Seattle Times: Microsoft ends its permatemp era
When I worked as a development manager at Microsoft, I was never able to persuade any temp programmers to become full-time employees. Why didn't they want to do this? Simple: the temps got paid about twice as much as the full-time employees. Of course, the full-timers got other benefits: bonuses, health plan and, of course, those stock options. So I haven't had too much sympathy for the permatemps. But to be fair, not that long ago I talked to one who was bitter. He was not a programmer, but rather did phone support work and got paid very little, and would have jumped at the chance to go full-time. So anyway, there is more to this than what you read in the papers.

Oracle hired Microsoft snoop
Oracle admits hiring private detectives to snoop around some Microsoft lobbyists. They even tried to buy trash from the janitors. Apparently setting the DOJ on Microsoft wasn't enough for Larry "The Dumpster Diver" Ellison.

I just noticed goddessKRING's LiveJournal, from local cable access star Shannon Kringen. I wind up watching a fair amount of cable access and hers is one of the more interesting shows (even when she keeps her clothes on). Regular TV gets so predictable; you never quite know what will happen on Channel 77.

Mailto links should not look like regular hyperlinks. And yet many times they do. You click on them and boom! you are switched to your email program and then you have to cancel the damn email. If mailto links can't be a different color or something, then the text ought to make it clear: Click here to send me email

Response to "Eveline" by James Joyce
Eveline is one of those terribly sad stories in Dubliners. Interesting how some of these students (still learning English) thought Eveline was lucky.
I feel so sad, if I were her, I would go with the boyfriend. Because family can not give me life and another person can. Of cause I will choose the other one. However, family still is family. What I will do is send money back help them or came back sometime. It is also nice that there is guy can give her new life and love too. So it is one thing she should happy about it. I think she is a lucky person.

We've been off at the Fourth Alcor Conference on Life Extension Technologies in Pacific Grove, California. (This is quite near the Pebble Beach golf course where Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open by such a large margin. The main effect on us was to make travel difficult.) It was an interesting conference mostly about cryonics (see my cryonics page for the basics). There are two schools of thought here: the bio fundamentalists who are working on perfecting the freezing (or vitrification) and thawing process to minimize damage to cells from ice crystals, and the nanomedicine advocates who believe it will change everything in a dramatic way. The bio fundamentalists are closer to making it work, but it's a controversial area of research with very little funding. Nanotech is purely hypothetical but has major backing from the US and others. President Clinton announced a big nanotech initiative at Caltech in January and nearly half a billion dollars is budgeted for work this year. It's kind of like the tortoise and the hare, but I'll be happy to see either side win.

Pope Happy As Italy Frees His Would-Be Killer
The guy who shot the pope and asked for clemency recently on the grounds that it was fated to happen (see earlier entry) will now be freed from his Italian prison and sent back to Turkey. I have nothing to add.

This article in the Economist interested me because it's about the Internet and the IETF and mentions yet more old ISIers (Steve Crocker who was once my boss, and the late Jon Postel). Better look quick, though, because the Economist links last only as long as the current week's issue. I was taken with the interesting side note about humming as a way of voting in a meeting. That way, no one knows who voted yea or nea, because it's hard to locate the source of humming. Hmmmm!

Internet money ripens prices at wine auction
Internet investor Dan Lynch of Los Altos Hills, a wine auction veteran and this year's fifth-largest spender, said big bidders this year had to greatly increase what they had expected to pay. ``People's mindset was `I'll go half a million,' '' he said. That was a ``serious change. None of this $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 stuff.'' ... And entrepreneur Paul Mockapetris, creator of the Internet domain name system, paid $65,000 for a two-night Tuscan-style adventure donated by La Famiglia di Robert Mondavi winery.

Twenty years ago I worked with these guys at ISI. Every Friday night we had the W.O.W. (Wine of the Week), where we sat around drinking $4 wine from the Boys Market. Both these guys were there often. My how times have changed.

(Thanks to Billy for this one.)

From the National Post Online:
The man who is serving a life sentence for the shooting of Pope John Paul II is requesting clemency, following the Pope's revelation that the third secret of Fatima was a prophetic vision of his assassination attempt. Mehmet Ali Agca argues that since his crime was "preordained," he should be absolved of all responsibility. The 43-year-old Turk, who is in prison in Ancona on Italy's east coast, envisions a holy life for himself, as a preacher spreading the message of Fatima.

You know, this has a certain logic to it, like the boy who kills both his parents and then pleads for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.

Whole Earth: Bring Back the Elephants
We fully expect that the proposal for free-ranging elephants in the Americas will shock and confound many conservationists and naturalists. What could be more foreign in the New World than free-ranging elephants?
It certainly would make a walk in the woods more exciting - bring peanuts.

There's an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal, reprinted by MSNBC, about the Microsoft breakup. Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation look to be the big beneficiaries and need no longer fear competition from Microsoft. Bill Gates and the other top execs would likely go with the applications company, which has few restrictions placed on it. My thought is that the logical thing for the OS company to do is to spin off all the business not covered by the court ruling, giving the stock to the OS company shareholders. The remaining rump of Windows business can be milked as a cash cow. The ruling effectively prohibits the further development of Windows, so a new OS will have to be developed, probably by the "apps" company. The proposed ruling is so vague that further lawsuits are inevitable.

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Here's a guy with a breast implant in his living room. Just the thing for parties, apparently.

Today's Seattle Times pointed me to the ePredict.com investing page. It's free, you sign up (via an obnoxious questionnaire that asks stuff like how much money you have in stocks), you are given a few stock names and asked for your opinion on their prospects. Then you are allowed to see what others think to get a consensus opinion. If I'm understanding this correctly, they claim the consensus opinion beats the market. Hmmmm - this is exactly the opposite of the contrary opinion theory. I guess there is something for everybody in stock picking.

I checked out their past reports on MSFT. It's been a "strong buy" or "buy" all the way down from a high of 119 to the mid-60s where it is now. Maybe there is something to all this, but I don't think so. Going with the consensus pick reminds me of the racing form. It doesn't do well with the ponies and I doubt it would with the stock market. They quote good performance figures, but who has checked these?

Last night we went to see the 1962 movie "How the West Was Won" (part of the Seattle Film Festival). This movie is the best of the original Cinerama movies and it was shown in the newly renovated Seattle Cinerama theatre, using the original super wide three-projector system. It was very cool to see this star-studded extravaganza, which was actually very well written and a big hit back in the 60s. Paul Allen wasn't there in person - I guess he had a basketball game or something.

Workers accuse slaughterhouse of animal cruelty
The line at IBP's plant in Wallula, Walla Walla County, moves so fast, workers say, that cows are being skinned alive, their eyes still blinking and their limbs flailing as plant employees - pushed to work quickly - struggle to dismember them.
All hail the Humane Farming Association for exposing this abuse.

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The papers lately have had articles about how fat Americans are (Europeans are getting fatter, too). They all mention the Body Mass Index, which is 703 times your weight in pounds, divided by your height in inches squared. If it's over 25, you are over weight. If it's over 30, you are obese. Mine is 33. Ooops!