I saw this Saudi King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert. It caught my eye because:

Saudi Arabia has been sending people to the US for education training, conferences and even ncaete. Infact, they've been hiring people from the upper-educational world and paying *big* money for help (ie consulting).

Personally, I think you'll see Jordan doing this next. Because some of these countries are finally realizing if they don't reinvest all the oil money they've made off of us, they're screwed.
 

The $150 laptop was apparently too good to be true. 2Checkout has suspended all sales of it, refunded all orders that were marked shipped, and allowed all authorizations not charged to expire. An email from 2CO said there may be a time in the future when saleswill resume but its mentioned as a "when and if" situation.

The Oregon Brewers Festival was interesting. I attended with out at OSCON 2007. Lots of tents. Lots of beer. Lots of people.

But the most odd thing of all was the 'beer growl'. Seriously, people would just kinda do this. It was like a roaring growl. I hear this unique "thing to do when drinking good bear" was invented in Portland and is a common thing at this festival.

On my trip out there I had a number of local beers. I don't recall finding a single one I didn't like. I should have kept the labels, because I now remember none of their names :( Aw well, maybe next year :)

I'm signed up for EcoTours of Oregon's Columbia River Gorge Waterfalls
and Mount Hood Loop Tour.

I had contacted them months ago, when I knew I was going to OSCON (ie, when the payment check was cut). The guy from EcoTours who responded was nice, but informed me they have a minimum-party requirement. One, well, just wasn't enough. But he said he had any one else inquire about doing that tour, that day, he'd let me know.

He called sometime today while I was in bed (the flu). The tour is on! I'm psyched! Geek to the woods, here I come!! ha ha

I've never done anything like this before. I figure I'll take my camera (wide angle lens and a 70-200) and my hiking stick/mono-pod, along with hiking boots and hat. Add in an extra battery and an extra CF-card too. That should do the trick I suppose.

I'm going to OSCON this year. If anyone who's reading my journal's going, let me know and let's meet up for a cold beverage or something.

I am going to be there Sunday to Sunday. In fact, if any of you would be interested in doing an Eco Tours Columbia River Gorge Waterfalls and Mount Hood "Loop" Tour on the 28th, let me know. They do it in packages of 4 people. I have one person, myself, interested for that date.

If you know someone going to OSCON that'd be interested in doing this with me, please by all means forward this JE to them.

On my route to work each morning, I go through a ~2 year old neighborhood for about a mile before I reach the turn-in for the office. The houses are built right along the Scioto river. The houses along the river have woods seperating them from the river (as well as steep banks). Most of the development's completed, but they are still building the last 10 or so houses and there's a handful of for-sale lots.

So I was driving down the road, ogling the $500 - $700k houses that maybe, someday, I'd be able to afford. When I noticed the car ahead of me just miss something rather large in the road. As I approached, I could see it was a turtle. I looked, no one oncoming, no one behind me, so I pulled over.

It was a rather large snapping turtle. I carefully picked it up on it's sides, towards the back, and started walking to the other side of the road where it was heading. At which point it let lose a torrent of, well, piss. Luckily, I was not wanting to get dirty (since I had my dilbert outfit on) and I didn't want to get bit, so I had it held out far from me. But most importantly, I had it pointing the opposite way. So it's jetison was no where near me.

I grumbled some explative about how unappreciative it was. Maybe something towards the idea of I should put it back down and let it be flattened. But I didn't, continued walking across the road. Went to put it down, and *swoosh* it let loose another torrent. Luckily this hit the mud that was on the other side of the curb where I was putting it down.

After it was down, I waited a second to see if it'd scoot away, but it was too alarmed to move. And I had to get to work, so I left.

Towards the end of that street, I noticed another large object on the opposite side, right on the curb. It was another turtle, looking to make the opposite journey the other had. I didn't stop. I hope he made it.

Looking back on it I should have pulled out my cellphone and taken a picture of the turtle. Tho not having handled all that many turtles in my life, this one seemed a pretty good size.

Slashdot's moderation system is mentioned at the end of the article:

Tim O'Reilly: Web 2.0 Is About Controlling Data.

This past weekend my wife and I went and saw Breach at one of the local movie theaters.

What was interesting is my wife had previously gone to the movies a few days before with our son. So when we sat down, she quirped something about "this movie's brought to us by Vista ugh!!". I didn't know what she was talking about, and she's not a techie (though she sure has to listen to all sorts of 'techie stuff' all the time because of me). So I gave her a quizzical look and continued unwrapping myself from my gloves, hat, jacket, flannel, etc, as did she.

Well what do you know? She was exactly right! The movie's 30 minute set of ads,community spotlights, quizzes and what-not were definitely brought to you by Vista!. Each commercial, each movie clip, each ad, was shown in various window-arrangements and settings via a Vista desktop. And it was so pretty! ;)

Seriously, they made the windows (each representing a commercial that you'd either just watched, or would be soon) flip over each other, jump over each other, shuffle their order, jump around ala OSX's Expose. Every once in a while they'd try to delve into other "pretty" aspects of Vista, but soon after jump right back to the window management and the flippy window icons.

