What would you do if your name was Kerry Edwards?

“Its pretty nice,” Kerry said of the bonanza of personalized bumper stickers, T-shirts and yard signs the election has wrought.

Though not necessarily yard-sign types, Kerry’s parents are glad the Kerry-Edwards ticket represents views closer to their liberal politics than those of the Republican candidates.

I guess it’s a good thing Kerry didn’t pick former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey. Kerry Kerrey?

This year’s “Trial of the Century” has its own corps of dedicated followers, one of whom has assembled the most complete timeline and information source I’ve seen.

It’s not exactly an office (only because the only office hereabouts is taken by the president of the company/division) but it is an extra-large, semi-private, corner window cubicle. Nice.

Just noticed that I have eleven Gmail invites. Anyone want one? Let me know.

Rather than wait for the interminable download of SP2 (especially since widely-reported problems may have you installing it more than once), you can order a free CD from Microsoft. They even encourage you to share it with others once you’ve installed the SP yourself.

The Shakespeare Programming Language

The program starts with a Title. It is followed by the introduction of characters participating in the play. Hence in the program, we can deal with two characters – Romeo and Juliet. The two characters are initialized to zero by the compiler.

The play consists of a single act and a single play. In the scene we take the two characters on the stage. First Juliet speaks, to read the first integer value. It is stored in Romeo. Then it is Romeo’s turn. He starts with a praise which stores the value 4 in Juliet (simply, to add beauty to the program). Then the second value is read and stored in Juliet. Juliet ends the conversation by storing the sum of first and second value in Romeo. It is displayed.

I know how I’m writing my next project, to be sure.

Sometime back in the late 80s/early 90s, Doctor Demento played a record featuring a Henry Kissinger sound-alike being interviewed. The repeated gag line was that a person was “eaten by a snit”. All I can remember at this late date is Kissinger-like voice saying “he was eaten by a snit”. Google, surprisingly, is no help, and neither is the online playlist archive (that I could find); probably because I don’t know the actual name of the track.

Does anyone out there remember this record and possibly know the title?

My Dell Inspiron 600m notebook came with the Intel 2200BG wireless NIC. Since activating WPA (Wireless Protected Access) on my new Linksys WAP54G AP, I’ve gotten a BSoD referencing the 2200BG driver (w22n51.sys) whenever I try to telnet to an SMTP server. A quick Google on ‘w22n51.sys bsod‘ turned up this thread from HP’s Business Support Forums. Apparently Intel knows about the problem and has addressed it in a beta driver, but they are not actually shipping the beta driver even to people reporting the problem. Luckily someone on that thread has made the driver available.
If you are experiencing this problem (if you have the Intel 2200BG wireless NIC and are using WPA on your wireless network), you should install the beta driver from the link on that thread. I did and have seen zero ill effects, and the BSoD problem is fixed.
One caveat: Installing the new driver will clear any WEP or WPA keys you may have saved. You’ll just need to re-enter the keys to connect to your encrypted networks.

Note: This post is from August, 2004. For current information on fixing problems with the Intel 2200BG wireless NIC, visit the 2200BG support page on Intel.com.

We checked out the “Simon Super Chefs Live” event at the Stanford Shopping center today, mostly to see Alton Brown. The autograph line was, and I am not exaggerating, five hours long. We did not get our book autographed. At one point, I’d split off from Jen to drop something off at the car and was coming back to the event area. When I got there, the host was asking trivia questions. The question was, “On the Food Network show ‘Taste’, who was the host?” The show in question last aired something around three years ago. I knew the answer and raised my hand, and was picked. “David Rosengarten!” I shouted. This was correct, and for my trouble I was awarded a toaster. It’s a very nice toaster.

And I blame Amanda Beard, Michael Phelps, Misty May and Kerri Walsh, Paul Hamm, and Carly Patterson. Yes, my name is Andrew and I’m an Olympoholic.

How much am I willing to sacrifice in order to take transit to work instead of driving? Not this much, I guess. To get to work by 9:30, I’d have to catch the 7:22 Caltrain northbound from Palo Alto, and connect to the 8:18 BART Richmond train, arriving at North Berkeley at 9:15. Then it’s a mile and a bit walk to the office. No, the walk is not a big deal, but the trip takes more than twice as long by train as it does in the car. I can leave home at 8:45 and drive to the office in 35-40 minutes, with average traffic.

It’s unfortunate, because the company will apparently subsidize the BART portion. I guess I’m more interested in the extra hour of sleep than saving the planet.

The Chronicle reports Marilyn Barletta, the Sonoma County nutjob who packed more than 200 cats into her squalid home three years ago, has been freed and declared unfit to stand trial.

Her release came after two psychiatrists told Sonoma County Superior Court Judge Robert Dale that her competency could not be restored to face trial on misdemeanor animal cruelty charges.

Barletta, 64, appeared to be pleased after the judge ordered her to be released from custody. Dale had suspended her criminal proceedings June 21 and sent her to the county’s mental health facility for treatment. She had been held in the county jail since Nov. 6.

A followup question to the reporter clarified that Barletta has no criminal record as a result, and amazingly no restrictions on keeping cats!

I’d like to see law enforcement for wherever she ends up keep an eye on this. She should not be permitted to adopt or pick up cats, or any other pets for that matter.

I’ve moved the atom feed here and added a new RSS 1.0 feed here. Anyone subscribing to the old remotely-converted RSS feed should change their subscription address.

