Power outage

Amazing. So there is this little storm (actually, quite the giant storm) passing through town, and it brings the first thunder and lightning in years. Wouldn’t you know it, the power is knocked out for 16 hours, like in some backwards Third World country? Sunday plans had to go to heck. No laundry, no gym, and instead of working on improving the house and putting everything in place, I spent the whole day looking for the fuse box. Continue reading

The Four Boxes of Democracy

A quote from a Canadian on /.: There are four boxes to defend liberty with: the soap box, the jury box, the voter box and the ammo box. Use in that order.

Yahoo! Maps Beta

Did you try the new [Yahoo! Maps](http://maps.yahoo.com/beta)? It’s aimed squarely at Google Maps, and it’s really a neat solution. Flash based where Google prefers AJAX, Yahoo! Maps is fast, accurate, and has such nice gimmicks as: drag and drop of locations to the “Directions” area multiple locations for way points finds places of interest along a route, not just near a point live traffic cams All in all, a huge success for Yahoo! Continue reading

Googlecounts

Yesterday, I had forgotten how to spell ’embarrassing’ and was too lazy to look it up on dictionary.com. Instead, I went to Google and typed in the two possible spellings I was considering: ’embarrassing’ and the more phonetically correct ’embarassing’. Never mind that my Italian suggested the single ‘r’ where I should have known better; never mind that dictionary.com and any other dictionary are the right source for this type of information; never mind that what I got was just a corruption of a search; never mind that Google itself suggested the correct spelling. Continue reading

Weblogging

I tried all sorts of webloggers (blogger, tkblog, etc.), but in the end the easiest one to install and use was the one you are currently seeing. GreyMatter has the big advantage of being just a set of perl scripts that live (data and script) in the cgi-bin directory, no requirements to the environment but that there be a perl shell available. If you like this, I strongly encourage you to use it. Continue reading