NICE is nice!
We arrived in Nice on Monday and are having a great time. Weather is in the 70's (low 60's at night)...

We're staying with the wife's cousin and they are treating us like royalty. There is only one way to describe the food: oh, la la

But I bet that I will come home weighing less than when I left. Every day we walk miles (and miles and miles). That's the French way. Besides I don't like giving up my pristine, free parking spot that is right in front of their condo. If I move the car, I'll end up parking 6 blocks away in an underground parking garage.

Forget the American idea of French rudeness. Everyone has been great. Even the news stand gal had me roaring with laughter this morn. I gave her a 20 Franc note for my morning USA Today newspaper that costs 10 ff. She pretended to tear it in two and hand me back half of it. BTW, I do not speak French. I do know some words and can count. I'm not above using what little I know and using hand gestures for the rest. Most French know more English than I know French and will use it if you make the first attempt.

I find it humorous that I have been stopped twice so far this week by tourists asking for directions. Do I look French? Not really. oh well, who knows what the hell tourists will do.

We'll be headed to Digne, then Paris the first of the week. Not sure when I'll be able to update this again. You'll just have to watch for the updates.

(You know I'll try... after all, I am typing this in a little internet hole-in-the-wall instead of going to the beach with the wife. Yes, the beaches are topless here. Yes, that shows my dedication, right?)

We're ready to leave

The bags are packed, weighed, some things unpacked, weighed and ready to be put in the van.

Our driver - daughter Cathy - is here. (Using our water to wash her Jeep.) She'll take us to Tampa International in a couple of hours.

It is Tampa to JFK, a 3 hr layover and then an 8 hr flight to Nice.

I'll try to post things here when I can. No promises. Just will try.

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.

Speaking of Experience

We've always liked this quote...

Good judgement comes from experience;
Experience comes from bad judgement.

The K&E Coincidence

No sooner had I put up something about a K&E slide rule (see below) than this slide rule link was promo'ed on Slashdot, of all places.

Aaargh, the comments in that Slashdot thread make me sound like some ancient geek! Next thing you know, they'll start discussing vacuum tubes...

Guess we need a motto for this blog. How about - It's not the age that counts, it's the experience.

The Generation Gap

I've been reading Linus Torvalds's autobiography, Just for Fun. Good book. Sharp kid.

What is amazing to this old geek/nerd is that I can relate to him a lot. Different generation -- I did get my start with computers before he was born, after all -- but a sameness is there.

For instance:

• A kid with little or no social skills in school. Glasses. Didn't care for phys ed. He played with computers after hours; I played with a K&E slide rule. He and I both liked math and science and did well in them without studying.
  
• Focus. I can relate to his ability to focus on a task. You had to hit me alongside the head to get my attention if I was intent on something. Still do, in fact.
  
• Machine code beginning. Although I was 25 when I was introduced to computers while working as a tech on the bring-up floor at RCA in Palm Beach Gardens, FL, I quickly picked up machine code programming. And, with a red haired guy by the name of Chris Braidwood managed to turn the memory bank lights into a scrolling message board. (Anyone know Chris? would love to get in touch with him.)
  
• Beautiful code. Tight, elegant code has always been my forte. In the old days, you had to code that way to get it to fit. It's a habit I carry over today.
  
• The thrill of figuring out how to do something the "right" way. I always seem to spend more time thinking through the problem than most programmers. The "Eureka!" moment is a real high. The coding is a piece of cake after that.
  

It's a shame that I don't use Linux, isn't it?

Countdown is getting shorter

Gosh, only a week until we leave for a 3-week vacation in France. I'm going to need the vacation to rest up from all the activities necessary to get ready to go. :)

Be sure to watch the blog while I'm gone. I'll try to update it once (probably in a great) in a while while we're there.

Alas, no hope for me

I've been procrastinating on writing a book for years. According to this article, maybe it is a good thing.

It is hard enough to write well enough to do a book -- now they expect you to be pretty or handsome too? Does that mean the only genre available to me would be horror tales?

Achoo!

It appears that in today's economy when Silicon Valley sneezes everyone catches a cold.

According to this article, many of the Silicon Valley companies have closed for the entire week, forcing employees to take the time off either without pay or to use vacation time.

Think San Jose and you think dot-com. Think dot-com and you think of horrible online ad sales. But those poor ad sales aren't just on the web.

This week's InfoWorld is a puny 44 pages. That's half of the previous week's size. It looks and feels more like a pamphlet than a trade pub. I counted only 11 full page ads and that includes the two on the inside and outside of the back cover. One has to wonder if they contracted their ad sales out to About.com.

