Zhanga: July 2007

Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007 (0 comments)

Ok, maybe intelligent design was a better idea. Darwin isn't working out too well for me.

And in other news, I have managed to bum an almost-new computer desk with keyboard tray from an intern who is leaving. Unfortunately, I'm just going to have to pass it off to another intern later, since I can't ship it back...

And I just got home from frisbee and carrying that desk to my apartment (no car... had to carry it like a mile), but I still haven't eaten dinner and it's already 10:38. And by the way, don't drink soda before two and a half hours of frisbee. The enormous amount of gas that gets produced is both uncomfortable and loud.

10:38PM

Monday, July 30, 2007 (1 comment)

Ok, nobody is going to write their Senator, but at least call them. They don't put you on hold and it only takes 45 seconds to dial, speak, and hang up. Call Saxby Chamdliss at 202-224-3521, ask for his stance on net neutrality, then tell him you are in favor of net neutrality and, as one of his constituents, hope he is as well. Do the same with Johnny Isakson at 202-224-3643.

I thought it was a bit funny in a depressing way that when I called them and asked for their views on net neutrality, in both cases the office staff answered in exactly the same way: "On which one?" But then they figured it out pretty quickly when I repeated myself. I think I just suck at speaking English.

A couple weeks ago I was looking through my server's logs to try to figure out how to stop hordes of zombies from flooding me with referrer spam. In a few cases they have DoS'ed me so badly that my server was briefly unable to serve normal requests. A home DSL line just can't handle a few dozen bots simultaneously.

That was some interesting stuff that you don't care about, but anyways, the point I was getting to is that while I was there, I noticed an interesting trend in the access logs for xanga.icydog.net -- they were 20 times smaller than what they used to be. So I dug into the database and got some numbers:

Hits to Xangas

This graph shows the full months of Feb 2005 - Jun 2007.

Beginning 30 months ago, I tracked visits to Xangas. I have 12 accounts set up but a couple are dead, so the site tracks hits to about 10 Xangas now. Anyways, this graph shows the monthly totals for all Xangas tracked. (That huge dip is because my DSL died while I was in China in July 2005.) The first half of the graph is a little screwy because I was adding new users during that time, but the last user was added in Dec 2005 (the second peak). From then on, you can clearly see the brutal Facebook rape...

And this is a standard linear graph. The axis starts at 0, and I didn't do any inverse-log (if that's a real thing) or whatever you can do to make the differences look bigger than they actually are.

3:48AM

Thursday, July 26, 2007 (3 comments)

I listened to Steve Ballmer (the Microsoft CEO) yesterday. An intern with a thick Russian accent went up to a microphone during the Q&A and asked, "When are we going to buy or destroy Google?" Ballmer first noted that he wasn't allowed to use those words, half-jokingly, then he assured us that it wasn't going to be the first of the two.

After him, some moron decided to ask why we have an incentive to produce when there is enough money in the bank to last for years. Ballmer replied, "I have enough money in the bank to last for years. You don't." Everybody laughed at that, and the silly intern who asked the dumb question put his tail between his legs and whimpered as he tried to become invisible.

The guy's pretty funny. I took a bunch of pictures of him while he was speaking. In about half of them, his hands and arms are curled up in a way that makes him look like he's constantly trying to strangle something (Google?). He's also making funny faces 80% of the time, and they go along pretty well with the strangling-things look. But the best one I got was our CEO doing the Hitler salute. I'll put it online somewhere eventually.

Speaking of strangling... you know that saying, "I don't mind God. It's his fanclub I can't stand."? Well, I can't stand Apple's fanclub. Although I guess I do hate Apple as well... so that saying doesn't really work here.

Anyways, the iPhone is a ripoff and I don't think it's that great, but that's not the point (Maddox does a better job at explaining than I ever could). The point is that Apple fanboys are annoying and I hate them.

A couple of days ago, somebody used an iPhone to take a picture of a crashed iPhone at a store. I read this on Digg, which is a site that posts links to articles which you can then comment on. Diggers happen to love Apple. A recent survey showed that 27.6% of Diggers would gladly bend over for Steve Jobs (that's Apple's CEO) every night if he so requested.

Anyways, almost immediately, there were hordes of stupid Diggers claiming that's not a crash screen. Some know-it-all said, "Oh but look! It booted into single-user mode!! It didn't crash!!!11eleven111" Sadly, at least a half-dozen other Steve-pound-me-please types followed suit, and they got modded up (Digg users can vote comments up/down).

