Emil's Wicked Cool Blog

I couldn't agree more. Very similar concepts to the pit of success, which I have posted outside my cube.

The Old New Thing : It's not surprising at all that people search for Yahoo

I was surprised to see a stock I own (INPC) on this list today:
Russell 3000's Best and Worst Performing Stocks: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

It says YTD performance for INPC is 279%. I'm not sure how they get that...the closest that I find is a 140% gain if you bought at the 52 week low (5.02) and sold at the 52 week high (12.07). I don't want to call them a liar or anything, but if YTD is defined as Jan 1 (8.76) to today(11.38), that is a 30% gain. If you bought when I did, you're still down about 20% but a lot happier than when the stock was at $5/share.

With the recent production release of Internet Explorer 7, I thought it was time to revisit my default browser decision. I've been fairly happy with Firefox, but have had a few annoyances:

1. Copy/paste of HTML tables into applications (Microsoft Word and Excel) doesn't work nearly as well as with IE
2. Proxy changes don't happen without at least an extra trip to the options. To be fair, IE 6 didn't handle it at all, but since the browser lacked tabs, starting a new instance wasn't a difficulty
3. Some internal web sites designed the authentication in a manner that required another click to get in
4. When printing, some pages arrive with parts chopped off from the right
   
5. Some web sites (e.g. Wachovia) would break randomly for no apparent reason. Sometimes they would work, sometimes not
   

Well, I installed IE7 and it seemed ok. I found a mouse gesture plugin to compensate for the lack of something built in. I tried setting it as my default browser, but after using it a bit I had it crash a couple times. The session manager built in apparently assumes this will never happen, because not once did it restore my session from a crash, which is something that I've had for over a year in Firefox via the Tab Mix Plus extension.

Other than the fatal flaw, I agree wholeheartedly with the Cnet.com review of IE7. Firefox remains my default browser.

So I went to my usual yearly eye exam the other day, and they had a new piece of equipment to help make sure that my retinas were healthy. It takes a picture of your retinas. Anyway, after the deal was done, the technician asked me if I wanted the photos emailed to me. Do I need that? Absolutely not. Is it cool? Yes. My response? Totally email it!

Without further ado...

Interesting day. Looks like the results are in, and democrats are taking control of at least the house. Call me cynical, but having different parties in control of different branches is my best case scenario. Gridlock is great...do we really want government messing things up more?

In Oregon, it looks like everything is going to the democrats, so I don't get my gridlock. I guess you win some and lose some.

My favorite story of the day: Oregonians didn't understand the assignment. Measures 46 and 47 in Oregon were dedicated to campaign finance reform, and were dependent on each other. Either they both needed to pass or nothing would happen. Well, measure 46 failed while measure 47 passed. The results weren't even that close on either race.

Lastly, it looks like we'll pass a $195M bond measure for local schools. Kathryn voiced her support of that!

Just stumbled across this in my travels, and it looks pretty cool. This SQL Server Hosting Toolkit will generate database scripts from one database to deploy to another database, in an environment where full access is not available, say at GoDaddy.

Quick tip to keep the amount of change in your pocket to a minimum. Suppose you only have a large bill in your pocket, and you want a soda (which of course is the only appropriate term for the substance). The soda machine will always stop accepting money after you've met or exceeded the amount of the highest price item.

The solution? Put in the change followed by your large bill. With any luck, you'll get dollar coins rather than a mess of smaller change. For example, I paied for a $1.35 soda the other day with 35 cents followed by a $5 bill, resulting in 4 dollar coins rather than 3 dollar coins, 2 quarters, a dime and a nickel.

I, of course, think the typical soda machine user interface to be fatally flawed due to the inability of it to take more money than the highest price item (although I understand that the manufacturers don't want the machines to become change machines). That debate we can have another time...for now, enjoy the workaround.

The other day I was visited by someone with a stack of manuals for a technology/product that we're using in our group. I was asked whether we should throw those manuals out of keep them. I told them to go ahead and throw it out.

This is a technology/product that is currently in use. We're moving to a new technology/product, and that small decision to throw out the manuals felt to me more like a massive strategic decision that yes, we're committed to the new direction.

Here's something interesting I heard yesterday. Bush came out and announced he will hold onto Rusmfeld and Cheney until the end of his administration. Despite what you may think of the administration, it says a lot that Bush has to come out and make that kind of statement.

I'm currently on hold with my pediatrician and was amused by the phone announcement. After the usual "if this is an emergency please hang up and call 911" yada yada, it mentioned that "if you are a non-english speaker, please call us at xxx-xxx-xxxx". Well, if I were a non-english speaker, would I really understand that request? The note was never repeated in Spanish (or any other language).