Yes, all brought to you by Vista!

We were so thankful. Because of Vista's unique window arangement tools, we fully comprehended all of the advertisements. And because of Vista, we gleefully watched each and every ad diligently throughout the entire ~30 minute spell. That is, before the ~15 minutes of forced-real-previews started. But they weren't brought to us by Vista. At-least, not yet.

Disclaimer: I'm from Ohio, and very much an OSU Buckeye fan.

There's now a lot of talk about an OSU/Michigan rematch for the National Championship.

My position on this: I do not think this should happen, nor be allowed to happen.

This game was Michigan's chance to make sure they were in the National Championship, if they won. They didn't. It was a great game, and we had a great time watching it (it helps when your team comes out on top, too, along with Chili & beer!)

But now you've got the USC/Cal game coming. Florida just won (against a lowly opponent), Notre Dame won and Rutgers (undefeated, I might add) still has to play WV.

Rutgers plays Cincy now, then Syracuse and WV.
For USC their game against Cal just started (after I type this, that's what I'll be doing) then Notre Dame (another big game) then UCLA.

What'll happen? How will it all play out? I don't know, but after looking at the top 10 teams (only 2 of which are now undefeated) I'm finding it more difficult to justify, in my mind, that OSU replay Michigan for the National Title game.

This morning my wife yelled down the hall "one of the founders of Apple is on NPR" so I ran in and sat down to listen.

Boy, is he a goofball. Did you know he once called the Pope pretending to be Kissinger?

And he's not very good at answering questions. There were a couple of questions which he just did not answer what was asked, but instead spouted off about whatever he apparently wanted to.

It interesting nonetheless. I don't know which NPR show it was on, but I think it was a semi-advertisement for his new book, apparently called "iWoz".

I'm stuck at work all day w/ no Tunes. My iPod got wiped. 'How' you ask?

Before I left in the morning, I had updated the iPod from the workstation at my desk. Before disconnect I made sure to mark it as manual-update.

So I came in, and thought "I'll play it on the laptop". Ah, big mistake. Apparently the iPod-update settings stay with the machine, not the iPod. My laptop has no music on it (small hard drive). But at one time I had used it to populate the iPod.

And there's the dilemma. An iTunes install that has no music, an iPod it recognizes from ancient times ago, that it used to populate. It updated the iPod allright, with absolutely nothing, therefore removing all the music on the iPod.

The irony is if you hit Apple's discussion-server, there were a number of threads where people stated their iPod was 'ate' (or wiped) by iTunes. I had recently posted a response to one of them saying I haven't had any problems since I had upgraded. I guess technically, I haven't, other then my own user-error.

Seeing as the Ohio Linuxfest 2006 is coming up, I thought I'd put a few select OLF2k5 pictures online.

First this Ohio Bar Owner Will Fight To Keep 'Speak English' Sign and now this Philadelphia's cheesesteak shop's sign: WHEN ORDERING SPEAK ENGLISH.

Ohio law says it is unlawful for any proprietor of a place of public accommodation to deny the full enjoyment of the accommodations based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, age or ancestry.

It doesn't say anything about "language spoken".

Are these two different? The one in Ohio wanted to require English to be served. The one in Philadelphia, seemingly, is asking for it to be spoken. Is there a difference? Maybe.

But I don't see the problem for either.

If I relocated to Russia (or insert your country here), I'd damned well better learn the language inorder to survive. I don't see any reason that we ask the same here in the US.

Link: Digg to expand content

From the sound of it, they're going to add sections for alternative content - politics, entertainment, etc.

Is this more competition for Slashdot and it's like?

I'd yes, but with a caveat. Myself, I hit slashdot constantly because of the "geek related news" that's always popping up on it. But more then that, it's the comments (well, 3++, or 4++) that keep me coming back. Sometimes it's even the discussions related around those comments.

So is it competition in the sense that Slashdot should be worried? I don't think so, in that Slashdot seems to be "expanding" as well. From the tags, the new brief article teasers (presumably to get even more article links on the frontpage), to the bookmarks system, to the discussion2 changes. I think once all of those things are tied in, there will be yet another reason to hit Slashdot - quicker, more fine grained news via the tags and the bookmarks that could be combined (intertwined?) with the stories such that I can pick out news stories and links even quicker via Slashdot. And they can serve me an add (I'm not a subscriber) that's pointed to what I'm viewing so I may just click on it. (of all the sites I've seen, Slashdot's ads I've clicked on the most, simply because they're often something I'm interested in).

Of course, it helps to have had lots of contact w/ some of the guys who code for Slashdot, so I've a personal interest in the site from knowing them and want to see it, and them, do well.

This Dell XPS M2010 is a friggin monster. They say it's a portable, the pic shows it as looking somewhat like a laptop, but I'd tend to call it a lap crusher if you tried to put it on your lap. And $4000.00!!! ouch!

Thanks, but no thanks. I'll keep my 15" MacBook Pro.