Category Archives: uncategorized

PETC begins today. If you’re at the show, be sure to see Sally Bair’s 3:30 presentation: Using HelpDesk 1.0. I wrote the HelpDesk software she’s presenting on.

We went to the mall to get my daughter’s Valentine pictures taken tonight. She’ll be three in May. While we waited for the pictures to be developed, we took her to the play area at the mall’s lower level.

Quite honestly, I don’t think most people teach their children anything about manners or behavior anymore. My daughter is no angel, and I’m certainly not a perfect father, but I was really disgusted at the way some of the children there acted. One child in particular — his name was Dominic — was running laps around the play area, knocking over any child in his way. And wouldn’t you know it? He knocked over my daughter.

I picked her up and comforted her the best I could, but I came to a hard realization. Someday, somewhere, somebody’s going to hurt my little girl. And I won’t be there to pick her up again and hold her until she’s all better.

That’s rough. That’s hard for me to take.

John’s not happy with Dan today.

Microsoft Office X has a security hole. Big surprise, I know. At least there’s a fix already.

PostgreSQL 7.2 is out. Woohoo! PgSQK training is available here.

“Egads, Frodo. You are one remarkable hobbit.” This is the joke in my office now. See the movie and you’ll understand why.

I am testing BlogScript. Seems pretty cool. Let’s see if it works.

MSNBC: Inside the Taliban Religious Police”. The Taliban banned music and other forms of light entertainment, and the confiscation of audiocassettes and musical instruments took up a good deal of the religious police’s time . . .

Bob Young, via Yahoo: Red Hat CEO says Linux Won’t Rule. If you’re IVI and your machine goes down in your lab, you call Microsoft and you say “There’s a bug in here somewhere”, Microsoft says, “No there isn’t, you’ve done something wrong.” And so your only solution is to take the machine out, decontaminate it, and then do the reverse process, and it’s a huge pain. And of course, the related Slashdot discussion is here.

My PowerBook went back to Apple today. It’s getting a new DVD-ROM drive. The old never really worked right. When it comes back, it’s time for a much needed clean install of Mac OS X. I’ve installed a ton of database engines (OpenBase, FrontBase, mySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.) to tinker with in REALbasic. They all came with great OS X installers–but no uninstallers.

Recommended listening: Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, read by Rob Inglis. I’ve been listening for over a week in my car. It’s awesome. And speaking of Lord of the Rings, you have to see this movie. I laughed out loud watching it.

For kicks, check out McSweeney’s True Tech Support Stories. There’s stuff in here I can relate to.

Very interesting article about the Bible and the Qu’Ran at MSNBC. I still need to finish the National Geographic article about Abraham as well.

David Coursey’s experiment continues. Looks like he’s becoming a Mac guy after all.

I’ve decided to move to Blogger and say goodbye to Manila, at least in my personal life. I still run my Manila server at work, and I think it’s great. But for this type of site, Blogger seems to be better. I can host it on my own server without running any special software for one thing.

I think I’m getting sick. My legs hurt and my daughter threw up all weekend. Not a good sign.

On the positive side, one to two inches of snow expected tomorrow.

Jakob Nielsen just keeps getting more annoying. His latest column asserts that better software design is not a strategy of Steve Jobs. As a full time user of Mac OS X, I have to respectfully disagree.

Slashdot: Is Evolution Over in Human Beings? Interesting discussion. Of course, anyone who dares suggest that God created the world is immediately branded a narrow-minded bigot, full of religious bias. What I find interesting is that I know many anti-Creation folks who hold as strong a religious bias as most Christians. It’s just the opposite direction. They don’t believe in God, and nothing anyone does will convince. So they can’t even entertain the notion of Creation. Do I have proof of Creation? No. Do I demand it? No. I believe in Creation. I don’t believe in evolution. Am I narrow-minded? I like to think not, but I welcome each person to draw his or her own conclusion.

Here’s where I work. I do the main web site.