Looks like Oracle snapped up Collaxa.  Congratz to Doron and Edwin.  I don't know about Edwin, but this is the second bag for Doron.  You are on a roll, buddy.  Keep throwing that dice!

When I wake up I usually find some interesting remains in my mind.  It's as if the brain forgot to flush the cache when I awake.  This morning it was the thought that the word 'destroy' originated from the fall of Troy.  So to destroy is to suffer the same fate as the city of Troy did.

Is this true?  Dictionaries I looked up didn't list Troy as the origin of the word.  Searching Google returns many pages that mention the city of Troy and the word destory together yet none seems to suggest there there might be a closer relationship between the word and the name.

Seems unlikely though.  The concept of destruction has a long history and, while the destruction of Troy took place long time ago, use of the word 'destroy' to mean 'do the same as what was done to Troy' would require a lot of story telling.

A: Destroy that city by nightfall!
B: Do what?
A: Destroy!  Turn it into rubble like Troy.
B: Troy?  What's that?
A: *sigh* You never heard about Troy?  Giant Horse?
B: Uh, no.  Why don't you tell us?

More likely, the word is related to the word 'destruction', removal of structures, but it's fun to play with words anyway.

It's been a while since I have been to Fry's but I needed to get some gears today.

Wi-Fi stuff – Annoyances of being wire-bound finally got to me.  So I picked up some Wi-Fi PCMCIA cards and a Wi-Fi router/firewall.  It's amazing how cheap the stuff is now.  I paid $29 per Wi-Fi cards and $49 for the Wi-Fi router/firewall, both made by D-Link.  They were actually $49 and $69 respectively, but I lucked out and got $20 rebates on each of them.

External USB hard disk – I didn't want the hassle of upgrading the internal hard drive so the only remaining choice was an external hard disk.  I went with Maxtor One Touch 250G which was priced at $279.  Isn't it annoying that external drives cost about $100 more than the internal drives?  Someone must have read my mind because they charged me only $179 for the drive when I got to the counter.  Weird but I wasn't going to argue with them to charge me more, so I was smiling on the way out.  Heh.

I also had to get a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card for the laptop because my Dell laptop only had USB 1.1 support.

Now it's time for a bit of ranting.  I can't use Wi-Fi and USB 2.0 at the same time because both the Wi-Fi PCMCIA card and the USB 2.0 PCMCIA card has bulb-like ends.  They are all right if only one card is like that but you can't insert two such cards at the same time because they both extrude in the same direction (normally up).  If different direction is problematic they they should have at least made one card types longer.

Update:

I guess you get what you paid for.  I got Wi-Fi working but when I started looking around the D-Link router admin console to increase security, I found that D-Link is rather lacking.  For example, I found no way to restrict access to a handful of MAC and WPA didn't seem to work.  Windows Wi-Fi control panel being confusing didn't help either.

I wonder if NetGear is any better.

While most of the comments I write elsewhere are throwaways, some of them are precious enough for me to feel as if I abandoned a small part of me.  The comment I made in response to a final goodbye, Jeneane Sessum's post about death of her sister's dog, was one of those.

My own experience with my dog wasn't that pleasant. I knew the time to put her to sleep was coming because she was in pain more frequently. One night, we woke up to her howling in pain. As much as I wanted to keep her with me just a little longer, I thought she deserved better.

So my wife and I took her to a 24 hour vet on Middlefield. The doctor gave her a tranquilizer first and, while she seemed to feel less pain, the sight of her tongue seemingly woozing out of her mouth scarred my memory of her forever. On the way back, I was too shaken to drive. When we got back, I sat next to her bed to inhale memories of her still lingering about. So sad.

Now she sits atop my desk in a small pine box with a little metal statue of her. I regret not getting some of her hairs though because I miss her smell. I guess I have a dog's nose or something.

Damn. I am full of tears again.

It's rightful place is here at my blog.

On Washington Post via Joi:

'Fuck yourself,' said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.

…

CHENEY: Well, I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it.

Hmm.  Are there any medical researches done on the use of foul words to increase endorphin production?

