Elliotte Rusty Harold reports on a great looking pair of tits in Amsterdam.
I arrived in Amsterdam this morning around 8:00 A.M. local time and got to the hotel around 10:00. I had a few hours to kill before my room was ready so I wandered around to see what I could see. This being Amsterdam, there was quite a lot to see, but my absolute favorite was one pair of great tits. I even got a picture of one of them. We don't have tits like these in Brooklyn!
As some of you know, I am a judge in Weblogs, Inc's 'Perfect' Corporate Weblogging 'Elevator Pitch' Contest which is now in the scoring phase. I just spent an hour on the submissions and, frankly, it was difficult to judge because:
Making a 'pitch' without knowing much about your audience is like pitching without knowing where the strikezone is. Know who they are and what they are interested in so you can select the appropriate bait and dangle it where they are likely to bite.
Anyhow, I think such a contest should be held once a week with a specific target description. For example, VP of Marketing at Nike, VP of Sales at Victoria Secret, or VP of Engineering at Sony. Forget the judges too. Instead let the readers cast their votes to select the Pitch of the Week. Fast forward and I wouldn't be surprised if executives send in pitch requests to hear how blogging can help their particular company. Heck, asking for help is a form of marketing after all as enterprising Nigerians have showed.
These are some of the thoughts I had recently about phishing blacklists which is going to play a major role against phishing in the near future.
Queueing reports with client-software is no problem. For server-side only, file the report under a cookie which can be claimed when the user logs in. Unclaimed reports are removed after a time limit.
With only a few hours til the tax filing deadline, I was having problem with TurboTax. It reported no errors so I proceeded to file it electronically, but it kept saying it couldn't do it because there were errors. So I went back and found that some field in California tax return was not supposed to be a negative number and it should be greater than the number above. Well, the number above came from the federal side and was negative.
After an hour of going back and forth which TurboTax really sucks at (why can't it be more like a browser and let me spawn new windows and navigate back and forth?), I finally started ripping out forms and wiping out deductions until the damn thing filed without complaining. I am paying a bit more tax than I would have otherwise, but at least it's done and over with until next year.
If I could make a wish come true to make my tax time headaches more tolerable, it is the ability to dictate where my tax money goes after I file my tax return. I want to be able to use a nice GUI application to swoop in, to see how others have allocated their tax money and where it's lacking, and divide up my tax money into areas where I think more money should be spent.
Concerned about the homeless or unemployment? Drag and drop part of your tax money to the homeless or economic programs. Angry about the Iraq War? Don't spend any money on it. Want to see more tanks? Drill down into the army budget and spread your bucks on the armored divisions' purchasing budgets. You want to reward or punish the job FCC has been doing? Squeeze their budget until they do what you want.
UI-wise, you can select from a large selection of budget configuration packages from political parties or even influential individuals so you don't have to micromanage the federal budget. So you would select one or select a few and average to start with and then make fine adjustments on the programs you feel strongly about.
If implemented, the tax I have to pay every year becomes money I have to spend every year. Why stop there? If one has the money, why not pre-spend tax one has to spend in the next ten years at once in public programs that I care about and needs funding? This way, I can pitch in hundreds of thousands instead of few thousands at once, superboosting cruicial programs and increasing the chance of seeing some good results early.
Instead of voting on politicians, judges, and policies, direct budgetting allows us to vote with our tax dollars. Whether the system will work in real life or not, the vision is definitely a satisfying one. If successful, politicians will be on their knees begging for money for their favorite program as April 15th nears each year. Who knows? Maybe everyone will act responsibly. If you like this idea, just drag-n-drop some donations to the Don Park's Daily Needs box.
As expected, pro-government Uri Party got 152 seats out of 299, which gives them the majority. Han-nara (Grand National) Party lost its majority position but still managed to eek out a respectable showing, thanks to the daughter of a former dictator who took control of the party just weeks before the election. It's funny how conservatives prefer the nostalgic certainty of iron-clad rule by dictators over euphoric optimism of liberals. Min-noh (Democratic Labor) Party emerged in the third place, making the ultra-liberal pro-labor party a political force to be reckoned with.
National Assembly seats after ballot counting [As of 1:00 a.m.]
| Party | Before | Now |
| Uri Party | 49 | 152 |
| Grand National Party | 137 | 121 |
| Millennium Democratic Party | 61 | 9 |
| Democratic Labor Party | 0 | 10 |
| United Liberal Democrats | 10 | 4 |
| Others | 14 | 3 |
While Longhorn will be breaking some new grounds in GUI when it is released (eyeroll), I am afraid the Longhorn GUI team is too focused on the 'look' and not enough on the 'feel'. Onscreen objects should not only look great, but also feel right. If an object looks heavy, it should feel heavy when I am pressing on it or moving it around. If the surface of an object looks rubbery or plastic-like, objects behave accordingly when objects are dropped on it. GUI designers have forgotten about physics, something game programmers have not.
Unfortunately, there aren't any physics engines for GUI available today and it would take more than a patch to retrofit existing game physics engine for GUI. I hope someone writes one so onscreen objects can exhibit real world properties like momentum, collision effects, elasity, etc. There is also the sound to consider but, until affordable sound projection technologies becomes readily available, noise will be too much to bear in typical office environments.
Given that more spams originate from certain countries than others, I wonder what would happen if total bandwidth capacity of each country is choked by percentage of spam in outgoing e-mail. For example, if Korea's bandwidth capacity is X and 70% of e-mail originating from Korea is spam, then Korea's bandwidth is limited to 30% of X.
My guess is that choking at the national level will encourage each country to choke at the network level which will subsequently encourage ISPs and broadband operators to choke at the connection level. This will encourage spammers to use zombies at other countries which will in turn encourage that country to crackdown on spams.
Hopefully, spammers will eventually run out of places to spam from.
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.
Don Park's Weekly Habit 