Ok, well, the message on the screen says the drive isn't mounted properly so you can't write to it. And it tried to boot into singleuser mode but failed... it couldn't start the shell because there isn't one. This is equivalent to turning on your PC and having Windows dump you at a black screen saying "NTOSKRNL.EXE MISSING OR CORRUPT" -- I'm pretty sure these Apple zealots would say that's a crash.

Oh wait, but maybe they couldn't read the message because... the picture was taken by a phone pretending to be a camera... aka an iPhone! Luckily, the Macmorons were on top of this one too. I'm pretty sure I saw a half-dozen comments saying how this was not caused by the camera sucking, but by the picture-taker having unsteady hands. Ok idiots, that picture is clearly out of focus. You can see the texture on the wall behind the phone, yet the phone itself is blurred like you dropped the lens in butter. And shaky-camera blur causes blurring with streaking, nothing like what you see here.

Now don't get me wrong -- it's not just Apple-lovers on Digg that I hate. All those who worship Steve Jobs deserve equal hate from me. They just happen to like gathering on Digg a lot.

Ok, end of rant.

5:42PM

Tuesday, July 24, 2007 (9 comments)

If you want to apply for a Microsoft internship for next summer, or a full-time job, get a resume ready and let me know by August 10. Apparently, the procedure for applying or whatever is going to change due to some government regulation, so to get around that you can apply early. Yes, I'll stop job-whoring now.

I figure since I program this boring MS product by day, maybe I could do something that's actually interesting by night...

So is there something you really want to see on Facebook? A new feature or whatever -- it could be pretty much anything. It doesn't have to be a discrete piece by itself. It could be integrated with other parts of Facebook, and of course the most powerful aspect is that it can connect with other Facebook users. Their apps platform allows a very wide range of possibilities.

So if you have any ideas, well, you can now leave comments! Which I'm sure you've all been dying to do since that day my server went out, right?

By the way, the following are not options because Facebook has made them technically impossible:

And for good reason, too. If creeps like me couldn't freely be creepy, then that would mean less page views for Facebook, which means less ad revenue and less money in their pockets.

So anyways, give me ideas if you have any so I can do something interesting at night other than fail at cooking (I keep forgetting to defrost my meat (no meat jokes... please.) so I ate vegetarian dinners the past two nights).

6:58PM

Sunday, July 22, 2007 (1 comment)

I only want to talk about one thing today. It's one of my rants again, but this time it isn't about how Internet Explorer is my mortal enemy, or how Tux eats the MSN butterfly for lunch. I actually want you to read this one, so humor me this once if you will.

Sometime between half a year and a year ago, I started seeing the words "net neutrality" on nerd forums like Slashdot and Digg. I didn't really know what it meant for the first one or two months because it was just so confusing. Basically, the debate revolves around the Internet service providers, the companies who own the wires that our data travels through (AT&T/Bellsouth being a big one). I gathered that there were two sides, but could not figure out which side was which. The sides are:

  1. There should be no government regulation on the Internet. ISPs should be free to do whatever they want with the wires they own, specifically including the ability to prioritize certain types of content and deprioritize or completely ignore/drop others.
  2. Government should regulate the Internet and ensure that all types of content are delivered without degradation or blocking by the ISPs.

Eventually I figured out that the second one is net neutrality. It seems that the telecoms (ISPs) have made this intentionally difficult to understand so that people will get confused into mistakenly supporting them.

So why is this important? Well, currently, our Internet is neutral. This means that if you type in www.google.com, you'll get there in a timely fashion even if Yahoo is your Internet provider. But there aren't laws requiring net neutrality at present, and large telecoms (AT&T in particular) have publically stated that they want to do away with it, and they have stated their case.

Let's start with some basics. You pay your DSL company $50 a month to get online. Google and whoever else wants to get online also pay money to be online, though they pay a lot more than we do because they send more stuff through their lines. Now say your ISP is Comcast and net neutrality goes away. Comcast says to Google, "If you want my subscribers to be able to access your site smoothly, then pay us $X per month. Otherwise, they will have slow and broken connections whenever they try to go to google.com." AT&T says the same thing, and other ISPs follow suit. This is wrong -- you and Google are already both paying money to be online. Why the double-billing?