It's 5:30AM here and I was about to chuck it in for the night when I heard a noise outside.  It was a racoon beating up a cat.  The racoon looked pretty young, probably one of the six racoons that was born up in our attic a few years ago.  Too bad I didn't see them when they were babies.  When I first saw them they were already lanky and ugly.  I like the way adult racoons look though.  But then that's how I got bitten by the mother racoon.  Nasty gal.  After all those peanut butter cookies I gave her.  I would give her two and she would take one in her mouth, take the other one in her hands, and casually walk away standing up.  Hillarious.

I did that only because she broke her nails trying to get back into the attic when we blocked the entrance (we didn't know about the babies until they started crying) and I felt sorry.  One day I was cursing about the racoon making noise in the attic and the next day at 4AM I was on the roof (it was raining too) with a crowbar and hammer to make holes so the mother racoon could get back in.  Oy.  I had this horror image of dead baby racoons in the attic.  Anyway, I am not feeding her any more so don't bother leaving tsk tsk comments.

Halley writes:

Blog Murder

Is there a reason Dave Winer just killed 3000 blogs — like this one (Tom Matrullo's) and this one (Dean Landsman's) and this one (Craig's Booknotes)– and no one, including Slashdot has the balls to write about it?!

At least he's taken the gloves off — if you thought he was a cuddly teddy bear friend of all bloggers — you might want to rethink that.

then she added later:

And if you want to take the time to read what I wrote — I never called anyone a "murderer" as some have claimed — and my question was why no one else had written about it.

Halley obviously has some harsh feelings against Dave, feelings that distorts her view on anything Dave does.  I think it is all right for a person to not like another person.  But I think she should have just said so instead of practically calling Dave a murderer on flimsy evidences and then, instead of apologizing, resort to playing word games.

To Both Sides of Weblogs.com Conflict

I have a problem understanding people who routinely go beyond the needs of momentary emotional ranting to shred another person's reputation in public.  Over and over, they portray the focus of their anger as the ultimate evil.  What are they trying to accomplish?  If they are successful, then the person will be ruined professionally and shunned socially.  Is that really what they want?

If I could give them an advice, it is this:

If you are chasing, you better be ready to catch.

Hurrah!  Privately funded by Paul Allen, designed by Burt Rutan, and piloted by Mike Melvill, a 62 year-old test pilot who is now an astronaut, SpaceShipOne successfully reached space and returned safely this morning, the very first manned private spaceflight in history.  Awesome.  With all the doom and gloom these days, it's nice to have something to smile about.

 

Joi Ito calls Ray Bradbury's complaint about Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 stupid and compared it to a supposedly homophobic essay by Orson Scott Card.

Don't you hate it when your favorite writers do, write or say stupid things?

This reminds me of the horror of reading Orson Scott Card's homophobic essay, "Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization".

The following is an edited version of my comment:

I think Bradbury's position is understandable and definitely not stupid. Don't you think the proper thing for Michael Moore to do was to ask? If Bradbury was pro-Bush, he wouldn't have wanted the title of his works being used for Michael Moore's movie. For him to just blatently use the title like that is just plain asinine.

As to your comment about Orson Scott Card being homophobic, I don't see what is wrong with being homophobic. If there is nothing stupid about being afraid of heights or spiders, why is being homophobic stupid?

Update:

Thanks to Russ's mini-rant which prompted me to look up the word in the dictionary, I just realized that my definition of homophobic and the dictionary's definition are different so you can throw out that part of this post.  If you want to continue the discussion then I am fine with that too.

Just got back from the tourney.  I got there late because I thought it was to start at 6PM when it actually started at 1PM.  They still let me play though.  I didn't get many good hands all day so I had to max out the ones I got by building the pot.  After five hours, I ended up at the table of final seven players (out of twentysome players) by winning only a handful of large pots.  After that I spent most of my time dodging deadly hands because the final table was a no limit table.  In the end, I placed third which won me the chance to play in the tourney of champions in December without buying in.  So, my prediction was right on the ball.