Month: May 2003

… So my corporate credit card showed up today, and there are a few mysterious charges on it. One of them is to a company called Kagivo, and since I’d like to know who’s billing me I thought I’d check out their web site. I was deeply impressed by this statement:

“We offer a selection of databases proxy servers. Each base is constantly updated kind and all bases on the countries are broken.”

And even more to the point,

“We offer you search of a proxy of servers in range IP of addresses specified by you, search in the country set by you, city, state (USA), determined by you ISP.”

I’m not even sure what that means, but believe me when I say I’m really happy they’re charging my credit card.

Sheesh.

I think I burned my feet.

We played our usual lunchtime ultimate game today, and the temperature hovered around 95 degrees. With the sun baking down like that on the dry ground, the dirt and dry grass must’ve been well over a hundred degrees. After playing for about 45 minutes my feet were really feeling the pain. I had to sit out the end of the game because I couldn’t keep dancing from foot to foot.

Now, back at the office, they’re still tingling. Man, that’s a hot day…

59:40.

That’s twenty seconds shy of my one-hour goal for the Bolder Boulder yesterday. It’s a ten-kilometer run, and since I never actually go out and run I figured it was reasonable to shoot for an hour (which is a pace of around a ten-minute mile). This was my fifth time, and I’d never been “sub-sixty” before.

The run itself is an absolute riot, with all the stuff along the route through the city: grunge bands, eighty-year-old cowgirls, belly dancers, Elvis, the Blues Brothers, and thousands of people just generally cheering, throwing water, and offering beers to runners.

This year was the first time I had a stopwatch (“chronograph” if you speak Timex) and I think it really helped me know how far to push myself. I ran the first kilometer in five and a half minutes, and at that pace I wasn’t going to make the hour so I kicked it up a notch and did the second kilometer in five minutes flat. As the race wore on I’m sure I was slowing a bit, but managed to keep the pace pretty well. By the time I ran up the last grueling hill into the stadium for the big finish, I knew I had to put in a final spurt. Not easy, but I clicked off the stopwatch when I crossed the line and was elated to see the number.

Afterward, of course, my friends and I wandered the pavilion while we enjoyed our healthy snack of Cheetos and soda. Uhhh, they sure know how to feed runners!

All in all it was a hard run (good thing it’s only once a year), but I’m pleased I did it and hope to repeat the feat next year…

So it seems that police in Olympia, WA used a court order to place a hidden GPS transceiver in the car of a suspected murderer. He drove to the shallow grave of his daughter, and they followed the GPS signal and arrested him. He was convicted and sentenced to 56 years in the big house.

However, now the lawyers are saying the GPS device was an invasion of privacy and essentially an “invisible police officer in the back seat”, which violates the guy’s Constitutional rights.

On the one hand, I agree that having the police secretly track vehicles– on the suspicion that the driver has committed a crime and will return to the scene or at least to a place with evidence– is treading dangerous water in terms of privacy.

On the other hand, they obviously had reasons to get a court order on this guy (his story wasn’t that good) and it paid off because he was apparently the killer after all. So this was a good tool to seal the case and convict him.

The question, then, is whether this is a Good Thing or not. For a guy who’s griping a lot about invasion of privacy, I find I’m leaning in favor of this…

Boy, I was all concerned that the Pentagon’s TIA (Total Information Awareness) system was going to cause privacy issues for me. But it turns out it won’t. The Pentagon has renamed the system; now it’s called TIA (Terrorist Information Awareness). I guess that means it’ll just collect information about terrorists.

No worries, then.

As if we didn’t already have the most popular yard in the neighborhood (almost a quarter-acre of grass), we cracked out the 14-foot trampoline the other day. Almost instantly the neighborhood kids were over to try it out… and it was funny to watch a half-dozen little bodies trying to coordinate their bouncing so no one got launched into orbit.

Of course, the sad part is that in today’s world having a trampoline is almost an open invitation for a lawsuit. I’m waiting for the first time someone takes a dive and breaks an arm or something. Sigh…

Isn’t it odd that the phrase “quite a few” means a lot… not a few?

Sort of like “inflammable” meaning the same thing as “flammable”, I suppose.

Seen on the Net:

“Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.”

Amen.

Seen on Slashdot:

“No matter where you go, there you are… about a block from Taco Bell.”

Whenever I have the need to send a test e-mail message– one that I never want to see again, or one I use to sign up on some lame web site that requires an e-mail to register, I always use the same address:

god@heaven.org

Very clever, eh? (Heaven would be a non-profit organization, hence the .org extension.)

I always felt a little bad for the guy who owned heaven.org, because he would be getting all these random e-mail messages from whoever I happened to sign up with today. But then I checked the domain registry, and it turns out heaven.org isn’t owned by anyone!

Now I’m wondering if I should buy the domain, and what I might put there. The mind reels…