Now let's say that my ISP is Bellsouth, my cell carrier is Cingular, and that AT&T recently acquired both of these companies (all true). Now let's say I am starting to dislike Cingular for whatever reason, and I am going to switch to T-Mobile. Currently, I can just go to T-Mobile's site, look at their plans, and sign up or whatever. If net neutrality dies, then when I decide to visit T-Mobile, I may find that the site won't load or loads painfully slowly. This would suck for T-Mobile and me and is horribly anti-competitive.

Bandwidth costs are deadly as it is. A web startup like Youtube or Facebook, at the beginning, bleeds [money] out of more orifices than an ebola victim because they aren't making any. (In fact, I'm not sure that Facebook is profitable even now, and Youtube was bleeding pretty badly for quite a while.) Imagine that on top of all that, they had to pay yet more money to every ISP who demands it in order that their traffic not get dropped or slowed.

And it's not only anti-competitive against content providers (website operators). Lack of net neutrality would also strongly disfavor small ISPs. Imagine that AT&T, which provides Internet to tens of millions of Americans, tells Facebook that they either pay up or else lose out on those users. Perhaps Facebook would pay. But then what about the little local ISP with a thousand users? All the big ISPs now have another revenue stream, but the little guy isn't going to be able to extort that money out of large content providers like Facebook.

I could go on and on, but I'll leave you with just one more example and I'll finish. Let's say you pay Bellsouth or AT&T for DSL. They also happen to provide wired and wireless phone services. Now let's say you're looking into voice over IP phones (a phone that sends voice over the Internet; e.g. a phone that runs Skype) because they're cheaper and give you free international long distance, or whatever. After signing up for the service, you find that you can't use the VOIP over your Bellsouth DSL because Bellsouth wants you to use their phone services and not a competitor's. So half your VOIP packets mysteriously disappear and the other half lag by 10 seconds, making conversation impossible.

Oh wait... one more... I have to throw Linux in here. Linux is usually distributed in ISO files on donated webspace (playboy.com is an official mirror of stuff like Linux, Firefox, and other open-source software). These files are huge, and it's a lot of bandwidth that doesn't generate any revenue because it's free. Without net neutrality, it'd take me forever to download the latest Linux distro, if it downloads at all, and nobody's going to volunteer to put it online if they have to pay yet more money.

So to wrap up, net neutrality would prevent the large telecom companies from owning the Internet, which would violate the whole spirit of the net anyways. It's always been an open, free area, basically free speech to an extreme (the good extreme). We don't need the Internet to become a segmented piece of corporate crap, which seems likely to happen if net neutrality goes away.

Somewhere in Congress there is currently a net neutrality bill going around right now. The bill consists of regulations that will ensure net neutrality. (Yes, NN means more regulation not less, so all you Libertarians need to figure out that regulation is sometimes necessary, especially in a market that lacks real competition (how many ISP choices do you have? 1? 2?).) So now that you know about this issue, write your Senators and tell them that you support net neutrality and freedom of the Internet. I haven't written my Senators since a third grade assignment about acid rain, but I am going to write them about this one.

By the way, in case you still aren't convinced... without net neutrality you will no longer be able to read your favorite website! Mine!

4:28AM

Friday, July 20, 2007 (0 comments)

My bike slid out from under me this morning on a slippery wooden bridge. As I slowly turned and banked ever so slightly, my bike hit a slippery spot and ended up landing on top of me. Then I slid on my side with the bike stuck on me for a good 20 or 30 feet. I was still kind of asleep when it happened, so about a second after I finished sliding (I hit a bush) I finally realized that I had fallen. The first thing that went through my mind was, I kid you not, "WTF?" and I mean the letters, not the words, complete with the question mark.

Then I had to go all the way back home to change so I didn't have to show up to work like a total tool.

I showed up like a total tool anyways. It was raining pretty hard this morning, which in the summertime is rare. My bike doesn't have the mud deflectors, so the front tire sprayed the entire front of my body continuously. This is no good when a third of my route has construction going on. My face and shirt were covered in mud spots by the time I got there, and my bookbag was pretty muddy too. But the worst part was that I got a very mud-colored, 5-inch diameter circle of mud centered at my anus.

To end today, I want to mention the Zune. The Zune, if you didn't know, is Microsoft's answer to the iPod.

I think the Zune people are trying too hard to be hip and cool. It feels like they're just trying to copy the iPod in every way (except they added a crippled WiFi ability), but always a step behind and not doing it as well. Why can't they make a unique product?

