I get asked this question every so often so since I just did the calculation for it I thought I would post it.

There are right around 4.4 million friends of friend and foes of friends relationships. This is out of 89K friend and foe relationships (the record number of second degree relationships is around 16K, with the next 3 being in the 13K range).

You know, I like my Zaurus. I have a couple of complaints about it but those are pretty minor and are more application specific (well battery life could be better but lets face facts, nothing is going to beat a palm since it does so little... which translates into it needing little battery life (sure, do away with color, a good processor, and I bet you could do the same)).
I now have my calendar working thanks to the fact that KOrganizer runs on it. Wish Kmail and the addressbook did too. The built in one sucks pretty badly to be honest and doesn't handle IMAP as well as it should. A simple perl script solves the issue when it comes to the addressbook, but I think that it is lame that it requires anything at all.

I may back up the entire thing and install the OpenZaurus boot roms, in all honesty I think they may be better then the sharp ones. I don't need to read word documents so the Hancom stuff is pointless for me. Opera's interface is cluncky.

Now if only KOrganizer could sync itself from an iCal file on the web. Now that would be very nifty.

On a side note, the image for the handhelds topic is a bit... dated.

An Organic Seal will begin appearing on food stuff. The last time I read much about this, and it has been years, was that the industry had gutted the bill and made it easy for anyone to get the label. Now reading a couple of on-line articles it looks like this is not the case.

Since its around election time Bush has decided to go after drug companies who try to extend the period of time that they get to keep their drugs to themselves. Drug companies are given a complete monopoly over the drugs that they produce (the period is 30 months). I realize that there is a cost involved in creating drugs, but it sure stinks that for that first 30 month only someone who can afford the name brand version is going to be able to get it. The other way to look at this though is that those with money become the first test rabbits among the general public.

Cute, there is a mad deer disease. Tack this on to the new PETA campaign slogan "Cut Class, Not Frogs" and I have a happy little pro-veg morning.

I love how Seattle's waterfront viaduct issue is being compared to Boston's big dig. The question is, is it worth billions of dollars extra to put the thing underground instead of leaving it in its current design? Billions.

Interesting to find articles on the Web talking about the mistrust between the White House and the military. Makes me wonder how many of them now wish for a return to Clinton days.

Bomb in a Bali nightclub has the marking of terrorists. The club was mainly filled with Europeans and Australians it seems. No actual Indonesians though unless they were a part of the staff. The club turned away people who actually happened to be Indonesian. See any happy fun resentment possibly there?

Seems that Falwell apologized for likening Muhammad to a terrorist. The amazing thing is that a few groups actually bought into it. I wonder what Socrates would have to say about that.

Good morning Afghanistan. While Afghanistan seems to have slipped American minds for the moment it is nice to know that at least a few people living there certainly have not forgotten about us. They were reminding us about this last week by shooting rockets into our camps. They use timers so that when we show up to thank them, they can keep it a surprise as to who gave us the wake up call.

Looks like Britain has decided to take back Northern Ireland again. Just remember this if you are on the London tube and you see a package sitting there all by itself.

Ewww, Salon gave a positive review of "Birds of Prey".

So Carter got the Nobel Peace Prize which I think is pretty cool since he was actually a pretty good president. A friend of mine had him as a prof at Emory, she was lucky enough to get in, and had nothing but glowing things to say about him. What is a shame is that people are commenting on this being a jab at Bush, which I think is a shame since Carter deserves this regardless of who is in the White House.

Seeds of protest growing on college campuses. Wow, that is a surprise. Bush is the one thing that could actually light that torch again. Now how long it lasts is a good question. My favorite quote though comes from the NYT where the president of Oberlin was surprised at the reaction.
Its Oberlin! What the hell does she think is going to be the reaction?

Stock Market is up (see-saw)

The Bureau of Land Management has caught officials selling off land for kickbacks and political favors. In similar news it was reported that "a lot of grass is green".

If I didn't read the NYT I an not quite sure I would know about the sniper in DC.

My favorite bit that I see in the headlines is that Rumsfeld has ordered faster plans for a war in Iraq to make it go a little faster and be a little cleaner. I wonder if he would like fries with that?

So China has a novel idea, which of course still stinks of politics, where they have decided to make the rich pay taxes and obey zoning laws. The problem of course is that this is selective but it is interesting to see it happen anyway. Makes one wonder what would happen if Gates, Jobs or Turner decided to speak out. That of course would never happen.

Nasdaq is considering dropping the $1 dollar limit for stocks out of a fear of probably closing up shop sometime in the near future. Where else would people be able to bet on the ponies out of season?

Bush realizing that he has been handed dictator like powers by congress has decided that he can confront the issue of economey now. He has an MBA right? Surely he will know what to do...
The Seattle Times mentions is an article on what the military takes with them to the gulf:
...the sumo wrestling suit ($3,395), cappuccino machines ($51,200) and white beach sand ($4,638)...
Wonder what would happen if they were to just turn this focus on building homes for a couple of days for the poor? BTW its only 2K tons of material to keep about 20K people in business per day in the army.

And on that note I think I will go put a cup of food in my dog's bowl, drink 16 ounces of soy milk, and plan to move a 50 pound dog to a park where she can run...

