While not a new concept this is a particularlly interesting implementation of the ‘internet speed test’.

Speedtest.net

I work with someone who can only be described as a ‘colorful character’. She swears like a drunken sailor and speaks her mind without being hindered by social filters. If you really want to know how your hair looks, just ask her. 😉 She is a pure spirit, I wish more folks were as refreshingly open and honest as she.

She has a long history of working at radio stations, including a large group of stations based in Boston, that required her to travel to the other stations. She is a Boston girl, through and through, with an accent and manner to match. When she visited a station ‘down south’ they were so enamoured with her Yankee persona they just had to get her on tape. She offered to record a joke for them to play on the station. Unknown to her, they had a record delay in the headphone line so that what she heard was several seconds behind what she was saying.

That threw her off a bit. 😉 Continue reading Yankee on Delay →

In case you were wondering what to bring to feed the squirrels in Boston Common you can scratch grape lollipops off your list.

When offered an (unwrapped) ‘grape’ lollipop; ‘he’ came, he tasted and he ran away.

There you have it, one out of one squirrels do not like grape lollipops.^*

^* Margin of error +/- 100%

That’s “command line interface” for the non-geeks in the house; aka ‘cmd prompt’, aka ‘dos box’, aka ‘C prompt’…

I saw this bumper sticker the other day.

It will come as a surprize to no one that it was not attached to an American car.

I have strong opinions about “that ‘W’ store”. As with all of the big box discount retailers the real reason they have gas stations in the first place is to get you to stop there. They are not so much profit centers as marketing venues and as such they are happy to just break even, if that.

This may be a triple play on Wal-Mart’s part; to be seen as a ‘leader’ in the effort to combat global warming, free promotion of the brand, and to expand the target demographic to those tree-hugging, blue state, liberal nut jobs intellectuals (of which I am one) that currently would not enter the “‘W’ store” unless they were being chased by a rabid mountain lion.

Now, if they were talking about cellulose based ethanol rather than corn/cane based I would be much more impressed, but that’s an entirely different rant. 😉

Plugged in: Your car, corn and Wal-Mart – Aug. 9, 2006

Well, it seems that those knuckle heads over at AOL have belched up a “Oops, my bad” for the release of the search data from 500,000 of it’s subscribers.

“This was a screw-up, and we’re angry and upset about it.” spewed the spokes-mouth. “We’ve launched an internal investigation into what happened…” should be read as “We’re going to eviscerate the poor schlub who got an OK from his boss without realizing his boss didn’t have the authority to authorize such things.”

I’ve worked with plenty of ex-AOL people, engineers and ‘managers’ alike. The engineering folks are a bright bunch with first class skills. I have a distinctly different opinion of the ‘management class’; they are rife with two-faced, responsibility dodging, finger pointing, attention seeking dullards who fire those that ask ‘Why?” a few too many times.

But seriously, I think AOL should call each and every one of the subscribers who search data were released and apologize. And I don’t mean a call from a $3/day flunky in some offshore call center, I mean from the kibble-brain that approved the release of this data, personally.

AOL apologizes for release of user search data | CNET News.com