At the end of last year, the size of Fast Company and Business 2.0 rivaled a Sears Catalog. You could get a hernia carrying them from the mailbox into the house. Since then, they look like they hired Richard Simmons as publisher and started attending Weight Watchers every day.

There is a positive side of all this -- if you are a tree.

As I write this, it is almost like WW III outside the house. Fireworks EVERYWHERE! With nature even adding some of its own - lightening.

In Florida, only sparklers are legal. But there is a fireworks tent on every other corner. Why? Well, you can buy roman candles and goodies that rival the municipal fireworks displays if you sign a paper saying that you are going to use it to hail a train or to scare birds for an agriculture venture.

I didn't realize that we had so many farmers in our neighborhood. Funny too that they have to fire them off after the birds go to roost!


Don't get me wrong. I like fireworks. But not when they threaten my property. If that makes me a curmudgeon, so be it.

Flatulence Exposed

It is indeed true that you can find information on the web about anything!

With this site, I learned lots regarding a subject that I'd always been too polite to ask questions about.

What's Wrong with Slashdot?

The geek's favorite site, Slashdot, appears to be down again. They had a serious Cisco front end problem a week ago and haven't been stable since.

It's got to be embarrassing as hell when the geeks can't keep their site on the air.

This surely isn't some conspiracy by their corporate parent, VA Linux, to save expenses by cutting back on bandwidth, is it?

PMS

Bumper Sticker seen on car in the parking lot as we came back from lunch...

PMS -- Punish Men Severely

Stupidity Question

If you were brought into a court of law on a charge of stupidity, would there be enough evidence to convict you?

Stupidity

This past weekend was my first in a long time without a deadline for creating online content for a freelance gig. So I enjoyed the time off, deftly avoided the honey-do list and spent time reading.

I finished off Sue Grafton's new P for Peril, then read Janet Evanovich's newest Stephanie Plum mystery 7 Up and Donald Westlake's Bad News.

The best of the three was Evanovich's book. I roared with laughter at Plum's antics (out loud, multiple times, which is unusual when you're reading a mystery novel). Plum's family and friends -- particularly Grandma that loves to go to viewings -- certainly puts the DYS in DYSfunctional.

However, it was one of Westlake's minor characters, an upstate New York small county judge, that gave me pause.

The judge was of the opinion that it was his job to oversee the consequences for stupidity. Two good old boys run out of beer at 4 a.m., so they break into the locked up convenience store for more. The judge sentences them to two to five. For B&E? Nah, for stupidity. Think about it: Do you really sentence someone for DUI or do you sentence them for being stupid?

Which takes us to Microsoft. (Doesn't everything?)

The appeals court slapped Judge Jackson. For bias? Nah, for stupidity. Gates's videotaped testimony was a farce and just showed the richest man in the world acting stupid. Trying to fool the judge with faked video? One word: stupid.

Microsoft didn't pull in its horns during the appeal. They're doing more of the same over and over and over. Just aggressive business as usual? Nah, just being stupid. And, eventually they will have to face more judges over their stupidity.

Makes you kinda wish that fictional old county judge in upstate New York could hear the cases, doesn't it?

That's a good question

I'm a big fan of Marilyn Vos Savant, who has a column in the weekly Parade Sunday newspaper suppliment. She is pretty, brainy (she's in the Guinness Book of Records for Highest IQ) and has a wild sense of humor.

In today's issue she published a couple dozen questions that readers had sent in that don't need to be answered, just enjoyed. Here are my favorites from the collection...

If you sank an elevator shaft through the earth from the U.S. to Australia and baorded the elevator in New York, would you be standing on your head when the elevator door opened in Sydney?

Is it true than an IQ can actually differ dramatically even from day to day? Is it also true than an IQ can drop even without having children or any other activity that causes brain damage?

I heard there is a USA Shopping Team. Where can I find out about it and how do I join?

Ahem, if you know the answer to that last one, please let me know. I'm sure that my wife is qualified and would be interested in it.

Happy Birthday to Dawn

Gosh, you know you are getting old when your kid sister turns 54!

Dawn Henthorn, who edits The Morning Message humor email digest for me and is the Guide for Florida for Visitors on About.com, had to get out of bed at the crack of dawn on her birthday today so that she could host three (!) different realtors bringing people by. They're trying to sell their home in Ocala so they can relocate to the Tampa Bay Area. Is this area big enough for both of us?

It is never too late to send her an email birthday greeting. Send it to dawn@darlcomm.com. You can send all of the jokes that you have socked away in your email client too. She'll appreciate them!