Today is a big patch day for Windows users.  Microsoft released many patches, mostly critical, today.  If you have auto-update turned on, you probably have them downloaded and ready to install.  If not, Windows Update site is overloaded so it will take a while to get them.  If there aren't any updates, try again when the site is not so busy because network timeout seems to be interpreted optimistically by Windows Update scanner.  I installed 4 patches on Windows Server 2003 and 5 patches on XP.  On top of all that, I installed a script debugger patch from Office Update.  Damn those 17-inch PowerBooks are looking good today.

I got back yesterday but was too tired to post anything.  Everytime we go camping, we forget something and we forgot the air mattress this time.  Two nights without the luxury of air mattress was bad, but not being able to sleep thanks to noisy neighbors was even worse.  They were rude beyond comprehension.  Chopping wood at 3AM?

If you like tranquil camping experience, don't go to Spanish Flat Resort.  We had such a terrible time that we are never going anywhere near the damn place.  Yeah, it was that bad.

BTW, Comcast's e-mail server is not working today so I have no e-mail.  If you need to contact me until it's working again, leave a comment.

I am one of those people who just can't seem to catch a fish so I stopped trying long time ago.  At the campsite we are going to is supposedly a good phishing, oops, fishing site so I guess I'll give it another go.  See y'all Monday.

Speaking of safety, here is a gadget that offers safety of a more enjoyable kind for callous geeks like me looking for a good place to rest our wrists (via Gizmodo).

They should offer versions for those who prefer to rest their wrist on a male chest.  I'll provide a mold of my chest for a reasonable fee.  While my chest is not as good looking as Brad Pitts', I think I have more professional looking nipples.  Besides, I am internationally respected where Brad is only internationally ogled.

Design quality-wise, I give the left one a B but the right one gets a C because the gel bumps are not symmetric.  More advanced design could allow a picture to be 'slipped-in' like those promotional mousepads and control buttons to inflate the gel bumps.  BTW, I see no obvious security vulnerabilities in these products.

During a break from wrestling with Windows Shell COM interfaces, I was googling to find what PS2 game I should get next when I came across this Sex in Games: Rez+Vibrator article by Jane Pinckard who runs Game Girl Advance site with Justin Hall, both of whom I recognized from Joi Ito's posts and pictures.

Anyway, the article is two years old but I think you'll enjoy it.  It's just too bad our PS2 console is in the livingroom and my son likes to sleep with his door open. 🙂

Our family and a couple of other families are going camping next weekend, first of many planned this year.  The weird thing about camping is that time flies although there is nothing to do.  I know other people do a lot when they go camping, like climbing hills.  I don't.  My camping goes like this:

drive, unload, setup
for (i = 0; i < n; i++)
  sit, eat, sit, eat, fire, drink, sleep
tear down, load, drive

It's been a long time since read a monthly magazine.  Maybe it had something to do with Internet, maybe not.  Regardless, I didn't realize how much I enjoyed reading those articles in them.  People like me, sensitive to the point of absurdity, can feel the differences in texture among articles in monthlies, weeklies, and dailies.

Between the lines, you can hear the pace of the writer working on the article.  You can hear them talking with their friends and associates about the article they are writing.  Daily and weekly writers are hurried and more distanced from what they write.  Monthly writers drown themselves in their articles.  You can hear their cryies for help as well as sighs of closure.

Where do blogs fit in the picture?  Blogs are hourlies.  There is a wide gulf of difference between hourlies and monthlies which is why I miss reading the them.  I just discovered KeepMedia where articles from 150 publications are available for online for 16 cents a day.  I haven't signed up yet, but I really enjoyed reading My Bodyguards from Esquire by Tom Chiarella so I may do it during my next spending frenzy.

Microsoft and IBM is about to release the latest spec in the WS series called WS-User Profiling (WS-UP) which address the need to associate user profile information with a web service transaction.  A use case example in the spec will show how urgency information, extracted from a user's calendar database and inserted into SOAP requests, can be used by a travel agency to intelligently price airline tickets.  More urgent the user is, higher the price.

I think WS-UP will enable merchants to provide personalized service to online customers, something that only meatspace merchants could provide until now.  Charging some customers more than others is an old art of trade that is sadly disappearing with the emergence of e-commerce.  With WS-UP, that art of trade will live on.

My new project for April is ByteTorrent which extends the BitTorrent protocol to transport bytes instead of bits.  I am hoping this change will increase throughput by 800%.

FYI, a similar attempt has been made before but I think I can succeed where they failed because I am using higher quality bytes recently released by Samsung.