Skip this list if you don't care. Here are some things I dislike about the Zune, mostly ways in which I feel it just copies Apple in an inferior way (and note, I like MS much more than Apple and always have):

  1. The round wheel with a button in the middle. Except you can't scroll with it.
  2. Zune plays MP3s and Windows Media audio/video. iPod plays MP3s and Apple audio/video. (Most other media players I've seen support a variety of formats.)
  3. The installer
    1. Features a never-ending series of pictures of "cool" people and really happy-looking people. The interface is "stylish" and not the normal boring Windows-look. I've never used a Microsoft installer that ever looked this gay.
    2. In the name of simplicity or whatever else they think the iPod did right, the installer doesn't even ask you where you want to install. Microsoft installers for separate programs always ask you where you want them to go. Of course, it would be great if it worked. Unfortunately the installer on the CD is broken. I had to download a different one from the site.
    3. The "installation failed due to some error" screen (I became pretty familiar with this one before it finally worked) shows a picture of an Asian girl lying on a grassy field. Her facial expression indicates that she's being tickled in the belly while a really, really large black man is hiding in the grass, busy pounding her from behind.
  4. Just like iTunes, the Zune software is this gay-looking crap that doesn't look like the rest of my Windows software, and supposedly makes my music library more organized. Just like iTunes, it obfuscates my folder structure (I have no idea where my "media library" is), and just like iTunes, it helpfully wants to convert all my music to its own crappy format (AAC, WMA respectively).
  5. I noticed another thing about the Zune software. If you double-click a picture, whether it's on the device or your computer... nothing happens. It can't freaking open pictures. Computers 10 years ago could perform this task. (Side note: Zune's CPU is almost 600 MHz.)

Anyways, here's a Zune with my 5th gen iPod Video. It was hard to keep the camera still because the Zune was shouting "I AM A BOX!!!!!" at me so loudly. Maybe they should fix that...

Zune and iPod Video

It is good as a radio, at least. But maybe that's because I don't have another radio.

11:18PM

Thursday, July 19, 2007 (0 comments)

I really hate Fox "News." It's always showing on this big screen in the cafeteria every day when I eat lunch. I usually sit down somewhere pretty close to the TV, and on every day except one it was playing either some terrorist alert or a story about someone dying in a murder or similar. Seriously, I hate Fox so much. And that one day, I forgot what they were talking about, but terrorism came up just seconds after the thought of, "Wow! No terrorism alerts!" went through my mind.

Today I didn't sit by the TV. But when I got up to leave, I walked past it. My mentor looked at the TV and cracked up, so I looked to see what was going on. The headline on Fox: "DREADED SPIDER MAY HAVE WARNED WOMAN OF FIRE" ...wtf?

Now let me complain about my job some more. Ever since I started making webpages more complex than this crap you see here (the temporary site), Internet Explorer has been the bane of my web-existence. Back in the day, I used to wonder why my HTML wasn't displaying like it should. I thought I was doing something wrong... and then I learned that IE just sucks. Ugh!

Hm, speaking of IE sucks, my site probably doesn't even work in IE... oh well, your loss. You won't get to see my beautiful site in all its wonderous glory!

Anyways, the product I work on uses these really gay <ie:menuitem></ie:menuitem> tags, which obviously aren't real HTML. You figure that if MS is going to use these tags, at least IE will support it, and their internal tools would support it... right? Well, you'd be wrong. Because nothing freaking recognizes this tag, not even their own tools. And I have to figure out how to automatically click these things that don't really exist. Ugghhh!!

3:00AM

Monday, July 16, 2007 (0 comments)

I went to work Saturday and Sunday. It sucked.

Let me tell you about my current task. I have to automate my Windows Vista machine to click links in Internet Explorer to make sure there are no broken links on specified webpages. That's right... my job involves making my second most hated piece of software repeatedly click on my all-time most hated piece of software. Maybe being a janitor in the adult theater wouldn't be so bad after all.

I ate lunch yesterday at 老四川. I ordered 20 dumplings for $4.50, but forgot that I was eating lunch and not dinner, so I ordered a 麻婆豆腐 and a bowl of rice. It was extremely excessive and I had a hard time biking to work after that.

I always wondered why it's called 麻婆豆腐, especially the 婆. I always figured 麻 was the one in 麻辣 ("numbing spicy"?), but apparently, it actually refers to the 婆's pockmarks from smallpox. So one of my favorite dishes was invented back in the day by some old diseased lady. (Please see Wikipedia link above for the story in more detail.)

