Recently in World Category
I use iGoogle.com as my home page. (Used to use my.yahoo.com.) You can customize the home page to track news, weather, stocks, etc. I added a Google Trends gadget after the Sarah Palin announcement. This little gadget often beats news announcements because it reflects the current "buzz" so quickly.
Just spotted #10 on today's trend list. Mom's oldest brother is "spicy".
Ted writes that the new daylight savings schedule is like Y2K all over again. For me there are two reasons why he is wrong and one reason why he is right. But I agree that unlike Y2K this change probably causes more problems than it solves.
Two reasons this is not as bad: (1) I had to man a Y2K Command Post until midnight on New Years Eve. I still have the denim shirt with the Y2K C.P. logo to prove it. (2) With the help of a few elves, I helped craft a now famous poem, The Bad Y2K. It is famous because it is listed in Wikipedia on the Y2K article. I put it there. Gets about 1 hit per day with 5 pages per visit.
But in one very important way, Ted is right. It is Y2K all over again and even worse. Why? The two of us both had problems today. I had no problems on Y2K day. At work, I use a Mac and Windows XP. In Lotus Notes, all of my appointments showed 1 hour later for the next three weeks. On the Mac all of the appointments showed 1 hour early for the next three weeks. It hurts my head just trying to figure out why there is a difference of two hours here. But that isn't so hard to deal with. I just started off the day mentally subtracting an hour and only looked at my Dell. Except I showed up 1 hour early for my 3 o'clock meeting which showed as 4 and really turned out to be at 4. The host of the meeting laughed at me, which wouldn't be so bad, except this host happens to represent our whole division in the merger planning. "That Jeb... he can't tell time. We don't need anyone who can't tell time in the new organization."
For the real Y2K, there was no job threat. Just a really high quality denim shirt.
Note: Top ranking in Google:
I had seen some of these photos during the year, but I had not heard of #1 (the last displayed) which is an amazing photo taken by the Cassini spacecraft from the far side of Saturn looking towards the sun. The earth is in the photo.
I also like #9 painting the moon and #5 the shuttle and space station passing the across the face of the sun.
And other paintings by Jacek Yerka. Thanks to Scot.
In late 1999, a group of us with kids in tow went on a holiday weekend in Cloudland State Park. We stayed in cabins. I wrote a poem called "The Bad Y2K," got some of the kids to help illustrate it, and I created a website on AOL using the screen name TheBadY2K. It is still there. Probably will last as long as AOL. [As it continues to decline, AOL shut off member web page services. Moved to mac5. - JC 1/16/2009]
I don't know how many other people wrote poems about Y2K and had them illustrated by kids, but I felt like this provided some unique, historical insight into the "Year 2000 Problem." So a link can now be found at the bottom of this Wikipedia entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2k.
This is a point of view worth hearing. It doesn't contain a lot of the rhetoric in right-wing and left-wing positions (although Harper's is pretty anti-establishment.) It doesn't necessarily square with what I think, but it certainly influences what I think.
http://harpers.org/sb-seven-michael-scheuer-1156277744.html
I've copy/pasted the entire article just in case the link stops working.
After delcaring that Pluto was no longer a planet, the same group of scientists decided to extend their meeting and make other decisions. Today's announcements included:
- 9 is no longer a number. It is just a shape.
- H is no longer a letter. It will join 9 as a shape.
- Brown is no longer a color. It will only be a last name, and
- B Flat is no longer a musical note because none of the scientists like the way it sounds.
"B flat is the same as A sharp, so we don't think it should matter," said one of the scientists.
In an ironic twist, one of the scientists will no longer get to be a scientist because the panel of 309 had to be reduced to 308 to comply with the loss of the number 9.
More decisions will be announced tomorrow.
Pluto may be declared to no longer be a planet. Doesn't seem fair, but in this article it says that Xena is bigger that Pluto, so that isn't fair either.
So the name may become available, and Katie's new brother could be called Pluto.
Ted's story about the reporter who started a newspaper to fill the void left behind by Katrina is inspiring. It makes me want to quit my job, move down there, start up a Craig's List kind of website, put the girl out of business, then take my mom to that restaurant and show her how everyone is reading my website on their BlackBerries. Kathy wants to buy the slab restaurant and turn it into a Starbuck's. (Composed on a BlackBerry en route to the Gulf.)
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Sent via BlackBerry
Just released. Starts off in a colorful elevation mode. Infrared looks more like the red planet than visible. Tried to zoom in and see the rovers. Couldn't.
See the links at top for articles and other information.
