What you heard I meant what I said you

I'm frankly not sure where the proper balance lies between these two opposing view points.
I'm frankly not sure where the proper lies balance between these two opposing view points.

Transportation Safety Board of Canada News Coverage

Swiss Air report findings.
(Runs 10:42)

Technical explanation of the report.
(Runs 21:02)

On As It Happens Mary Lou Finlay talks to Vic Gerden, chief investigator of the Swissair crash.
(Runs 6:29)

On As It Happens Mary Lou Finlay talks to Mark Fetherolf, whose daughter was killed in the Swissair crash.
(Runs 6:06)

The Transportation Safety Board Today of Canada released the final report on the Swissair 111 accident investigation. Investigators believe that an electrical arcing event on an entertainment system wire was associated with the initial arcing event. Story:BBC

Hours before the release of the report, the following story appeared in USA TODAY

USATODAY.com - Employees warned of heat on jets' entertainment systems

By Gary Stoller

A company that supplied entertainment systems for Swissair jets brushed off employees' concerns about the systems' safety, well before the product drew investigators' attention as a possible cause of a 1998 Swissair crash, two former employees say.

The employees say Interactive Flight Technologies' entertainment system produced excessive heat, which worried them. They contacted USA TODAY after it published an investigative report on the system on Feb. 17.

Quote of Unknown Origin

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, The Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the US of arrogance, and Germany doesn't want to go to war.
--Unknown

The first bit has been attributed to Charles Barkley, but was probably not original. Earlier citations include The San Jose Mercury News Online, epinions.com, and golfweb.com's quote of the year - all unattributed. The remainder would appear to be derivative and more recent.

So long and thanks for all the fish!

K-Dog, a bottle nose dolphin belonging to Commander Task Unit 55.4.3, leaps out of the water while training near the USS Gunston Hall in the Arabian Gulf, March 18, 2003. The multinational team is there conducting deep/shallow water mine countermeasure operations to clear shipping lanes for humanitarian relief. REUTERS/U.S. Navy/Brien Aho

What's the Good Word

404 (fohr.oh.fohr) adj. Relating to a person who is out of touch or
clueless.

Example Citation:

"It's rather silly that teen flicks are racking up huge box office numbers
and Hollywood's acting like it's some earth-shattering phenomenon. Studio
execs, you're so 404."
?"Gusto," The Buffalo News, March 5, 1999

Backgrounder:

This adjective (which appeared originally in Gareth Branwyn's Jargon Watch
column) comes from the following Web server error message:
404 Not Found. The requested URL was not found on this server.
This would be the Web equivalent of "the lights are on but no one's home"
and other fulldeckisms.

Posted on September 11, 1996

From: Wordspy

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

audblog audio post

Pithy quotes

Accidental Pop-up Spam

Whoops. I put the funny warning signs from uspoliticsforum.com in an iframe. Guess what. It's dumb-ass pop-ups come with the page. I have removed the iframe and the blog is now pop-up free.

Just in case you had any doubt about who we are fighting in Iraq

I don't recommend you view this link. But just in case you don't believe the stories, here's the Al-Jazeera web site's pictures of dead American soldiers. Note it tends to be slow. Apparently there's a lot of traffic on their site since they published this.
very disturbing content

Safety First

From Funny warning signs at USpoliticsforum.com

Don't you kinda miss cigarette advertising

from TVParty.com's VideoVault

New Vocabulary Words

I think I just received an email containing a link to a wiki about web service APIs for blogger.

Gulf War Drinking Game

drink when:

bush is called a crusader
x2 if its by saddam
saddam is called evil
x2 if its by bush
iraq troops surrender to the media
x2 if to a unmanned vehicle or inanimate object
iraq uses weapons it claims not to have
the united states uses weapons it won't allow iraq to have
a member of the media gets shot at
a toast to the shooter if its ashleigh banfield(msnbc), geraldo riviera(fox) or arron brown(cnn)
saddam uses a scud he doesnt have
x2 if its towards Israel
the united states terrorist threat level changes
the united states government tries to link iraq to 9-11
france goes pro US invasion
germany takes the side of the united states in a global war

Full rules

CNN.com - MySQL: A threat to bigwigs? - Mar. 12, 2003

Open-source database has dazzling opportunities ahead

By David Kirkpatrick
FORTUNE.COM
Wednesday, March 12, 2003 Posted: 4:13 PM EST (2113 GMT)

(FORTUNE.COM) -- Talking last week with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, took me back to the golden days of 1999. Here was a fresh-faced, unbelievably enthusiastic CEO, raving about the future prospects of his product, just like so many executives I met back in those unreal times. But Mickos has a very real opportunity. The open-source movement has become a major factor across the software industry, and MySQL is the world's most popular open-source database.

In contrast to typical commercial software, open-source products have their underlying programming code available for all to see and modify. The products are also free or close to it, which, needless to say, helps them grow rapidly if they're good. MySQL is used in four million installations around the world, Mickos estimates. The product gets downloaded for free off the company's site about 30,000 times a day. And here's what Sun CEO Scott McNealy said in a February interview with Computerworld: "If you want to save...money, make the default database MySQL. It's free, it's bundled [with Sun's Solaris software], you've got the whole open-source community working on making it better. If Yahoo and Google can run their entire operations on MySQL, then certainly there's a huge chunk of your operations that could run on it as well."

