looF lirpA 1

During the Easter festivities yesterday, Hawai'i Governor Benjamin Cayetano announced Baywatch's David Hasselhoff would be returning to Hawai'i to not only film a Baywatch movie in July, but would also become a full-time resident. Hasselhoff, long-time head of the made-for-TV water rescue team populated by pneumatic blond bomb shells admitted that he had become tired of working in meaningless Hollywood jiggle shows and would henceforth devote all of his time to learning the ancient Hawai'ian healing arts of looF lirpA.

Said Hasselhoff, "I just could not look myself in the mirror in the morning knowing that I was supporting such drivel. So I will turn in my tan to help the infirm."

looF lirpA II

Speaking of Easter bunnies, the Governor noted that real eggs would no longer be used in the Easter egg hunt due to last year's unfortunate incident involving the parents of certain children and where the eggs were hidden. Starting next year, David Hasselhoff will be in charge of a more mature oriented hunt in which Playboy(r) Bunnies will play hide the egg in the Bunny patch. Head Bunny Hugh Heffner, also in town for some R&R, noted that this would be the first of a series of new efforts to reach out to new markets.

looF lirpA III

A Microsoft spokesperson, yesterday, denied allegations that Chief of Strategic Direction Bill Gates would be buying the entire island of Lana'i, where he was married, and secede from the union. Unnamed, but authoritative sources, have told this reporter that the island would be called the United Federation of Clippy and would bar the use of any software unless it was accompanied by an annoying cartoon character.

looF lirpA IV

Apple Computer(tm) today announced that they were suing themselves for patent infringement. While the suit is still sealed under court order, details leaked so far indicate Apple copied the look and feel of earlier desktops and implemented them in their new operating system, Apple Mac OS X. Long-time Apple observer Honda Kawasaki noted that this appeared to be a brilliant move on the part of Steve Jobs to corner the market on self-importance.

Calls to Apple Computer were not returned before press time.

Aloha!

File This

I have a bunch of stuff to do this morning on the subject of electronic filing in the courts. So, the mail below will have to suffice for today.

Mail Call

From: Dan Seto
To: Phil Hough
Subject: You are absolutely right
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2002 08:13:01 -1000

Hi Phil,

I finally got around to watching, sort of, my second F1 GP of the season (yes, I know, Brazil is not the second race of the season, but it was the second one I had time to watch. I also fell asleep about half-way through the race :<) and you are absolutely right about the start of the first one in Australia. They do in fact run one lap to warm the tires (tyres) up and such before coming around to line up for the real start. So the US announcers were wrong and so was I. My apologies.

By the way, where does the phrase "pops her clogs" come from? [referring to the passing of the Queen Mum - ed.]

Aloha - Dan

From: Phil Hough
To: Dan Seto
Subject: RE: You are absolutely right
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2002 19:22:02 +0100

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Hash: SHA1

>I also fell asleep about half-way through the race.

It's usually a heavy lunch, some alcohol and a repetitive mid-section of the race that does it for me.

So the US announcers were wrong and so was I. My apologies.

There's no need to apologise. While I knew I was right (I've been an F1 nut since I was 15, watching pretty much every race, and learning a lot about the rules, procedures etc etc.), it's hard to prove it. Besides, as my boss always says "One man's perception is his truth", which is pretty much right.

> By the way, where does the phrase "pops her clogs" come from?

I didn't have a clue, until I read this: www.guardian.co.uk

It may not be right, but at least it's an answer.

ATB.

Phil

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From: Dan Seto
To: Phil Hough
Subject: Re: You are absolutely right
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2002 09:03:26 -1000

Interesting bit of trivia: Did you know that during the 1950s to 1960, winning the Indy 500 earned you F1 points? (see this link here)

I found it while trying to remember when I saw my first F1 race. I can't remember for sure, but it was in the middle to late 1970s. A time of Ferrari's Niki Lauda and Colin Chapman's JPS/Lotus driven by Mario Andretti. At the time, I was going to college in southern California, where for several years, the F1 had a stop in Los Angeles/Long Beach (see Lauda and Andretti here):

I still have a black and gold embroidered team jacket with the JPS/Lotus logo on the front and a British Union Jack on the arm that I bought during that time.

