You're browsing through your usual

You're browsing through your usual sites and notice that hey, Backup Brain's time (look up above, right under our name) is wrong, and you wonder, "What's up with that?"

Figuring that since we're JavaScript wizards it can't be our code, maybe you toddle over to Microsoft's IE 5 FAQ to see if your question is there--and (surprise!) it is! Certain Web pages are not correctly recognizing my date and location--why?

The bad news is that MS's answer (you need to fix the date and time on your machine) is wrong, wrong, wrong, and they've known this for years. The real answer is that they're getting the time from some weird place on your Mac, and it's incorrect in two instances:

1. If you've put the machine to sleep since you last restarted
2. Daylight Savings Time is in effect

I put my TiBook to sleep all the time (now that its sleep problem was fixed with 10.1.3--thanks, Apple!), so I hit the first problem with IE all the time. Now that Daylight Savings is starting tomorrow, everyone else will hit it for the next 6 months.

And all of this is just to say, hey, it ain't your fault or our fault--it's Microsoft's fault, and they know about the bug, and we wish they'd fix both the bug and their FAQ.

I was on the phone

I was on the phone today with an editor, and the following sequence of events happened:

1. I proposed the book I want to write
   
2. She screamed in pain
   
3. The phone line went dead

She called me right back and said that she'd banged her knee against the desk and then the battery on her phone died, but I have to wonder.

Way useful stuff: a Historical

Way useful stuff: a Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century.

This morning I got a

This morning I got a phone call from Kim at Peachpit--she'd just gotten a call from Warner Brothers, and they want to feature my new Java 2 book on an episode of The Sopranos. What can I say besides, "Who do I have to kill?"

I've been using my new

I've been using my new PowerMac G4 for about a week now. It's the 1 GHz Dual Processor model. It's fast; it opens Word X in about 2 seconds, and there's not much waiting around for anything. I just ripped my first CD with this machine, and now I really know how freaking fast this thing is. With my old 400 MHz G4, iTunes 2 ripped at about 3X to 5X, depending on the material. Now it rips at 12X to 14X. Yow!

Note to Dori: Would you

Note to Dori: Would you please switch us over to Movable Type? I'm really tired of Blogger being too busy, or down, or something else that prevents us from posting. Thank you.

There's been a lot of

There's been a lot of talk on the blogs about Teoma today. I gave it my usual test, and it passed with flying colors. This Teoma search gave the two results it should have found (and only those two), while the same search on Google doesn't find anything, and AltaVista gives the less important of the two Teoma results and one tangential result. I think that Teoma will be worth checking for those times when Google and I just aren't thinking the same way.

In this NYT op-ed, The

In this NYT op-ed, The Path From Oslo to War, written by a Palestinian lawyer, you might note that there are two words that are conveniently missing. Those two words are "suicide bombers."

I got my Burn, Baby,

I got my Burn, Baby, Burn! CD Swap recipient list, so I'm now working on my list of favorite summer songs. I've never got around to burning all my CDs to MP3s, so I'm getting stuck figuring out hasn't been burned already and what to include on the CD. If you have suggestions of what you'd put on your ultimate summer-themed song collection, let me know!