Tunnelvision. I suffered programmer’s tunnelvision today. Suffering tunnelvision is bad. Really bad. I need a drill. Like in, a giant drill. (Note that I was always used to call the Channel Tunnel, ‘the Chunnel’. Maybe it actually has a real name. I wonder if the Queen went by train via the Chunnel. Chunnel, chunnel, chunnel. CHUNNEL!).
Almost related: Compare Mark’s, Dave’s and Microsoft’s. Not that I really care.
Over at the BBC, an article that seems to bring closure to the Paddington crash (story about the crash).
Around that time, Alfons and I were in London too: we were visiting the old City to attend the Kurt Weill Centenary. Aside from that, we never noticed something happened until we found out that some of the trains and metros weren’t stopping over at Paddington station. Locked down. There were frantic calls from family members, worried that something may have happened to us: luckily my cellphone was actually working in Great Britain, something I have to thank my employer for, after all those years.
I gather that the time already changed over in Holland, last week, as the picture so rightfully shows.
There would have been a six hour difference between this part of the ocean and the old continent. I have just seen the future and it looks promising.
Alfons 
sent in some pictures from around the Deventer quays. They have been rebuilt in the Eighties, but the city’s Public Works department was smart enough to keep the old stones and bricks.
There’s something funny about that picture. Normally during the early Spring when the melting water of the Swiss Alps races down the Rhine (and then the IJsel), the section of the quay as pictured here, is generally flooded. Imagine how much water that is, knowing that the width of the river the IJsel (on the right) is probably around the 100 meters. Note the bridge. That’s that bridge, yes. But then I’ve probably mentioned that a hundred of times too.
Temperatures have been floating around the 5 to 7 degrees here, making the ground extremely soggy. Too much snow melting too fast. It’s a mess: supposed to be raining too, all weekend. Showers.
Rain, reminds me of AT&T’s ‘Rain’ commercial: that’s that one where the 1s and 0s fall like raindrops on people’s faces. The hammering and repetive tones of the piano at the end of that ad keep sticking in the back of my mind. They should offer downloads of commercials for free.
Naturally, not every commercial.
I can eat a whole tub of fruit yoghurt. You know the ones that they sell in your dairy section, for around 3 dollars. In 5 minutes. Preferably peaches. Peaches are good. Yoghurt is good. 750 grams of yoghurt and peaches.
Eh? [insert sound of rewinding tape] Grams?
Grams the tub says. 750 grams. That’s not right. Liquids have a volume. You measure them in mililiters. Solid materials have mass. The amount of a mass is measured in grams. Liquids, volume. Mass, grams.
My head.
A couple of eulogies to Apple’s Hypercard.
A hundred of years ago, I remember buying a DOS based ‘Hypercard’ clone, ‘Hyperpad’. Fun, but at the end the concept of ‘stack of cards’ is pretty limited if you want to do more than one-to-one type of databases.
And fear not, there’s a Python-based open source Hypercard like development system. Naturally, it works on multiple platforms.
There’s a pressrelease over at the WHO regarding the Tobacco treaty. With the signatures of Congo and Ecuador, 100 countries have ‘underscored the intention to protect their citizens from tobacco related diseases’. Remarkably, the list of countries does not include the US. There’s a reason for that. Or maybe not.
No, really, a couple of weeks ago, the CDC released a factsheet of ‘common causes of death’ in the US in 2000. Smoking, naturally, tops the list of causes of death.
Americans call it the factor that broke up the Eastern Front. The Star Wars program, and apparently today (23rd) it’s the day that former President Reagan announced his SDI program.
I’ll leave it to the experts, but as a kid then, who grew up with Star Wars (The Movie), I honestly thought the Americans were up to their yo-yos. That Reagan calling Russia ‘The Evil Empire’ didn’t help either. I sometimes wonder how Americans of my age felt. I wonder how the Russians felt. I mean, a year later, Hollywood released a movie about Russians invading America. Starring mr. Dirty Dancing!
Hilarious, if you think about it.
For some kind of reason I think the Globe and Mail is too heavily involved with advertizers. If you’re a frequent visitor of the paper’s website, you may have noticed the Canadian Nuclear Association advertisements. The latest add beats everything in my math book. It’s a quiz. A test your Energy IQ quiz.
Why does it beat everything in math? Because the answers are so predictable: it’s about Canadians, so the answers to many of the questions are Canada-related answers. And then the main clue: always pick the last option, whenever it concerns percentages (or pick the highest number). It works everytime. And in a matter of seconds you’ll feel your Energy IQ rise.
The Dutch queen’s mom died yesterday morning, and the first thing I did was go to the Dutch broadcasting corporation and view the news streams. I noticed that most people, when asked for the opinion, told that they regarded queen Juliana as the ‘people’s queen’.
Ruling from 1948 to 1980, she directed the Dutch government from signing the independence of Indonesia (the former Dutch East Indies) to the Lockheed scandal. Not to mention her utter disappointment in minister van Agt when he ordered Dutch police forces and military to bring an end to the De Punt hijacking.
Have I already mentioned that I think that the InterActual Player is actually InterActual Crap? Want to see the extra features on that new DVD? ‘Well, make sure to install the InterActual player’.
Only available for Windows and Mac. Naturally. And also, if you plan to watch those precious extra features, make sure to tick off those extra checkboxes when the Settings dialog appears after installing the player.
Next time I will just neglect these kind of DVDs.
It looks like the Windows port of that database server is getting closer to completion.
There are a couple of reasons why I’m following this. First of all, working on Postgres databases on both Linux and Windows platforms, I’ve been surprised how stable the server is itself. Coming from a Sybase background, Postgres felt like second nature, something where MySQL plain failed. If you’re running a business on MySQL, you probably haven’t looked around.