Tiffany: David I just had this really scary dream! We were in a car and then this creepy person entered!
...
Me: So... I was really manly and protected you... right?
Tiffany: [hysterical laughter] No. We ran.

5:52AM

Sunday, July 15, 2007 (0 comments)

I'm trying to write a post, but even though I can type Chinese in some programs, I can't get it into this Zhanga file. I've tried all sorts of combinations of editors and copy/pasting and other voodo, but... well, it turns out that Windows sucks.

I will replace this complaint with a real post when I get back.

5:38PM

Friday, July 13, 2007 (0 comments)

Microsoft is messing with me. I don't use Firefox at work because Internet Explorer 7 is pretty good and does what I need besides block ads. And most of the sites I go to are internal Microsoft sites anyways, so they don't have ads and don't work well in Firefox.

But occasionally, I do read things that any good Free software guy would be interested in. I browsed to a linux.com article, which loaded just fine. After it was done loading, I got this:

Operation aborted

The top portion of the page is readable, but the scroll bars don't work because of the dialog. After hitting OK, IE then goes to the generic "Internet Explorer cannot display this webpage" error.

By the way, I decided I am actually going to buy Vista and a bunch of other Microsoft products. Office 2007, or at least parts of it, is actually a great product, and that's coming from my very biased view (but let's be honest... OpenOffice sucks). Although Vista is completely useless, it comes in the (very inexpensive) package, so I might as well just take it.

I have a boatload of work to do, which will possibly make me come to work Saturday and Sunday, so I'm going to stop wasting time complaining about IE and start producing things.

Actually, I have one more thing to complain about. At school and at home when I'm doing school projects or writing programs for myself, I mainly use Eclipse, which is free and open-source. At work here, obviously I use the Microsoft equivalent, Visual Studio. In general, I think VS is a better product. But VS lacks some simple features. For example, in Eclipse, if you type any of {[(" it will automatically insert the matching closing symbol }])". Also, if you click on a variable in Eclipse, it highlights all the occurrences in the code window so you can easily see where it's used.

According to the interns mailing list, in order to get the matching parenthesis feature, you have to buy a plugin for $250. The highlighting feature either doesn't exist, or nobody (including regular employees) knows about it. It's one of my favorite things about Eclipse.

This brings me to a bigger point. Every little piece of functionality that you want to add to your Windows machine costs money. I've been so used to just searching for a Firefox plugin, Eclipse plugin, a separate program, or whatever to give me all the features I need... always for free, and usually open-source. I Googled for an IE plugin that would let me look at HTTP headers (it was for work). For an hour, all I found were $20 programs. An hour later I finally found something for free. Can you imagine charging $20 for a Firefox plugin? (FYI, the free one was Fiddler2, which is amazing at what it does. Ironically, this free program is made by none other than Microsoft.)

1:11PM

Thursday, July 12, 2007 (0 comments)

This building has three levels plus a garage in the basement. I work on the first floor, I have no idea what's on the second, and I eat lunch on the third floor.

On Monday, after lunch, I and a group of other random employees entered an elevator on the third floor and began to descend to the first floor. After arriving on the first floor, the elevator paused, then began moving upwards. It stopped on the second floor and opened its doors, but its next stop was the third floor.

Evidently, the buggy Microsoft elevator stopped on the first floor but forgot to open its door. Someone on the second floor called the elevator to get to the third floor, so our elevator went up without letting us out. You figure that an elevator that only services 4 floors could maybe get things right.

Yesterday my mentor called Microsoft an evil corporation. He then told me that I didn't hear that.

Speaking of evil corporations, I took a look at the two coffee machines in the kitchen here on this floor. They have Starbucks logos on them, so I guess they make Starbucks coffee or something, but since I hate coffee that doesn't matter... just thought it was interesting. The kitchen also provides a ton of free sodas, a variety of 100% juices, some types of tea, and maybe other stuff too. No food, though. Microsoft should be able to feed its employees!

I have nothing left to talk about, probably because yesterday I got a 4x5 inch Graphire4 graphics tablet. Basically I spent the entire evening/night doodling and writing stuff in The GIMP, and seriously, pressure sensitivity is pretty much the coolest thing ever. This tablet is just a little hard to get used to.

