Week Ending December 7, 2001
Wednesday, December 5, 2001
Christmas bells, la, la, la... We were working on our Christmas tree last night and had Christmas music going in the house. Today I asked some of my co-workers what their favorite Christams songs were. I think mine is The Christmas Song by Nat King Cole, but Christmas in Hollis has to be up there as well.
In my weekly XML report, I saw an article on the privacy policy specification that is being considered by the W3C. It relates to storing a machine readable version of a sites privacy policy (in XML format, of course) on the web site. Interesting idea that I will have to implement and test here at some point.
Tuesday, December 4, 2001
Finally feeling a little better. Got some good rest last night. I started studying for my MCSE upgrade test a little today. I registered for the accelerated test, 20-240, which is extremely hard to pass, combining 4 tests into one, but it's free and I've got to take it by the end of the year, so I registered for it yesterday. I'll keep track of what I use and note if it helps me in the Computing section.
Read an interesting speech on cryptography by Bruce Sterline that was listed on Slashdot. Not sure if I agree, but it was interesting.
Another new worm spread by Outlook. Funny how this has been reported on the news (as I listen to ESPN Radio) many times today.
Monday, December 3, 2001
Wow, another year almost gone. Despite being sick, I had a good weekend. quite a bit of family stuff, so most people might want to skip this section.
We got our Christmas tree yesterday. It used to be a big event with my oldest and I was looking forward to going with the 3 yr old. I thought this might be the first exciting Christmas for him. Well, we got busy and I was feeling sick, actually me, my 3 yr old and my 6 month old were all in various stages of some type of cold. When my daughter fell asleep on my lap, I elected to stay and watch the Cardinals/Raiders game (which was great by the way).
When everyone returned, we got some dinner and it was nice to see Delaney (my 3 yr old son) excited about the tree. He kept carrying around a couple ornaments and asking me if we could get the tree off the car. He kept asking patiently for a 1/2 hour until we finally went to get it. He put on his coat, followed my wife and I out, and watched us get the tree, then "led" us back to the house with the tree. Kids are great. He then helped us get the lights on
We always string some gold and red beads around the tree. Last year, we donated a set to the Delaney so he could run around with them. This year, he wanted another set as we were stringing them, and we reminded him his were in the basement. He, of course, immediately went downstairs to find his beads. My oldest, Kyle, was watching "Jack and the Beanstalk", the live version on TV and so my wife and I were decorating the tree, wondering where all the excitement went. We couldn't coax my oldest to come help, though Delaney eventually came back and hung some candycanes. Kids are great, but it's saddening to see them growing out of the "kid" stage.
This weekend I read about the suicide bombers in Israel. To me this is insane. While I do not pretend to understand the mentality of anyone who is religeous (I'm an aetheist), killing people who have not directly offended you, and you do not know whether they support your enemy or not, is just insane. It is truly one of the places where the human race has not advanced very far.
In compting... I found a neat new site that allows you to setup and use a remote database using MySQL or Postgres. The owner doesn't provide much info, other than setup your own database. So far he claims to have over 14,000 databases on one server. Quite impressive. I need to give it a try and make some areas of this site dynamic and see what happens.
I also stumbled upon this site:Dr Dobbs TechNetCast. It contains interviews with various people in the IT industry. I listened to a couple of interviews with some of the heavyweights from Bell Labs. Dry for most people, but interesting for geeks over 30.
Weblog Archives or stuff I've noted in the past (What's a weblog?)
Training Horses
Blog Maverick
Jonathan Schwartz's Blog
SQL Server Central
ESPN
Slashdot
37 Signals
A Mile a Day
Joel on Software
Rockler
My Brother
Woodcraft
Weather at the Ranch
Books