From: Phil Hough
To: Dan Seto
Subject: RE: You are absolutely right
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2002 20:12:36 +0100

>Interesting bit of trivia: Did you know that during the 1950s to 1960, winning the Indy 500 earned you F1 points?

And now, you can win F1 points driving a modified "Indy not quite 500". What goes around comes around.

>I found it while trying to remember when I saw my first F1 race. I can't remember for sure, but it was in the middle to late 1970s.

And haven't things changed since then.

I first started watching at the time of Nigel Mansel, saw him win the championship. Then started watching seriously when Damon Hill got a drive at Williams. Then Senna was killed, which was a bit of a shock. And I've not stopped watching since.

ATB.

Phil

Aloha!

When Education Fails

In yet another example of what happens when the education system fails to educate, some fools people in Kansas became hysterical upset when radio station KQRC announced on Monday, April 1st [Hint. Hint. Wink. Wink. Nudge. Nudge. - ed.] that

"the water contained 'high levels of a naturally occurring substance,' dihydrogen monoxide, that causes increased urination, profuse sweating and wrinkling of hands and feet. Boiling the water long enough would get rid of the substance, however."

Jerald Robnett, the city's superintendent of water protection, commenting on the report said, "It's a terrorist act as far as I'm concerned." About 30 residents called 911 and around 150 called the board of water protection. Sigh.

What is dihydrogen monoxide? H₂O. More commonly referred to as water. See the full story here.

Spy v. Spy

Anti-spyware company Lavasoft recently released version 5.7 of Ad-aware (download it here from C|Net). The software "is a free multi-spyware removal utility that scans your memory, registry and hard drives for known spyware and scumware components and lets you remove them safely."

Perfect Logic

Deficit spending. You remember the phrase. It's what the US Congress did for years until the unprecedented 10 year expansion of the economy. Now that the expansion may have ended, we've returned to spending what we don't have. So Bush Administration Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is trying to get Congress to raise the debt "limit" so they can borrow more money to pay the interest on the current debt.

Let me rephrase that for the hard of hearing. We want to borrow more money so we can pay the interest on the money we've already borrowed. Can you say fiscal irresponsibility? I knew that you could. See the article here from the Washington Post.

Unintended Consequences

The Denver Post reports here that Colorado House Minority Leader Dan Grossman said Tuesday that he is withdrawing a proposed amendment to their photo radar speed enforcement program described as an "adulterers amendment" because now, when speeders are caught on photo radar, the photo, complete with image of driver and passenger, is mailed to the driver's home with a $40 ticket.

It seems some of the people in the photos should not, ahem, have been there. Perhaps, I would speculate, some of those people are legislators?

Aloha!

Last Shining Hope

Bad weather. Collisions. Fire at sea. All fears of the open ocean sailor and soon, before the day is out, two of these fears will be realized. It's a little over 20 days ago and you are the captain of the Indonesian flagged tanker Insinko, a refueling and resupply ship for Taiwanese fishing vessels operating in the Pacific.

It's 10am one bright morning and everything is going smoothly, except for the large waves pounding the ship, with no indications of the danger that will soon erupt below. Suddenly, fire alarms start clanging all through the ship. Men scurry to and fro trying to locate the problem. Confusion is the order of the day. The lights go out and all power is lost. At first you think it's a kitchen fire but the cook says no, it's the engine room. You send the first mate to investigate but he can't get near the room because of the thick smoke billowing out.

So you decide to go down and try to get to the engine room yourself. You reach the area but you too are turned away by the smoke and intense heat. But you know the danger of a fire aboard ship so you try again to get into the room. As you get nearer, the fire flashes over scalding you and the first mate.

The fire knocked out not only the engine, but the electrical generators, leaving the ship with no power. No power means no water pumps to fight the fire. And fire means death. So you order the life raft over the side. But the rough seas overturn the raft.

You decide to take stock of your situation. One sailor is dead and another is badly burned. The fire rages, spreading out from the engine room. The life raft is useless and the waves make it is too dangerous to try to retrieve and right it. What do you do?