2:06PM

Wednesday, July 11, 2007 (0 comments)

This page will serve as my Zhanga until the real one comes back online. I know you all just love leaving comments, but nobody wants to give me scripting/database functionality for free so you won't be able to =(

Actually, last year I mailed $1 to the SDF guys to get this account, so this wasn't exactly free either. Interestingly, they've existed and have been online since 1987... that's why their site looks so ancient. I think they just copied it over from their old BBS-type thing.

Alright, enough about really old Unix admins. Back to my life.

This morning I left my apartment after searching in vain for my helmet. Early indications suggest that I forgot my helmet in the conference room yesterday evening after my team meeting. And by team meeting, I actually mean team Xbox360 Halo 2 fragging on a ~25x20 feet projection screen. Microsoft seems like a better and better place to work every day, and I don't even like Halo. (It's more enjoyable when the screen is bigger than a toaster though... I'm looking at you, Hanif.)

Anyways, I rode my bike to work, and along the way there's been some construction. One woman was holding one of those signs that say STOP on one side and SLOW on the other. She turned it so that STOP faced me, so about 50-100 feet out I started braking. When I was about 10 feet from her, I was rolling along at like 2 mph. One second before I came to a complete stop, she stuck out her hand at me and barked, "You know, you need to stop." By the time she was done talking, I had already stopped. I didn't even know what to say. Was braking from 30 to 2 mph not a clear indication that I was planning to come to a stop?

Let me tell you about my cooking experiences. (These all somewhat resemble Chinese food except for the last one.)

Eggs and tomatoes
Edible...
Eggs and tomatoes with mushrooms because I wanted to see what would happen
Tastes like eggs, tomatoes, and mushrooms.
Seaweed/pork soup
Pigs always taste good. Seaweed tasted like crap. I only made this once because I keep forgetting to defrost my frozen pork (I forgot again today), and that one day was the one day my eggs and tomatoes came out completely disgusting for whatever reason. Since the seaweed was no good either that night, basically I ate some rice and like 4 lbs of pork.
Shredded seaweed
50 grams of shredded seaweed became a metric bucket-full after soaking. At least this time I didn't try to cook it all at once, because that would have taken a week to eat, kind of like last time. It tasted pretty good.
Spinach
Does the opposite of shredded seaweed.
Ground beef and tofu
Pretty much the only thing I've made that is better than "edible."
Ground beef and green beans
I stir-fried the beans for 10 minutes. I tried to eat them and it tasted like I took them out of the freezer and microwaved them for 3 minutes on low. Inedible. (The beans weren't in the freezer, FYI, that was just a comparison.)
Rice
The only thing that can't go wrong. Until your $15 rice cooker decides to quit.
Noodles
Barely edible (terrible).
Stir-fried noodles, pork, tomatoes, spinach
The only thing I've made so far that doesn't resemble Chinese food, courtesy of Tiffany. It was pretty good, but I am already too much of an old, stubborn geezer who hates change. I would have liked it a lot more if I enjoyed Italian/American/whatever it is. However, this was definitely edible, which is a lot more than I can say about, for example, my green beans. Might as well just keep eating this if I can't make Chinese food.

Alright, I just spent the past hour playing around with this server/telling you about my diet/writing here. I'm pretty sure the open-source-ness of this is against Microsoft policy in some way, so I'll write more later.

2:04PM

Friday, July 6, 2007 (4 comments)

Guess I haven't written here for a while. Well, last Thursday I went to the house of BillG himself. There were 267 interns on the list, plus about 20 highly ranked VPs and general managers and other executives. About six circles of people (~50?) surrounded Bill the whole time and tried to talk to him and shake his hand and whatnot. I eventually got my turn, and by that time I was really tired of retarded crap like "Where do you see Microsoft in ten years?" or "What are your views on Google?" etc.

I asked him what his favorite fruit is, and he replied with, "Raspberries, bananas, oranges... I like them all!" I think there was another fruit between bananas and oranges, but I forgot what it was. However... it was not "apple." He definitely left apples out.

My revised list of lifetime accomplishments:

  1. Wore Blue Screen of Death shirt to Bill Gates's house.
  2. Peed in Bill's toilet.
  3. Shook hands with him and exchanged words.
  4. Beat Parkview in Science Bowl.
  5. ...

Half a week later (I think it was Monday when I heard this), Bill is declared no longer world's richest man... go figure.

Some intern wrote on a MS mailing list, "Bill, you'll always be number one to me!" Isn't that cute?

12:49AM

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