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Well, I'm back. Sailing in the C-15 Nationals was great because any time spent in a boat is better than any time spent not in a boat. [ "Ole's Law" ] Other than that there was no wind, and drifting around pretending to race is frustrating. But at least it was time spent in a boat...
[former Oracle COO] Ray Lane: Why Oracle-PeopleSoft is a lose-lose. Well we knew that already, but Ray has tremedous credibility. Market roll-ups are not good for consumers, and Oracle-PeopleSoft is a market roll-up. Meanwhile, PeopleSoft seals JDEdwards merger.
(click pic for movie)
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Want to see something really cool? Here we have a crow who figures out how to bend a wire to retrieve food. Birds use tools!
In other bird news, my baby birds are flying! It is so cute to see these little guys flying around, encouraged by the chirping of adults. (In addition to the surviving parent, apparently other adult birds get involved in cheerleading the kids!) Stay tuned - I'm going to try to get some pictures...
"The netscape dorm" - Jamie Zawinski's diary from the early days of Netscape. To me it really gives the flavor of what start-ups are all about - that feeling that you're doing something important which makes everything fun, even when it isn't even fun. Recommended!
 AOL is beta-testing their new blogging facility; Dan Gillmor has one. Looks pretty cool. Maybe now people won't ask "what's a blog?" when the see me wearing my "I'm blogging this" T-shirt :)
Tim Bray: The door is ajar. "Today, the human experience of the Net stands at a crossroads, paths diverging into the future, and nobody knows which one we’ll be on in a year." Tim makes some interesting points, but I don't think "now" is as big an inflection point as Tim does - things on the 'net are evolving, as they always do, via natural selection...
Jim Moore, in an otherwise-unrelated post, blogs a great line: The best networks win. Yep, and they win via natural selection; memes are very Darwinian.
This is special: the House of Representatives (our representatives, mind you) is considering legislation to make online file-swapping a felony. This is so stupid! File-sharing is a business issue, not something which requires political action. Why don't they worry about public education instead?
Here's a great RFID application - tracking luggage. RFID is really "a thing", we're going to hear more and more about it until it becomes taken for granted that everything is trackable.
Anyone tried Microsoft Reader for reading e-books? It is being given away at the moment, along with 60 best-selling e-books during a 20 week promotion. Somehow I'm not tempted to try it - yet.
Philip Greenspun: Boing ignores engineering. "Boeing was famous for being an engineering-driven company, headquartered right next to its factories in the Seattle area. [then] Boeing became a finance-driven company, run by guys in suits from a new headquarters in Chicago." Very sad...
Lazlo looks really cool - "an XML-native platform for deploying rich Internet applications into any browser". Unfortunately it seems a tad pokey, which is often the kiss of death for such technologies...
Larry Wall's seventh State of the Perl Onion.
More later, I have pattern recognition algorithms to debug...
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