How Microsoft Conquered Washington: After

How Microsoft Conquered Washington: After the Justice Department filed its antitrust suit in 1998, Microsoft–a company famous for its disdain of government–undertook the largest government affairs makeover in corporate history. The company now boasts one of the most dominating, multifaceted, and sophisticated influence machines around, one that spends tens of millions a year.

I find this pretty frightening. I don’t like the idea of any company wielding that kind of influence over politicians. I know that means I’m hopelessly naive. So be it. At least I’m honest.

11 Things About Spider-Man, including

11 Things About Spider-Man, shop including one very weird lawsuit about billboards in Times Square.

No way. Mozilla hits 1.0 status. Wow. And, look I downloaded it at 140k/sec at home. Thanks, Comcast.

Speaking of Comcast, I had another outage today, but as I was on hold with their support folks (again, very friendly and eager to help), I removed a coax splitter from my setup and everything came back to life. Maybe all of these outages were my fault?

Comcast? Never showed up today.

Comcast? Never showed up today. “We’ll be there between 11:00 and 1:00.” Never showed up. But here’s the funny part: I never dropped the connection today, so I really didn’t need them today. Weird. I wonder if there was something wrong on their end which they fixed, and then didn’t need to send anyone out to my place for. Still, a phone call or something would have been nice.

Mammoth PostgreSQL. Sweet. Solaris, Red

Mammoth PostgreSQL. Sweet. Solaris, Red Hat Linux, and Mac OS X. Nice.

Comcast will be here tomorrow to check why I seem to lose synch every day. Hopefully it’s something easy and fixable. If it’s going to be a daily occurence, I may as well go back to dial-up [shudder]. But I must say that every tech support person I’ve dealt with at Comcast has been very friendly and as helpful as possible.

The Google API. Interesting. I love Google as a search engine. Now it can be embedded in other applications. That’s pretty cool.

Jen is feeling better. She spent some time sitting outside and reading today. I’ll be staying home with her again tomorrow since her recovery is still going pretty slowly. But I guess that’s to be expected after 5 1/2 hours of surgery. The doctor had predicted two to four hours, but apparently the work that needed to be done was pretty extensive. More on that later, though.

Well, the surgery is over.

Well, the surgery is over. Jen is home recovering. She’s pretty tired and very sore, but I suppose that’s to be expected after 5 1/2 hours of surgery. The doctor said that hers was the second worst case of uterine scarring that he had ever seen.

The good news is that this should take care of her pain.

The other news is that we’re pretty much done having children. That’s out of our hands now.

By the way, I’m posting this over my cable modem. It’s very, very fast. I got 140k/sec last night.

It’s the Bill and Steve

It’s the Bill and Steve show.

This guy is an absolute hoser.

So far, Comcast gets a thumbs up. Everything is working great. I had a brief outage this morning, but I called tech support and immediately talked to an intelligent and friendly rep who listened to what I had tried and gave me a case number within a few minutes. He said I did everything right, and he passed me up to the higher level tech support. The higher level tech told me that would push the synch out to me again (although I don’t honestly know what that means) and that it would working again within an hour. She also said to leave the power to the modem unplugged in the meantime. One hour later, I was back online. Nice.