05-05-05

The bird bath is a little skating rink this morning.

Today's three fives augers well for Tony Blair's election chances, or so say the numerologists across the pond

We bought a new microwave oven recently. There's a little display above the command buttons. When I first connected the oven, the little display said, "Welcome to Panasonic. Please read the owner's manual." Nice plug for our profession. Even better, the unit is designed well enough that we don't need the manual very much at all. Our only complaint is that the oven plays havoc with the cordless telephone nearby. I guess it's time to upgrade to a 5.8 Ghz phone. Companies ought to sell microwaves and cordless phones in pairs.

In Australia, in order to qualify for unemployment insurance payments, the unemployed need to work on projects that will help their chances of locating work. A group is trying to match unemployed tech folks with with open source software projects to help them meet their community service obligations. OpenOffice and Ubuntu Linux Documentation are among the projects. (Via ./)

I just installed the Google Web Accelerator beta on my home system. So far, it appears that web pages do load more quickly. If you decide to install GWA, read the privacy policy carefully first.

Just in time for Mother's Day - an iPod shuffle made from everyone's favorite meat-like substance.

Next laundry day, I'm going to try these instructions for folding a fitted sheet.

This morning's email brings a request for assistance from Mrs. Suha Arafat, the widow of Yasser Arafat. She needs my help to retrienve monies from a secret bank account. My reward, if I can figure out how to parse this, is "we shall share in the ratio of 30%for you 65% and 5% for expenses incured,as you know there is know transaction of such huge amount that does not require expenses." I'm flattered and humbled.

We in da' house, ayuh.