I talked with my manager yesterday and learned that my contract has been extended until early May. He said that, unless he comes in to tell me to clean out my office, my contract will be renewed automatically. We talked briefly about permanent employment. There's nothing available right now nor is anything likely to open up this quarter. Nevertheless, it's good to know that my work is useful and that I'll have continued employment.

Statistics can be interesting. For example, Firefox now has between four and five percent of the web browser market, about the same percentage as the number of climbers who die on Mount Everest.

I don't, as a rule, read the spam that comes my way. I receive on the order of 150 spam messages each day. Not only is the stuff unpleasant, but it can also be dangerous. About 20% of the messages carry some kind of payload. Anyway, one message, sent to an address that I rarely use, caught my attention. In French, it invited me to a web site where I could purchase a book that is leading the charge against heliocentrism. "... that Holy Scripture does in fact undeniably present the universe as geocentric and the sun as being in motion around the earth."

Not willing to fall further behind the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy style mavens, the People's Republic of North Korea has launched a program against long hair. Let us trim our hair in accordance with socialist lifestyle warns us that long hair has a deleterious effect on intelligence. It takes a lot of nutrition to sustain long hair, robbing the brain of energy.

Bob Dylan, however, observed, in an interview published in 1966, that not only is long hair warmer, but it is beneficial to the functioning of the brain. "But I guess if you figure it out, you realize that all of one's hair surrounds and lays on the brain inside your head. Mathematically speaking, the more of it you can get out of your head, the better."