This is a great story of a woman who set up a porta-potty in her front yard and charged money to St. Patrick’s Day drunkards to use it.
The awful part is the cops shutting her down at the end. Ridiculous. She can’t charge money for this, but it would be fine if she set it up for free and had drunk bastards crawling around her yard?
An interesting article posted on Slashdot from the author of XML. Having worked a fair bit with XML parsing, I would agree with a lot of his concerns. Although I guess I can say my code is more “extensible” after having moved to XML as an input format, I sure had to write a lot more code, including introducing and fixing new bugs and writing lots of little workarounds for the Java-based parser I was using (Xerces).
Is it just me, or does the motto for the new Saturn ION make no sense whatsoever: “Specifically designed and engineered for whatever’s next.”
How did they specifically design for a concept that is by definition vague? Is that the joke? Screw Saturn and their lame jokes.
Here’s a guy who received a medal from the French back in WWII for bravery. He’s giving it back.
I recently posted some new pictures on the website from this weekend. Yes, the photo gallery still looks like crap but hopefully I’ll get it looking better in the next few months (if I can find time to work on it).
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This interesting article from Salon.com talks about how radio technology could be different. Currently we ration out frequencies (to the highest bidder) as if they are a scarce resource. From a technological perspective, they really aren’t.
I didn’t realize until just now, but it looks like Schulte finally opened up his web log. If it lives up to it’s name, he’s likely to get boatloads of repeat visitors.
I got the TV today, and it’s sweet. Absurdly big for the room it’s in. I also bought a table in chairs for my little dining room today.
Total cost of TV: approximately $4000 at Tweeter. Total cost of table and chairs: $48.95 plus tax at Walmart. Plus, the pieces all fold up for easy storage… bonus!
If you recall from last time, Tweeter agreed to get me the new Sony TV. It was supposed to be in their store yesterday. I call up because I’m ready to come down there, and sure enough it isn’t. Didn’t make the shipment. Whoops!
So I tell them I’m willing to drive to another store and pick it up – no problem. The guy tells me it’s in Manchester, NH. I tell him that’s fine, but at that distance I’d need to pick the new TV up first, then come down and swap it at my house, then bring the old one back. He tells me that’s against store policy. I tell him I’ll leave a credit card. He says he’ll call me back.
He calls back and tells me there really is no TV for me in Manchester. They screwed up and showed 1 available in the computer, when really that was the floor model. He says he can get one in on Friday. Friday’s no good for me. I want it in my house up and running by Friday afternoon. I tell him I’ll just take my money back because they’ve screwed me over for too long. They can come pick up the broken TV at their leisure.
He talks to the manager. They now “guarantee” that the Sony will be delivered to my house by Friday. I say OK, knowing that it’d be a big hassle for me to have to re-shop for a TV and renegotiate the price down. We’ll see on Friday. What a bunch of idiots.
Slashdot has posted a link to a very interesting editorial on the future of Microsoft, and software in general. It’s quite long, but also very good. A lot of it talks to the .NET initiative and web services industry. There are also a ton of great references at the end. My favorite quote from the article:
Just about nobody trusts Microsoft any more, not even after a few drinks.