McNealy slightly exaggerated the Yahoo and Google stuff, but both companies do use MySQL extensively. I e-mailed so-called "Technical Yahoo" Jeremy Zawodny, who replied: "We use it all over the place-for batch feed processing in Yahoo Classifieds and Yahoo Finance, to serve live content in Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance, and even in some billing systems. Our usage continues to grow."

Full text

And the questions is:

Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?

Universe as Doughnut

New York Times, March 11, 2003
Universe as Doughnut: New Data, New Debate
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Long ago in the dawn of the computer age, college students often whiled away the nights playing a computer game called Spacewar. It consisted of two rocket ships attempting to blast each other out of the sky with torpedoes while trying to avoid falling into a star at the center of the screen.

Although cartoonish in appearance, the game was amazingly faithful to the laws of physics, complete with a gravitational field that affected both the torpedoes and the rockets. Only one feature seemed outlandish: a ship that drifted off the edge of the screen would reappear on the opposite side.

Real space couldn't work that way. Or could it?

Imagine that the Spacewar screen is wrapped around to form a cylinder or a section of a doughnut so that the two edges meet.
That is the picture of space, some cosmologists say, that has been suggested by a new detailed map of the early universe. Their analysis of this map has now provided a series of hints — though only hints — that the universe may have a more complicated shape than astronomers presumed. Rather than being infinite in all directions, as the most fashionable theory suggests, the universe could be radically smaller in one direction than the others. As a result it may be even be shaped like a doughnut.

My relationship to sheep is a bit ambivalent now.

CBC News:Flying sheep head fractures fan's skull at rock concert

OSLO, Norway - A man attending a heavy metal concert suffered a fractured skull when he was hit with a flying sheep head.
...
"My relationship to sheep is a bit ambivalent now. I like them, but not when they come flying through the air," concertgoer Per Kristian Hagen, 25, told the Associated Press from his hospital room.

My little friend Melvin's first day at school

Pooneekay vatsoom ahdtuih

"Goodbye" in many languages

Abenaki (Maine USA, Montreal Canada) Adio, wli nanawalmezi
Abenaki (Maine USA, Montreal Canada) Adio
Abenaki (Maine USA, Montreal Canada) Wlibamkanni
Acateco (San Miguel Acatán Guatemala] Xawil hab'aa
Acateco (San Miguel Acatán Guatemala) Qil xin
Aceh (Sumatra) Trok lom
Achí (Guatemala) [said by person leaving] Quin 'ec
Achí (Guatemala) [said by person leaving] Quin 'e na
Achí (Baja Verapaz Guatemala) Chawila awib
Achí (Baja Verapaz Guatemala) [answer] Mantiox, lawib chi
[Achinese, see Aceh]
Acholi (Uganda, Sudan) [go well] Wot maber
Acholi (Uganda, Sudan) [stay well] Dong maber
Acholi (Uganda, Sudan) [to person leaving] Dong iwoti
Acholi (Uganda, Sudan) [to person staying] Dong ibedi
Achuar (Ecuador) Wea jai
Acjachemem (San Juan Capistrano Calif. USA) Yatahay
[Adare, see Harari]
Adyghe (Middle East) Wog maho
Adyghe (Middle East) Hyarcha

Over 450 in all

Ukranian policemen install the first wooden police car imitation by the road near the town of Borispol, February 26, 2003. Police have decided to use the imitation car as a method of preventing speeding and reducing car accidents. REUTERS/Mykhailo Markiv

GAO to Investigate Aviation Contractors

USATODAY.com - Officials to probe use of aviation contractors

By Gary Stoller, USA TODAY

The General Accounting Office is launching an investigation into the federal government's use of thousands of private companies to inspect and certify airlines' planes and aircraft alterations.

GAO officials say the new probe was triggered by a Feb. 17 USA TODAY article and a letter Friday from Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. He said that the Federal Aviation Administration's use of private companies has been criticized and that the newspaper story suggested "the aviation industry was supervising itself without adequate controls and oversight by FAA." (Related story: Doomed plane's gaming system exposes holes in FAA oversight)

Neat Stuff from IBM

developerWorks: Web architecture | Java technology : An introduction to object prevalence

Blogs

Weblogs for Professional Web Sites

For web sites to look current and vital, they need a steady diet of fresh content. You—the designer/builder—certainly don't want to spend all day adding articles to the news page or updating the client's "You can see me at" travel page, do you? On the other hand, do you really want someone else to do it? A majority of our clients, be they freelance or in-house, are not well-versed in HTML or even WYSIWYG software. And even if they were, you're responsible for the site. Are you sure you want other people stomping through your meticulously coded site with a clod-footed WYSIWYG?

What you do need is some basic content management—a way to separate the new content from your wonderful design. You need to let subject experts add content when they want, not when you have time. But content management software can be expensive, cumbersome, and a hassle for most sites. Is there a better way? Yes. You can take the power of weblogs and add them to your professional site.

Weblogs, or blogs, are a popular way of posting content to the web via a simple interface. Think of them as web-based diaries you can update from almost anywhere. Imagine adding content to your web site without writing any HTML, firing up Dreamweaver, or FTPing a single thing. Just go to a web site, log in, type your content, and publish. Within seconds, it's inserted into a template and on your site. (See Biz Stone's story on weblogs for more information.)

So many weblogs look like personal diaries, not meeting our high design standards for professional sites. But there are ways that you can use the simple, HTML-less interface of weblogging to add fresh content to your conservative, business-oriented web site.

WebReview.com: February 4, 2002: Weblogs for Professional Web Sites