Author: cosmo

Whoa, the lighting outside just became really weird. Check out these clouds.

Natalya Kashuba, a 27-year-old Russian woman, drank around three liters of Coca Cola every day for five years. Amazingly, she developed heartburn. And in a shock to no one, she sued Coca Cola because they failed to adequately warn of the health risks of drinking three liters of their product every day for five years.

You guessed it: she won her lawsuit. Score another victory against common sense.

The only good ending for this little story is the amount of money she was awarded in the case.

$120.

The World Wide Web officially turns 16 today. The first publicly-available web server hosted a few HTML pages back in 1990, and thus was born the WWW.

It’s hard to believe it’s only been that long. Today the Web is everywhere, and has enormous influence in everything from the corporate world to entertainment to writing simple research papers. It even provides me with a way to earn a living!

Happy birthday, Web. It’ll be interesting to see what the next 16 years bring us.

On a Linux user’s group to which I belong, there’s been a lively and thought-provoking discussion about software engineering and how it not only differs from other “engineering” disciplines, but also what it really means when a customer buys software. I’ve been following the discussion because in the end, that’s what I do every day: I deliver software to customers who normally never see (nor care about) the actual programming logic behind it. They only care that it works, and does what they specifically need for their business.

A funny observation was about “enterprise” software:

It’s funny because it’s true, of course. I’ve worked with several clients who, after several years of using web-based systems I built and customized for them, discarded them in favor of an “enterprise solution” from some huge bloated company with a persuasive sales force. In many cases, the client spent gobs of cash on the software only to discover that it didn’t do what they need and had to be customized by consultants at $300/hour, or that it actually had fewer features than the system I’d built over the years. Go figure.

Yummy.

This is an awesome optical illusion.

If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, the dots will remain only one color: pink.

However, if you stare at the black “+” in the center, the moving dot turns to green.

Now, concentrate on the black “+” in the center of the picture. After a short period, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see only a single green dot rotating.

“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Rick was kind enough to bring me the latest YMCA newsletter, cleverly titled “Zing-a-Ling!”

What a bummer. I was going to use that name for the Zing newsletter I send to clients… guess it’s back to the drawing board.

Funny bumper sticker.

Remember the stunning victory for British and American anti-terrorism forces a few months ago, when they stopped a group of guys who were thinking about maybe outlining a plan to blow up some airplanes with liquids?

Well, it turns out two of those suspects were released today due to lack of evidence. That’s right– for months we’ve been subject to absolutely ridiculous security measures (I barely got through with my Carmex lip balm) because of this plot, and now we find out there really wasn’t much of a plot after all. Never mind that even if there was a plot, it wouldn’t have worked anyway, for about a hundred different reasons… including some pesky laws of physics.

If the terrorists haven’t won yet, heaven knows what it’ll take.