But that, my friends is the blessing, the curse that was avoided is something that online oldtimers will remember from years back. It was in the form of an email that made the rounds several times. It also got posted on countless newsgroups and forums. The content was something that made car buyers shiver and think “God I hope that isn’t gonna happen”.

How shall I describe yesterday? I like to keep this blog family friendly so I’m sure that most readers will understand my meaning when I just call it a “Rolling and Screaming Charlie-Foxtrot”. The details of this adventure is something that my wife will no doubt do a much better job of writing about than I can. What I want to focus on here is the cherry on top of that “wonderful” day.

According to an item on Zdnet, IBM and several Linux OS’s are planning to take advantage of Vista’s failure. In a move that would have you and me reaching for the phone number to that team of Chicago personal injury lawyers, These guys are planning to dogpile Vista.
They’re planning to increase the number of [...]

There’s quite a lot in a name. It’s your identity, it’s your family history and ancestry. It’s something that’s uniquely “you”, even if it’s incredibly common like “John Smith”.

I’ve been seeing more and more mention of the possibility that the Skype VOIP service has one or more ‘backdoors’ in it’s security that allow connections to be bugged. Of course, Skype is denying this left and right. Thing is, there’s really only one way that those denials are going to ever be [...]

With the Olympics being in China this time around there’s more attention finally being given to China and some of the ways they’re doing things are getting a little more press than usual. It’s long overdue and still not enough.

I see that the headlines are now screaming that we’re headed for “RECORD DEFICIT IN 2009″. What’s annoying about it is that the news story I read leads the reader to believe that it’s entirely because of the sagging economy and the stimulus payments to 130 million households.

Y’know, I’ve heard for years about how it’s supposed to be safer to fly than do drive and maybe that was true twenty or thirty years ago, but stories like this recent one in which Obama’s plane had to make an unscheduled landing in St. Louis because of a “maintenance issue” that came up on [...]

Japan is working on deploying visual “age verification” cameras on cigarette vending machines. The idea is to make sure that the person using the machine is actually an adult. Unfortunately, there’s a couple of little flies in that particular ointment.

With the retirement of Bill Gates (you know, the guy credited with saying that 640k was enough for anybody?) Well, it seems that one of his functions has been to try and keep the folks at Microsoft in step with reality. One of the ways was shown in an email he sent to [...]