Given the situation, you decide the safest course of action is to stay with the ship in the hope that the water tight doors may be able to contain the fire. So, for almost a day the fire burns and then smolders, eventually going out.

The danger passes. But you are adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with no way, save a few emergency flares, of communicating your plight. Yes, there's food aboard so you won't starve. Yet.

Morning turns to evening. The sun sets and it gets dark. The hours tediously pass as there is nothing to do. But wait, off in the distance is a light from a ship. Perhaps one of the trawlers you resupplied. Hopes soar as you fire a flare. But either the ship doesn't see it or chooses to ignore it. You know the trawlers rarely stop to help anyone anyway, since it would cut into their profits, so you knew it was a long shot, but worth the try anyway.

The days pass without seeing another ship. One week. Two weeks. Three weeks pass and hope is fading. You've tried rigging sails to take you in the direction of the fishing vessels you've resupplied but the winds take you in the opposite direction. You curse the gods for your bad luck. If only you could go in the other direction you could be saved.

As night falls, the tedium once again envelops the ship like a shroud. It is now almost 1:00am when a lookout sees a bright light just over the horizon. Slowly, the lights gets closer. A ship! But can you get them to see you and stop? They are at least 15 miles away and not sailing directly in your direction. You desperately fire one of the few remaining flares. Yes! They are turning and coming your way.

Slowly, you see the huge cruise ship Norwegian Star come closer and stop along side your disabled tanker. Saved, at last, by the winds, that you so cursed earlier. For they had blown you into the path of this ship, perhaps your last shining hope of rescue.

Aloha!

It's Friday!

RU2 Gentoo?

Version 1.0 of the Linux variation called Gentoo hit the servers a little less than a week ago (see the site here). I plan to give it a shot sometime this weekend. Or not. Remember, this is a point zero release, and the first one at that. As a digression, I find it interesting that people who warn against using such earlyware, in the Windows environment, are falling over themselves recommending this distribution. A distro that requires hours, if not days, of compiling using Klingon mojo. Where you have to do your own partioning and manually install the Grub boot loader. Talk about rolling your own.

As I said, I may give it a try this weekend but don't hold your breath too long because I may decide to wait until more of the bugs are worked out of the system. Note that the thundering hurds are hitting their servers so you may not be able to get in for awhile (although I got in and downloaded the 105MB stage-1/2/3 ISO yesterday, from their server to Pair.com in less than five minutes).

DoUC 3D?

A New Zealand company, Deep Video Imaging (see their Flash-enabled site here), says they've invented a process which allows the display of 3-D data without the use of special eye glasses. The process, incorporated into what is called Actual Depth monitors, layers two LCD screens, one on top of the other, creating a literal 3-D layer. The monitor supposedly works in Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems but does require either two video cards or one that can drive two - such as the Matrox 550.

RU4 B2B?

If you do a lot of business with Japanese companies you've no doubt come across the ritual presentation of business cards. And if you do enough business with them, you will probably need to print up a set of cards that have English on one side and Japanese on the other. So it may not be surprising that one enterprising UK printing company (see their site here) is also dispensing advise on the etiquette of exchanging meishi.

Do

• Exchange business cards at the beginning of your meeting: consider it as part of your greeting when you first meet your Japanese counterparts.

• Bow slightly and present your meishi with both hands, Japanese side up.

• In the same way, you should receive other people's meishi with both hands, bowing slightly.

• Study the other person's card for while, making a mental note of their name, and then put it away in a card holder. Alternatively, if there are a number of members present in your meeting, you can lay all the meishi out on the table in front of you and leave them there until the end of the meeting.

Don'ts

• Do not pass your meishi around as though you are dealing a deck of cards.

• Do not take someone's meishi, give it just a cursory glance, and then stuff it away in your pocket to refer to later, as you might at home.

• Do not keep getting the meishi out to check people's names - try to remember them when they give you their card. It is insulting if people cannot even remember your name when they are doing business with you.

• Do not play or fiddle with people's meishi - treat them with respect. A Western businessman once famously lost a big deal for picking his teeth with one of his colleagues' business cards, and was never given the opportunity to do business with the company again.

• Do not write on the other person's meishi in front of them - it is considered a direct insult.

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!