To celebrate 100 million downloads, Firefox launched a weather balloon satellite from Oregon State's Memorial Union Quad. Since this is my home turf, naturally I had to go. And since it involved a really big balloon, I had to take Emily. Check out my photos.
Emily loved it. She couldn't stop talking about the "big balloon." She just kept saying, "Daddy, look at the big balloon!" "Daddy, can I play with the big balloon?" "Is the big balloon going to go home now?" She's a cutie.
When I was scanning down the list of podcasts on GodCast, I saw a very unexpected entry: Klingon Word. Yup, that's right. A podcast devoted to reading the Bible...in Klingon--straight out of the KLV (Klingon Language Version). I guess there's some teeth to the argument that podcasts support "non-traditional" media. :-)
On a side note, it's funny because it seems like every few words is English. I guess Klingons don't have words like "propitiation". If you, like I did, wonder why someone would do this, you can always read the brochure.
That's right. Dynamic XML! Not all the people who read this blog probably read Kevin's blog, but you have to check out his post about his recipe system he just wrote (note: Mozilla-based browser required). He coded up some javascript that interactively filters what XML is fed into the the XSLT. Very cool stuff.
Hurray! OpenOffice 2.0 is finally here. Check out the features, then download it. They even have bittorrent downloads!
In particular, I'm eager to check out the retooled database support. It was hidden behind the scenes before, but now it's supposed to be more prominent and look more like MS Access.
I saw a funny VW commercial when I was watching TV this evening. I dumped a copy of it out of MythTV for your viewing pleasure. Watch it here. (6.1 MB, 60 sec)
When it comes to bleeding edge kernel development, I live in a technical black hole. Don't get me wrong--I love the Linux kernel. I think hacking on the kernel for a living could be awesome, but I don't make a living from it presently, so I don't really keep up.
Every now and again, I get a glimpse of the kernel development community that makes me laugh out loud and say "You guys rock!" Due to my timewarp, this isn't exactly *recent* news (Dec 2003), but it's new to me.
So, with not further delay, read Greg Kroah-Hartman's article on udev vs. devfs. I only have good things to say about Greg after talking to him on several occasions during visits to OSU.
Dave West wrote about drive through ordering problems and that reminded me of something...
I almost always order my drink without ice. This habit started about 6 years ago in college. For some reason, when I lived in Southern California, actually getting a drink without ice was somewhat of a feat. I've gotten more than one baffled look at the request of "no ice." It seems that people's brains are hard-wired to put ice in cups, so no amount of re-requesting can keep them from it. After all, it's hot outside, why wouldn't one want ice?
Enter Oregon....I haven't had a "no ice" problem up here. My theory: it's all about the weather. A freezing drink on a freezing day just doesn't sound good. Either that or the "Big Ice" (the step-child of "Big Tobacco") hasn't effectively pushed their wares up in the northwest. Of course, there's the "something is in California's water" theory. That would explain a lot of other things.