Project Insomnia

A great white shark that survived longer than any other in captivity was released back to the wild early Thursday because it was growing too large for its tank and beginning to prey on other fish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Last year, for the first time since 1999, neither the Giants nor A's made the playoffs. Both were flawed teams, partly because of inadequate bullpens and a lack of true closers. The A's had holes in their offense. The Giants had holes in their gloves.

Both got eliminated on the final weekend and have been reshuffling their rosters ever since. Six months after checking out of '04, they're ushering in '05 with new characters and new visions.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave workers age 40 and older greater rights to sue an employer for age discrimination, even if there is no evidence that such bias was intentional.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably built dozens of desktop computers on your own and for others and consider yourself a seasoned system builder. You laugh at the so-called expertise of Best Buy’s GeekSquad, and are the one doing the teaching when calling technical support. If this sounds like you, you’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to take your system building skills to the next level. This isn’t the place to if you want to sit and listen to an expert tuner take a didactic approach and give lecture on building a highly optimized system. This article isn’t written like a tutorial – this article is for experts.

1. Do not place Windows' swap file on a separate partition of your single hard drive. If you only have one drive, there's no performance gain at all in moving the swap file. If you have more than one, place your swap on the fastest drive you have--and install Windows on the second-fastest.


2. He suggests updating sound, video, motherboard, etc. drivers from the manufacturers' Web sites before hitting Windows Update. I have to strongly disagree here; unless your components are totally unrecognized by Windows, it's always best to make Windows Update your very first destination once you've secured the machine enough to feel comfortable plugging in the network cable.


3. There's been quite a lot of research and testing done to optimize the size of Windows swap files. The author doesn't seem to have read it, listing general estimates for various amounts of RAM. A few days of perfcounting will tell you exactly how big to make your swap for your specific system.


4. Classic search vs. XP search: XP search is not great, but classic search is worse. Leave XP search on and instead install Google Desktop search. It beats them both.


5. Having IE check for new versions on every load is just a waste of time, since you've enabled automatic Windows Update downloads.

On the bus ride back from Tucson on Saturday, A's manager Ken Macha had the driver pull into a Dairy Queen, where he paid for the team's treats. 'We all went in uniform and people looked at us like maybe we were a softball team,' Macha said. 'I went to the counter and said 'I'm the coach of this team, please total everything up and give me the bill.' It was a little over $50. When I was 8, cones were 10 cents, so for 13 players it was $1.30.' OF Nick Swisher said he ordered 'the biggest Blizzard I could get, with chocolate chip cookie dough.'

Firefox straight 'out of the zip' is ok, but there's a lot you can change, modify and improve. From performance to looks to usability, Firefox tuning gives you the power to make a browser specific to your needs and taste.

With the number of hardcore foodies living in the Bay Area, new food and wine blogs pop up constantly. Food blogs let people connect and share one another's cultures, even if they only live a mile apart.

Some blogs have become so sophisticated that it's hard to differentiate them from online publications. Many food bloggers accept advertising, request books to review from publishing companies and provide professional-looking pictures for each recipe.

Sometimes it seems that shoddy products and atrocious customer service go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

But while your average disgruntled consumer simply vents their bile by bellowing at a bewildered service rep, a few go farther. Much farther. These perennially peeved people build--and obsessively maintain--sites devoted exclusively to complaining about their least favorite corporations.

To honor these quixotic champions, we spent hours trawling the Web looking for the very best corporate hate sites. After checking out more than 100 sites with names like dontflycontinentalairlines.com and fordlemon.com, we rated the best of them on a scale from one to five in six different categories: ease of use, frequency of updates, number of posts, hostility level (angrier is better), relevance, and entertainment value (Hey! Angry and funny!).

The Monterey Aquarium's popular great white shark is now a killer, having taken down one of its Outer Bay tank-mates two weeks ago and inflicting a 5-inch gash in the tail of another soupfin shark on Monday.

But aquarium officials believe the 88-pound, well-fed white shark wasn't hunting its neighbors -- only reflexively chomping when it was startled by an accidental collision with the slower-swimming sharks. There are no plans to move the female great white, although officials may relocate two remaining soupfin sharks to avoid potential clashes in the million-gallon tank.

The band used to tour 100 nights a year, mostly in the United States, where radio kept it popular. This year, he says, with the dollar's devaluation, it will have to do 120 nights.

The live show is rich with hits but also features unrecorded songs: one in a spacey Pink Floyd vein; another with a harder edge. The band has continued to produce sci-fi sounding albums, if not hits, a kind of dreamscape music Curnin calls ``cinema for the blind.''

To celebrate its 10th birthday and show its appreciation for the consumers who have made Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) a household name, the company is inviting U.S. consumers to enjoy a free 2.5 oz. scoop of Baskin-Robbins ice cream courtesy of Yahoo! on March 2. Visit www.yahoo.com and get a coupon for a free scoop of Baskin-Robbins ice cream and join the celebration.

On Wednesday, March 2nd, consumers can visit the Yahoo! front page (www.yahoo.com) and download a coupon good for a free 2.5 oz. scoop (cup or cone) of their favorite ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. The coupons will be customized with the consumer’s name, and the site will feature driving directions and a Yahoo! Smartview map listing all Baskin-Robbins locations in the user-specified geographic area. As part of the birthday celebration, the coupon must be printed and redeemed on March 2nd.