02/22/2007

Mmm… credit card offers.

Normally I trash them, but when I saw that I could get a free iPod by having a new business card, I took the offer, purchased a few things for the company, and waited.

Today my iPod came!

Now I just have to cancel the card (heh) and wait for the next offer…

02/21/2007

Apparently Flickr went down on Monday for a little while, as the guys behind the scenes sorted out some problems causing the wrong photos to be displayed. During the “we’re really sorry about that” phase of the process, one of the Flickr developers revealed:

Flickr serves hundreds of millions of photos each day. On the highest traffic days, just over a billion photos are served.

Holy smokes, that’s a lot of pictures.

02/18/2007

Today is my birthday, of course, so I made some cupcakes for myself.

Everything seemed fine, and the first pan I pulled out of the oven looked normal.

But then I grabbed the second pan, which appeared to be a bunch of nuclear fallout mutant cupcakes.

I have no idea how that could have happened. In the end, everything turned out okay because it meant the frosting didn’t have to be spread across quite as many cupcakes, so each of the “good” ones had a nice quarter-inch-thick layer.

02/17/2007

On Feburary 11, 1997, there was a discussion on an online Windows newsgroup about computers having a gigabyte of RAM.

PC’s will never have gigabytes of RAM.

The reason is simple. Somewhere in the 50 to 200 megabyte range, all applications, (or at least their active portion), will reside in memory. Doubling memory may allow the entire set of applications to reside in memory, but the performance gain will be small. The larger the memory capacity, the smaller the gain.

As a result, additional RAM memory will not be added.

Of course we all have a good laugh now. The three-year-old computer I’m using to type this has a gig of RAM. New systems regularly come with that much; middle-tier servers have two or four.

Ahh, isn’t technologic progress fun?

02/15/2007

Laralee and Zack were making “peanut butter balls”, which are basically peanut butter mixed with Rice Krispies and chilled. The kids love them, and they’re (relatively) healthy.

Not content with just balls, Zack decided to get creative with a few of the ones he was making. Unfortunately a few of them look like something that came out of the back end of a dog.

02/12/2007

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

— Senator Barack Obama, October 26, 2002