Because I’m busy programming!

A couple of items in the Dutch news bulletins that caught my eye: first, national grocery chain Albert Heyn is launching a new concept grocerystore (Dutch). To focus more on families and kids, the chain will start to ‘sell bulk and wholesale packages’, eat-while-you shop corners (meals ready within 15 minutes for 8 Euros, ‘a brand new concept!’, according an enthousiastic CEO), a ‘customer service corner’ and (amazingly) a washroom.

Widely (world renown, I hear) popular ‘Uitzending gemist’ from the Dutch public broadcaster, will finally include commercials. Darn.

The big buzz around appears to be the ‘editing of the history of podcasting’. Mr. Curry was caught while editing the ‘history’ of podcasting in his favour. The real issue is not that he was actually caught: it’s the fact that people can claim fame for something so normal as ‘podcasting’. ‘Timeshifted downloads’. Rats ass.

In the article podcasts are described as time-shifted. This seems rather incorrect. Unlike time-shifted material, podcasts cannot be listened to while the content is produced, which makes podcasts more akin to recordings then to time-shifted content.

Questionable practices, and a national hero taking a step down. Talking about cloning, where’s Clonaid? Where’s Eve? When can I finally start cloning a triplet brother? Not right away though, I’m still in the process of building a genuine StarTrek-like ‘transporter beam’ that works on TCP/IP. (Note I’ve considered UDP, but for technical reasons, it wasn’t quite feasible)

It’s the same story in Europe. Sold out.

I was testing Firebird for an SQL analyzer I’m currently working on. Installing Firebird on the Debian box was a breeze. I had more troubles getting the ODBC connection going on my Windows desktop. After being able to finally get the connection going¹, I cannot even see my own tables. I’ll be hunting this problem down tomorrow or the day after: it might be some role/security problem.

Earlier, The Daily Show had Chris Elliott as a guest. He’s the guy who did ‘Get A Life’ (and you probably recognize him from ‘The Abyss’). I always thought that show was hilarious: I learned to appreciate his absurd humour after his excellent show on time travelling (truthfully detailing the paradoxes of time travel). Guess what, that particularly show’s script is online (script here).

¹ If you want to use Firebird server from a remote client, you need to download the complete server package (available in many flavours) and select the ‘install the client only’ option during installation.

MACKIE IS BACK

And yes, that’s Nellie McKay as Polly! Oh, wait, it was already old news.

You can actually click on the big letters!

Another gem in the War of the Words, found via Crooks and Liars. Words that come from William Kristol, apparently one of the founders of PNAC, the New American Century. In this case, Kristol was highly critical of remarks made by Democratic whip Nancy Pelosi. Kristol writes:

“It is possible that the situation in Iraq will worsen over the next year….But it is much more likely that the situation in Iraq will stay more or less the same, or improve.”

Lets say it this way: statistically speaking, there’s a 50 percent chance of choosing ‘Yes’ if the only other option is ‘No’. 50 Percent just sounds a whole lot better that way and it’s mathematically correct too.

update: I also find the following words extremely offensive to my intelligence: “But it is much more likely that the situation in Iraq will stay more or less the same”.

Doesn’t that literally mean that Kristof admits things are going bad in Iraq?

Hey: ME TOO.

There are far better images over at this FlickR set of pictures. Mine is not the desktop, which I could have made out of it I suppose.

Earlier, I noticed that a Canadian ISP will stop serving UseNet to its customers. The Globe’s Kapica noticed:

I recall one incident, in which a bunch of high-spirited kids decided to invade another newsgroup as a prank. The prank effectively destroyed the target group.

Yes, me too. I’m not yet sure about UseNet’s demise: the programming groups are still frequently sought out. Google nowadays crawls the groups (instead of Deja, back in the days). And naturally, Microsoft’s Netstat still hands out statistics for the interested (personally, the name netstat is a huge mistake).

On the world wide web, Shelley’s notes on her Gmail account attracted attention: The silence around the security issue is (indeed) deafening. I noticed Gmail having several issues last week ranging from ‘miscounting’ unread mail in the Inbox to not being able to check mail.

Hey: the Xbox 360 is supposed to be coming out next Tuesday. Prices are set too. Zellers offers two versions: The premium edition goes for 499,-. The ‘Core edition’ goes for 399. Xbox to the rescue? Not in our budget this year.

Going to Slashdot just a couple of seconds ago, I noticed some similarities between the International Humanists Organization logo and the last Rackspace advertisement. Can you tell the difference?

There’s a couple of posts sticking in the back of my mind: Alfons’ short reminder of Spain’s political duality (and the younger generation’s push to break the silence) and Alan’s (gigantic) effort to host the Carnival of the Red Ensign.

Both posts remind of a question asked to me, if I, politically, was one of thoses ‘peace loving socialists’. I replied that I considered myself a-political, but that I, in fact cannot imagine any ‘rationale’ for going to any war. War doesn’t make victims and veterans alone. It’s a plague that affects people for years as it passes on to next generations. Thank you very much: while I might be considered left of the ‘aisle’ by many, I consider myself a humanist first.

At least I don’t pretend to be able to solve the problems in the world. Being a-political, also gives me the right to objectively consider and approach political motions and motives with a healthy dose of scepticism.