I Guessed Correctly

I eyeballed the wife's luggage that she has packed for the trip to France. I attempted to lift one end. Oh, oh. I went across the street and borrowed a bathroom scale from Paul.

Weighed myself: 165 lb
Weighed myself while straining to lift the luggage: 240 lb

Net weight of luggage: 75 lb

And Delta's web site says 70 lb max or else they'll charge me excess weight charge. Oh Oh

DC: "Dear, ahem, er, Love, something has got to go."

At least this time I know the response won't be "Yeah, you!" After all, she needs me to lift in into the van to go to the airport and into the rental car and... and... and... for the next three weeks.

CDC, IBM, MS and DC's Memory

Dave Winer put out one of his DaveNet newsletters tonight suggesting that IE browser be split off from Microsoft as a separate company. He calls it BrowserCo.

It is not a bad idea. And, we're not sure if Dave realized that something similar happened way back in 1968.

Control Data Corporation (CDC) sued IBM for antitrust marketing behavior. Every time CDC introduced a new product, IBM would immediately counter with a product announcement of its own for the same device. And, they did it even if they had not done any work on such a product or were even going to. It was just a way to stifle competition.

The result of the lawsuit was that IBM transferred its subsidiary, Service Bureau Corporation, to Control Data for an insignificant amount. You can read all about that and more CDC history here.

I keep telling you that I am an old fart in this IT business. This helps prove it. I worked for CDC back then as a Customer Engineer on their big bertha computers - the CDC 6600. That machine was awesome. Thanks to a part of the machine called "the stuntbox", it could even perform instructions out of sequence. Instructions were executed in parallel (if possible) due to different hardware being used for adds, multiplies, divides. If you were not waiting on a result from a previous instruction, the next one would be executed.

Who says old computer pros lose their memory?

Look what the email brought

I publish a couple of humor emails. So that means that my inbasket gets filled with all kinds of things. (Yeah, I know that is typical of most everyone. But think an order of magnitude different.)

A friend sent me this link for a bunch of funny signs. Please beware that some are for mature audiences, even though they supposedly were found in public.

Linus book finished

Make that: I finished Linus Torvalds's bio Just for Fun. Good read. Nice guy. Recommended highly.

Still getting ready

We leave this coming Sunday for three weeks in France. Have a daughter and my sister who are going to share house sitting and bird sitting duties while we are gone. Bird sitting? Yeah, checkout this pic of Java.

I think most everything (except for film and video cassettes) is bought; most is packed.

BTW, if you want to see a pic of this guy, his wife and a couple of french celebs, check this out.

Reflection

Dan Gillmor has a great column on Reflection.

I have to wonder how many of you will even take the time to read it, let alone practice it.

There's been a lot written about US vacations lately. Including the forced ones for many in Silicon Valley and how, in the US, many don't take the vacations they have coming.

I'm headed out to France next Sunday. For three weeks. It has been interesting to see the reaction of people at work when I tell them. The typical response: "THREE weeks!!!! WOW!" It is beyond their comprehension.

I don't do that every year. Wish I could. I've found that it takes one week to unwind, one week to enjoy, and one week to worry about getting back to work.