It's that time of year

It's that time of year again (or nearly); time to check out the Macworld Conference & Expo Events List. Sigh... I remember when it used to be the Party Page. IIene, could you (or someone) do a page with *just* the parties again, someday? Please?

It's just what the name

It's just what the name says: Butts Across America.

From Slate's Today's Papers: The

From Slate's Today's Papers:

The NYT relates a Kafkaesque story from Russia. Several high-school classmates in a village in northern Russia wanted to film their graduation. So, naturally, they wrote Vladimir Putin for a handout, asking if he would send them a video camera. When the Kremlin received their letter, it wanted to respond but didn't have the students' names (they had signed simply, "the 11th grade"), so it forwarded the letter to the local school board for clarification. The school board, however, noticed that the letter had several grammatical mistakes and was written on a dirty piece of paper. Soon afterward, the students saw their final-exam grades lowered and several academic awards taken back. As a result of the demerits, one girl, who planned to go to medical school, has to attend a dairy college instead.

Sounds like Russia still has strong traces of the Soviet era.

To go along with the

To go along with the Datamation story below, ZDNet News has a story on how Women haven't broken the VC ceiling. According to WITI, women-owned companies receive only 4% of venture funding.

I know... you've been visiting

I know... you've been visiting the Ask the DHTML Pro site regularly, wondering when, oh when, I was going to have a new column. Sorry, but you've been looking at the wrong place. I'm now at Ask the JavaScript Pro, and my latest 10-minute solution is on the site now.

And if you know anyone who wants to be the DHTML Pro, I think that they're still looking for someone...

What are you doing

What are you doing this weekend? We'll be at The Pork & Paddle Party!

And I love the way this post segues so nicely into the one below it....

This is kind of a

This is kind of a bummer: Court rules in PETA online parody case. The guy who had "peta.org" and made it into a parody site called People Eating Tasty Animals has lost a round in court. Personally, I think that the real PETA folks - whom I consider to be a group of incredibly annoying, sanctimonious jerks - need all the parodizing they can get.

Datamation's got a good article

Datamation's got a good article on Where have all the women gone? Even as technology jobs are booming, the number of women in the field continues to decline.

There's some nice freeware and

There's some nice freeware and shareware dingbats at The Dingbat Pages. I like the Maulbats, myself. (PC only, unfortunately, unless you have a conversion utility).

Brandon Edwards has a cat.

Brandon Edwards has a cat. The cat needs a name. He's already taken nominations for names; now it's down to the voting.

There's only one good name on there, of course, so please vote for it. And while the voting system seems to allow you to vote for the same name multiple times, I cannot, of course, recommend that you do that.

Tom thought I was going

Tom thought I was going to blog this, and vice versa... Yep, it's another View From the Heart link.

Al's written a piece called the Oregon Plan Rant, about how Oregon decides where it does/doesn't draw the line as to who gets how much health care, when there's only a fixed amount available to go around. It's a thought-provoking piece, and you should go read it.

Tom and I discussed it, and ended up agreeing to disagree. He says that the plan as Al describes it is exactly how it should work. I agreed with that, but disagree that those making the decisions will be able to keep the line where they've drawn it, when the outcome is a death sentence for "a pretty, blond 18 year old girl." I'll be interested to see what happens; imo, Americans are notoriously horrible at drawing lines and sticking to them, when offered the chance of voting themselves bread and circuses.

And Al--thanks for linking to us!

From the Microsoft support web

From the Microsoft support web site: what it means when your Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music. It says a lot to me that MS considers "It's a Small World" to be Classical Music--yeccch.

There's been a thread today

There's been a thread today on the Studio B list about computer "bibles" vs. "the Bible." Writes Steve Champeon:

Let's look at this realistically:

• it contains a lot of content it "borrowed" from an earlier edition
• it has been extensively revised and corrected to suit its intended audience
• it was written by a number of authors, but nobody gets the credit they deserve
• it is so big that few people actually read it all the way through
• it contains an extensive reference section that everyone ignores
• much of the material it contains is disputable
• it claims an authority that far exceeds that of other books

Sounds like a lot of the "Bible" books I've read or worked on, frankly.

Word of the day: "ghoughpteighbteau"

Word of the day: "ghoughpteighbteau"

Pronounce the gh as in hiccough, the ough as in though, the pt as in ptomaine, the eigh as in eight, the bt as in debt, and the eau as in bureau.

Boys and their toys: Grit

Boys and their toys: Grit Truck. Ever wonder what happens when you attach model rocket engines to plastic toy trucks? We do.

Ever since StatMarket starting charging

Ever since StatMarket starting charging for their statistics, I've been looking for a new source of online info. CyberAtlas looks promising, so far.

Synchronicity

Synchronicity... Today being Father's Day, I was thinking about my dad, and how the only thing that I asked my mother for after my dad died was his slide rule. Hearing that she'd thrown it out made a bad time worse.

While thinking about that, I saw that Al at View From the Heart is also thinking about slide rule memories.

And while thinking about that, I got mail from Al telling me that Friday's quote of the day cracked him up the same way it did me (see below).