1) Space Invaders or Pac Man?
2) Art, the other white meat?
3) You go to your friends house and you find that they have changed the porch light for you to red, do you wish you would have worn clean underwear?
4) You ask for 5 million but they only give you 6 million, what do you do?
5) A mouse, a real estate agent and 50 foot of PVC?

Article from the BBC about a lack of female game testers for Tomb Raider. I suspect they never looked in Seattle...

Al Qaida mails out tapes to make sure everyone knows they are still around. I still suspect Bin Laden is alive and that he won't come out of hiding till he can screw the election for Bush. Mixed emotions about that one.

$355.4 billion defense bill. Its Christmas time in the military despite the fact that they didn't get what they wanted. Instead the hardware that was pushed came from an MBA and some of his father's cronies. Wonder how much pork is probably in that bill?

"Tuck Everlasting" is out. I adored the book as a kid. Salon is calling the movie "neo-vampire" and creepy. That is not how I remembered the book, but it doesn't sound bad either. Looks like the reviewer half way through the article tries to backtrack on saying this.

Not that I am really biased, nor would I say that the Seattle Times is biased, but why is their Sport's Editor flaming Ellison in the paper today? Seems a little odd. Boat racing is a very easy sport to loathe.

Human guinie pigs and how the French have turned a three year old into a not so quite Leukemia patient. I wonder if before we are done, if we will create at least one new crazy plague that wipes out a hundred thousand or more because of gene therapy.

So the motion for giving Shrub the keys to the car was 77-23. I am surprised that it was that low, but happy. I need to find out which senators need to be sent thank yous.

Looks like Cheney made a lot of money propping up the Iraqi government right before he got elected. Tells me the value of his robotic handshake (yes, I think he is in a room somewhere breathing out of a tube and that Disney is supplying the robotics to make a dummy they can hoist out for special events).

Fear the mouse...

1) Does safe sex include bananas?

2) How many calories do you really think it is?

3) Take a bite out of crime?

4) Ever wonder if Dan Quale was somehow split from the same egg as Bush, thus explaining a lot about our current state of the union?

5) What can you do with a bat, a doctor, and 50 gallons of punch?

1) Soup or Salad?
2) Got to have it?
3) What do you think it would take to get people to answer the phone with the words "al-Qaida" and have the response be "Bob Dole"?
4) What do you do on your knees?
5) What can you do with a platapus, forest ranger, and 50 tea cosies?

For those geeks among you (or hey, say you want to know what is happening in my life!):
http://krow.net/calendar.ics

This is a perl Apache handler for iCal formats. It is using the same setup that Apple uses when you publish via iCal (the display code is obvisously different, I should ask someone who has .Mac account to give me a screenshot). This of course is coming from Evolution since that is what I use daily, I could easily have my Mac share the file. Its a little slow at the moment but I could solve that by caching the page, or I could just parse the data into the DB which would make this a bit faster. At the moment it is parsing the file for each page view.

You can find the source at:
http://software.tangent.org/download/Krow-Apache-iCal-0.01.tar.gz

So someone asks "I have someone marked as a friend but they also show up under freak, what is happening?"

This means that you like them, they hate you, and you are probably a stalker.

Thankfully we never created a Slashdot dating service.

1) If you sit in your seat in anticipation, do you find that you get a sweaty butt?
2) In what year was cocaine removed from Coco Cola?
3) If I am your average bully in grade school and I know the geeky guy is going to make more money in the future and make me feel inferior, can I justify kicking his ass with a "First-Strike Doctrine"?
4) Would you really want someone to kiss your ass?
5) What can you do with a monk, a Nerf baseball bat, 50 little ninja's with kung fu grip?

(Yes, I normally only put these up on LJ but what the hell...)

Go on vacation and guess what happens? I come back to discover that no one had bothered to update my troll "slack" software. You know the one that goes through all of the troll posts on Slashdot and butchers all of their spelling and makes sure that at least a couple of them make intelligent comments about the state of different author's socks.
Not like this is going to happen on its own aye?

Still not king, terrorists must have already won.

Once upon a time I had a great little ISP. I never talked to them, things worked, and life was good. Then the outsourced themselves to an ISP called The River.

Now I deal with a flat bridged network, customer support people who mass email all the clients not using BCC, and the fact that The River seems to be filled with dumbasses who don't know how to set up routers such that incomming addresses won't get spoofed. Which means that my sendmail servers end up being told that they are connected to themselves and allow people to spam others (sorry about the 12K of "Make Money Fast" messages from China to Yahoo this morning).

I have always been a big supporter of small ISPs. They typically give great support and tend to have a clue.

This is the reason I get sad every time I see one get gobbled up by a larger one.

The Zaurus is damn cool for those who are interested. The wireless works wonderfully and its apt-get like system for finding new applications is a killer idea. This was always one of my biggest complaints with my Palm. It does IMAP directly so I don't give a shit about it syncing with my copy of evolution. The handwriting recognition is actually pretty nice and even though I find myself using the keyboard quite a bit, the other does work quite well.
I have owned Wizards, Newtons (three different kinds), and a palm pilot.
The Wizard was limiting (it worked), the Newton was great but just too damn heavy (and its hand writing recognition was only so-so), and the palm pilot worked but was very limiting.

Thus far, this is the best of them all :)