I think I’ve confirmed that it’s not a problem on my server. At least, a very simple Perl CGI script (this one) uploaded to the same directory and CHMODed 755 seems to work just fine. I don’t know enough Perl to troubleshoot the code from Recipants.

I would appreciate anyone more familiar than I (which wouldn’t take much) with Perl and MySQL take a look at this and then tell me why this isn’t working. I’ve set all of the .cgi and .pl files to 755. Unfortunately the documentation is designed for someone who already knows how to install and run it. I can’t even get past step 1!

San Mateo high school physics teacher and rabid Giants fan Paul Robinson has just finished a year-long study of the physics of the Splash Hit.

If the program can be believed, a hitter must get the baseball moving at least 105 mph off the bat straight down the right-field line, imparting a strong 1,800 rpm backspin, lifting the ball somewhere between about 30 to 45 degrees, in order to have any real chance of making the water. And that assumes no wind blowing the ball back toward home plate or toward the deepest part of the outfield, which often seems to be the case at SBC Park.

Sharply hit line drives — a speed of 130 mph and a 15 degree angle — smash into the outfield bricks. Lofty fly balls hit steeper than 45 degrees can reach an impressive 150-200 feet in elevation above the outfield, but unless they are hit at maximum velocity, which seems unrealistic for such a steep angle, they tend to fall back well short of the cove.

Practically any ball hit toward the gap in right-center, where the wall stands 365 feet from home plate, is doomed to stay dry. Even a 120-mph screamer hit an optimum angle of 42 degrees won’t make it without a near- maximum boost from backspin.

A fascinating read. Somehow we haven’t been to a game yet this season–we’ll have to rectify that soon.

Every four years, just in time to distract us from the increasingly ugly presidential campaign, we are treated to a tremendous display of pure athleticism. And a ton of lame commercials and smarmy bio-features, thanks to perennial Olympic broadcaster NBC. For this, we have DirecTiVo! I spent most of Saturday crawling around in the crawlspace (that’s why it’s called a crawlspace, I guess–if I could stand up without being impaled on roofing nails, it’d be an attic) installing the second coax run from the dish to enable the ultra-cool dual-tuner feature on the new box. This lets us watch one channel and somehow record two others. I don’t get it, but it works.

Some useful links:

• SFGate: Athens 2004 Summer Olympics
• NBCOlympics.com

Next up is upgrading the recording capacity; 35 hours gets used up very quickly when there are five channels (six if you count Telemundo, seven if you count the HD broadcast) all going more or less simultaneously.

To all my friends in central Florida (Kevin & Michelle, Doobie & Rebekah, Sue, Brian)… stay safe! We’re thinking about you.

Semestrial means “every six months”. What’s the equivalent word for “every six weeks”?

Changes to the Hotel California, Made in Response to Mr. Henley’s Recent Complaint

Update room décor, including removal of ceiling mirrors

Restock spirit supplies, encourage Captain to offer guests other options

Acquire steelier knives and/or less resolute beast

(Visit the link above for the full list…)

SFGate.com is carrying an AP story reporting that the California Supreme Court has voided gay marriages in San Francisco, saying Mayor Newsom overstepped his authority. It was more or less expected that the Court would rule that Newsom had gone too far, but there was some hope that the marriages themselves would be upheld. Unfortunately for some 4000 couples, this was not the case.

I’m cringing in advance of the inevitable gloating by the conservative anti-marriage groups and our illustrius CEO, er, I mean President.

This interesting quiz lets you guess whether certain phrases were said by (Jerry Falwell and/or Pat Robertson) or Osama bin Laden. For example:

• In today’s wars, there are no morals, and it is clear that mankind has descended to the lowest degrees of decadence and oppression.
• The government is committed to supporting God’s religion, the country remains a strong bulwark for religion, and the people are among the most protective of God’s religion, and the keenest to fulfill His laws.
• All these crimes and sins committed by Americans are a clear declaration of war on God.

Unfortunately, the answer page is broken (throwing a PHP error) so we can’t see who really said what.

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

—Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004 (thanks to The Complete Bushisms by Jacob Weisberg)

CNET News.com is running this story celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the “first” secure Internet retail transaction, apparently performed on a proprietary shopping service called NetMarket.

Few remember or have ever even heard of the Web retailer, but on Aug. 11, 1994, the college grads that founded NetMarket in Nashua, N.H., claimed they had conducted the very first secure retail transaction on the Web.

They said the first item purchased via a Web site protected by commercially available data encryption technology was the CD “Ten Summoner’s Tales” by Sting, according to former NetMarket founder Daniel Kohn. One of Kohn’s Swarthmore College classmates purchased the CD with his credit card for $12.48, plus shipping costs, exactly 10 years ago on Wednesday, according to a New York Times article that chronicled the transaction and credited the company with making e-commerce history.

Now, NetMarket is a true blast from the past for me. When I worked for Davidson (aka CUC Software, Cendant Software, Havas Interactive, Knowledge Adventure, Universal Interactive, and now “nothing”), we had to put the third-party installer for NetMarket on all of our CDs. This thing broke more often than it worked and caused endless tech support calls–not to mention that when it did work, it put a shortcut to a shopping site on the desktop of a machine which was probably a dedicated childrens’ educational gaming box. “What do you mean, little Jimmy just pointed and clicked and bought thirty CDs?”

Jeremy Zawodny writes today about living and working in the virtual workplace — how the lives of today’s tech workers (me included) are so drastically different than even four or five years ago. This is pretty close to how I live and work these days, too, except that I haven’t yet starting VPNing in to the new job. It’s almost exactly how I worked at ISS.