’s still not perfect, but I think it will be after I make it a few more times. And it’s good enough now, that I don’t mind trying. Once I get it just right, I’ll share the recipe for anybody who’s interested.
The strangest thing happened last Sunday. It snowed! Of course it was all gone by Monday morning, but luckily Paige managed to get a few pictures Sunday evening. Here’s one of my favorites, Max catching snowflakes on his tongue.
I’ll be putting more pictures up as I get more free time. I’m also reorganizing some of the galleries right now. If something doesn’t work, try again tomorrow and I should have it fixed.
Everyone knows that America’s involment in most of the Middle East conflicts is all about one thing – oil. Back in Desert Storm, we weren’t protecting the people of Kuwait, we were protecting their oil. The same thing is still going on today. Whenever war with Iraq is mentioned on the news, someone always brings up how it’s going to affect gas prices.
This is why I think it’s so strange that most Americans are infatuated with giant SUVs. It seems like if you aren’t driving a suburban, or something even bigger like a hummer, then you just aren’t cool anymore. People brag about the fact that their new SUV gets less than 10 miles to the gallon like it’s something to be proud of.
Now someone has set up a website to try to convince people that this might not be the best way. The site is called Americans for Fuel Efficient Cars. There you can read news articles and watch their commercials. I think they have a pretty good point.
Paige and I both drive Hondas, which are some of the most fuel efficient cars in the world…
After I got past all the war with Iraq, war with North Korea, and war with anybody else whose name George W. can’t pronounce stories, I found an interesting article on CNN about Manual vs. Automatic transmissions. The article itself wasn’t all that great, it was pretty much the same old arguments of sticks are more reliable and get better gas milage vs. automatics leave your gun hand free. The part that caught my attention was this:
Prior to the 1974 endangered species act, automatic transmissions were filled with fluid that was 95 percent sperm whale oil…
I’ve never heard anything like that before, and I worked for an oil company for over 5 years. Oh well, live and learn.
If you haven’t read my previous entry about GeoURL then go read it and come back here.
As is often the case with new websites, they’re now down for maintenance. If you want to try it out and see websites for people near us, check back tomorrow. Oh well, it was fun for a few minutes this morning, hopefully they’ll make it even better.
I just read about an interesting new website called GeoURL. They can give you a list of websites for people that are near you geographically. You sign up for their service by giving them your web address (URL) and location (longitude and latitude). Once you’re in their database you can get a list of sites near you.
Anyway, I signed us up for it and added a button (at the bottom of the right column) to the site so you can see websites for people near us.