My Model 100 still works, though it's in a closet at the moment. And my Apple Newton works just fine. I wish my Palm Pilots had fared as well, but I don't trust anything that rides all day in my pocket to survive like that.

He's Canadian. The preferred execution method is Boot to the Head.

That is an excellent line, sadly I'll probably fail to remember it. Much thanks.

I've actually shown her that episode of The Tick! She didn't find it as amusing as I do, but I'm a lot more weird than she is.

She's not a swimsuit model, and frankly I wouldn't want one, too high maintenance. But she is good enough for television: at least two BBC productions and one Japanese production have been made because of this lunar laser ranging program. Still, we're celebrating our 9th anniversary in June, and the coolest thing is that she found me through online dating even though I was 500 miles away.

So to my fellow geeks: there is hope, and patience is sometimes rewarded.

Actually, the Big Bang people heard of a talk by Dr. Tom Murphy (UCSD) who's in charge of this lunar laser ranging thing called APOLLO (http://physics.ucsd.edu/~tmurphy/apollo/apollo.html) and contacted him for info on how to do the BBT ep. My wife was also the closing segment on the 2008 Mythbusters lunar landing hoax episode, and I did a ten-minute documentary on the laser at my YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Wa.... Originally the Mythbusters wanted to build their own rig, but when they found out the cost and accuracy required they decided it was better to spend a few days traveling to New Mexico, it also gave them a chance to evaluate the gear that they were going to use for their first Alaska Special. Apparently Adam had a really bad problem with the high altitude of the observatory, Apache Point is at 9200', not an uncommon problem.

I'll be watching the eclipse from the catwalk of a 3.5 meter telescope while said telescope shoots a laser at the moon and bounces the beam off of five retroreflectors. Weather permitting. It's awesome having a wife who's an astronomer/PhD.

Agreed. I've been playing and running RPGs since white box/three book D&D, Traveller and Top Secret in the late '70s and designing card games for over a decade, and played computer games since it was possible. I've always felt that the thing that was really missing from online MMOs was the touch of a good face-to-face game master. I remember one of the D&D RPGs where you controlled a party of 4-6 characters and thought 'THIS is a game that's designed pretty well.' I've gotten some hints of that in Vanguard and Elder Scrolls Online, but that feeling in WoW is happening less and less. You're so heavily railroaded in WoW and there's really nothing you can do about it. Sure, you might be able to kill mobs of critters until you hit level cap, but it'd be pretty boring.

Yeah, there's definitely a market. My wife operates a 3.5 meter telescope, and one program that she runs works only on an old Sony laptop running XP. Apparently the graphic part of the program is tied so closely to the hardware that it just doesn't work as well on anything else. I really ought to scrounge and buy a couple more for backups. What will probably happen is the observatory won't do a thing until the current one rolls over and dies.

Well, Soundex has only been around for almost a century, we can't expect government programmers to be up on the latest technology. Even though every major relational database supports it. Even though most programming languages implement it. Even though you could write your own implementation without too much difficulty.

My PHBs wouldn't spring for something like Clipper. Still, we did some pretty amazing things with FB.

Medical/industrial toxic waste is still dangerous and can be used for making dirty bombs designed to spread said nuclear waste over a large area. Not incredibly deadly, but very expensive to clean up, it must be carefully and properly disposed of. I remember reading about a dental x-ray machine that was improperly disposed of and was basically taken south of the border and dumped. Somehow the container of nuclear material burst or was broken open and little kids played with the powder inside. I never heard what the follow-on health problems were.

Thank you, I've always wondered why these types of waste were not reprocessable. A friend of mine went to ASU in the '70s/'80s and they had an Indian physicist called Dr. Roy (no idea what the last name was) who claimed to have a method for safely disposing of nuclear waste, never heard of the program going live.

Man, I'll bet those two decades of me and my friends playing Champions really gave her a headache.

dBase III+ back in the '80s had a competitor called FoxBase. FB was crazy fast due to a very fast pre-compiler and a greatly improved indexing scheme. FB copied dBase's bugs because they had known workarounds in the programming community, and fixing the bug would break established code. Of course dBase was bought out by Borland, FB was bought out by Microsoft, and the world moved on to better implementations of the relational model.