I haven’t seen this film yet but you can’t tell me that West Bank Story can be anything but really great! I am definitely planning on getting this movie on DVD.
The word of the morning is rain. It rained most of the night and is positively pouring this morning. The rain has resulted in traffic jams up on Route 3 which Dominica has to take to work and on 78 which I have to take. Visibility is very low today.
Dad found a good article on household poisons that are often ingested by dogs. Good reading for pet owners. Some things that you might not think of as being poisonous for dogs are in there like ibuprofen and, of course, chocolate which we all know is toxic for dogs.
Tomorrow the Star-Spangled Banner celebrates seventy-six years as our national anthem. I learned today that while the lyrics are genuinely American – penned by Francis Scott Key in 1814 in the Maryland littoral near Fort McHenry – the tune is actually in inappropriate adult drinking song from England in 1780 called “Anacreon in Heavon.” The tune was written by John Stafford Smith and Old Glory flies above Gloucester Cathedral in his honour.
My day today was quite busy and flew right by. I grabbed breakfast when I first got to work this morning and decided to skip lunch. I always feel better when I do that anyway. And it is so much cheaper. Lunch at the office cafeteria is generally $3.50 but breakfast is like 65¢!
I had to spend a bit of time getting things cleared up so that we are all set to sell the house this month. It is hard to believe that we are now just four weeks to the day from the proposed closing day! That leaves almost no time to actually get everything packed up and moved out of the house.
Wheaton points us to an awesome XHTML Coder Geek Tattoo. This definitely falls into the “you know you are a geek when…” category.
So our weekend plans have changed and our current plan is to just stay in Newark this weekend but this is the last opportunity to do so that we will have. We have only two weekends left to do the moving! That is a little scary. The plan is to hire professional movers to do the big stuff in the end but that still leaves us with a lot of packing to do in the meantime. The bottom line is that we can have no more social anythings until the house is sold. We just don’t have the time. Nothing extra. Sorry to everyone who might want to do something with Dominica and I over the course of the month but we are one hundred percent out of commission until April. There just isn’t any getting around that – sad as it is. It isn’t all that long. I will be spending this weekend doing what I can to smooth the server transitions but there isn’t much left to be done with that until I actually get them into place. I was really hoping to have those rails by this weekend but it looks like I am not even going to have the tracking number for them until Monday!
Microsoft suffered a major patent defeat in German court today as the FAT patent is declared NULL! This is a major relief for, well, everyone as the patent would have been used to extract extra money from everything from Linux, UNIX, Mac users to digital camera owners, MP3 player owners, etc. Absolutely everything uses the FAT. (FAT = File Allocation Table.) The German courts ruled that everything “new” in the FAT is completely obvious to anyone who can program and therefore unpatentable.
On OSNews today there was a follow-up review for a Dell w1700 television / monitor combo unit. The reviewer discovered why no one should ever buy a Dell product: they don’t care at all about their customers. It turns out that Dell has been shipping this product knowing that it is faulty and that the back-light will just burn out. It is such a common problem that a third party has the backlights in stock and ready to go. It is an expensive item and Dell won’t pay to replace it but will recommend going to the third party and opening up the monitor and replacing it yourself. Dell is selling back equipment knowing that their customers aren’t very big on product research and taking advantage of them. This is a bad, bad company as we have seen from their exploding laptops and other products and now their SEC securities fraud investigations. No wonder Dell just took a 35% dive!
It is a good thing that I am not traveling tonight as I ended up getting stuck in the office very late. Friday nights are always busy but tonight was extremely busy. I had way more work to do than usual.
My Pinnacle Studio Titanium Media Suite 10.5 shipped tonight according to email that I received. I should be getting it in a week or two. I keep forgetting how long it takes for mail to make its way through Newark. For some reason just sending a letter across town seems to take a whole week.
Today the BBC partners with YouTube! This could be very interesting indeed.
It was well after eight when I finally got a chance to wrap up in the office. Tonight is such a busy night that plenty of people are still in the office working now that I am leaving.