Glad to see someone mention PSEO. My son's a HS junior, enrolled at Normandale through PSEO. Seems to be working very well for him.

I was JUST thinking a few days ago how cool it would be to get a new version of Civ, and like magic, here it comes. WOOOOOHOOOO!!!!!

Ditto what he said. Moon is a great film...

It's a balmy -4F here in Mpls right now, we've just broken out the light jackets...

Ditto. Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough.

If you're within range of Qwest's FTTN, I highly recommend it. They rolled it out in my neighborhood in the SW metro almost a year ago. I had put up with Comcast's unreliable speeds and random disconnects (just long enough to drop a VPN or Xbox connection). When Qwest rolled through, I had them hook me up and ran both for a couple of months. With Qwest, I get a steady 12Mbps down, tested at various times of the day/week, and my ping times dropped from an average 40ms (wild fluctuations) to a steady 18ms. I have a static IP and a rock-solid connection, haven't missed Comcast a bit.

I own two of them, I know.

I can't speak for all North American countries, but I can say that the general populace of ONE of those countries is genetically incapable of being thankful for anything, government issued or otherwise. It's never enough, I deserve more, now where is it? Drives me nuts...

Replying to myself, forgot to link to the NPR story:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113035255

Last week there was a story on NPR about this. In this story, they interview two teenage girls. OH... MY... GOD... The stupidity is just unbelievable.

One girl is 16, had a serious accident caused by her texting, spent some time recuperating. She recovers, starts driving again, and immediately has another accident, again while texting (she rear-ended a stopped semi). When asked if she'll stop texting while driving, she responds "Like, I've tried, like, but it's just, like, SOOOOOOO hard. Like."

The second girl says "It's fun to text while driving! Everybody does it, I mean, like, who doesn't?"

I fear for our future...

We have a whole department full of duct tape developers, writing Business Objects reports and other BI-type code. They can't write efficient database queries to save their asses. As one of the production support DBA's, I get the pleasure of debugging/tuning their crap after it hits production and won't run. Just yesterday, after one of the production Oracle machines fell over, we discovered a query that was piping a whopping 2.4 PETABYTES of data through a SELECT DISTINCT clause. Considering the database itself is less than 300GB, we found this rather interesting. When challenged, the developer responsible for the query says "It should only return about 10 rows". True, if it ever finishes applying the DISTINCT.

Ship first, tune later, I love that philosophy...

Get a FREE paperback book from PaperBackSwap.Com, then put it back into circulation when you're done.

Back in the mid/late 90's, we had a Btrieve-based app running on our Novell network. The client app ran on each local workstation, Win95 at the time. One of the resident computer experts (helpdesk guy) discovered a "tool" that would allow him to send the ping o'death to any machine on the network. He amused himself merrily, randomly crashing machines for nearly a week. Problem was, each time he crashed a machine, the Btrieve database would get corrupted or records would be left locked, requiring intervention by me to get things working again. Once I figured out who was doing it, I warned him to stop. He didn't, so I reported him to senior management. He was fired immediately.

Where do you live? I want to make sure never to drive there...

Just last week, I followed a kid for about 3 miles of my morning commute. During the entire time, he had a cellphone clutched in one hand, holding it above the steering wheel. Multiple times he crossed the center line. Multiple times he wandered into the bike lane. Twice I had to tap the horn to wake him up at a green light. The highlight came when we reached a point where the road narrowed (the bike lane ended), and he promptly bounced the left-side wheels off the curb. I think that got his attention, because he put the phone down and put on his seat belt.

I understand kids do dumb things. Hopefully he (and you) will live long enough to learn how dumb this truly is, without killing someone else along the way.

I do the same thing, but with Google Voice. The only reason I have a home phone is because my satellite receiver needs it. I have that number forwarding to Google Voice, which acts as a spam filter for my phone. The few calls that do get through, I can block manually. Blocked callers get a "number not in use" message.