The order I made on December 12 will probably arrive at its destination (my nephews' house) in time for Christmas.

The order I made on December 13 will not arrive until December 24 at the earliest. (Which is a problem, because it's being shipped to my office, which is closed on Christmas Eve.)

"Difficulties at the warehouse," they say. "Cancel my order and I'll take my chances at the brick-and-mortar store," I reply.

Geez.

Okay, I'm going wireless at home. I really, really want wireless 'net access for my work laptop when I bring it home. It'd be nice for the family laptop, too. Someday I may even make it easier for the Tivo to call home (far easier than running an Ethernet cable from the cable modem to that part of the house).

Do not go to someone with a master's degree and twenty years of industry experience, and say, "Gosh, I'm sorry you lost your job, but we've got a heck of a good retraining program at the local community college."

... is here.

http://factcheck.org/ is a non-partisan (i.e., they attack attack ads from both sides) web site run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. You'll find Republican-funded Group Attacks Kerry's War Record pretty much right next to Kerry's Dubious Economics.

Worth checking out.

http://www.agitar.com/news/000058.html: "Agitar Software, the leader in developer testing for the enterprise, today announced that Kent Beck has become an Agitar Software Fellow."

Problem: The Locate Link Browser Dialog Box Appears When You Open a Web Link in an E-mail Message.

Solution: described here.

I haven't tried this yet.

I was paying my credit card bill online, and my credit card company warned me I might not be able to do so if I was using the latest version of Internet Explorer with a recent patch. They pointed me to here:

I was moderating the latest front page poll, and found this (moderated as informative) entry. Follow the link, and you'll get to a site that has all sorts of real and imaginary objects, each page set to some scale for comparison purposes: 747, B5, DS9, and some of the space stations designed by Gerard O'Neill and those who worked with him. Cool stuff all around. Thanks, GQuon!

This is the funniest thing I've read all week.

This article should be mandatory reading for anyone who's trying to make some piece of software run faster.

From buffer-overflow's journal:

"Why do IT guys always ask people to move?"

"Because watching you use a computer is like watching Lassie try to communicate. Sure, she's smart and she'll succeed eventually, but Timmy needs out of the well now."

I've seen what must be twenty-three journal entries, which seem to originate with this page; so:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

IntelliJ IDEA is a commercial Java IDE said to be so good, devlopers would use it if they had to pay their own money for it. The price recently rose to $500.

Except that, between April 13 and 22, the price for a personal license has been reduced to $250.