Events

From Anne: Now on Huffington Post: http://nsaseti.cf.huffingtonpost.com/, a fun replacement for your tired, old SETI@Home application.

Anne just sent this photo, and I almost had to clean up my office from laughing:

I've been watching the weather in Torino, Italy lately, and I've noticed it's awfully warm there. The Olympic Games start one week from today, but Torino's temperatures have stayed way above freezing. Last night's minimum temperature was 6°C (43°F), for example. Are we looking at a repeat of the St. Moritz games of 1928, in which the speed skaters swam through 25°C (77°F) weather? Maybe we're heading toward a future where the Winter Games won't be possible below 2500 meters (8000 ft) or south of the...

From Paul Krugman's column (sub.req.) this morning: This administration is all politics and no policy. It knows how to attain power, but has no idea how to govern. That's why the administration was caught unaware when Katrina hit, and why it was totally unprepared for the predictable problems with its drug plan. It's why Mr. Bush announced an energy plan with no substance behind it. And it's why the state of the union—the thing itself, not the speech—is so grim. And this little tidbit from Poynter...

From the Washington newspaper Roll Call earlier today: House Republicans are taking a mulligan on the first ballot for Majority Leader. The first count showed more votes cast than Republicans present at the Conference meeting. I wonder if Diebold counted the ballots?

One of my clients has had a recurring server issue caused, it seems, by McAfee Anti-Virus. So we're switching to Symantec. The problem has been that, for quite some time, the naPrdMgr.exe process (which handles product updates) has gone into a death-spiral, consuming 100% of CPU cycles and making the server totally unresponsive to anyone else. I've finally gotten in touch with McAfee, and they said the client's license has expired. OK, so how does an expired license crash a server? When McAfee...

I can't believe I forgot to post about the Weather Now Beta launch Tuesday evening. I'll have more details later, including a list of why the new application is so much cooler than the current one, but right now I'm trying to figure out why a client's server keeps horking every day.

Josh Marshall has a new blog-within-a-blog: GrandOldDocket.com, which lists which Republicans have been indicted, convicted, or pled guilty to various corruption charges.

It's Groundhog Day! And it's official: Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, meaning another six weeks of winter. And he wrote a little poem about it, which is pretty impressive for a marmot. (You'll have to read the poem on the official Groundhog Day site.) Also impressive, this rodent has been around for 120 years, as the FAQ explains: How many "Phils" have there been over the years? There has only been one Punxsutawney Phil. He has been making predictions for over 120 years! Punxsutawney Phil gets his...

We were dark for over 6 hours today because someone at SBC did something, though no one seems to know who or what. The result was that the Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters had no phone or Internet service from 9:15 am CT/15:15 UTC until 3:30 pm CT/21:30 UTC. Sadly, this came on the first day of our Weather Now beta launch, which shows off some of our coolest stuff ever. (At this writing it's still a few hours behind, with weather from lunchtime today, but it's catching up as fast as it can.)...