I haven’t posted for over ten days - and my feed readership is going up.  Is that a message about my blogging, or what?

I had a few fun and hectic days @ SAP’s annual conference, SAPPHIRE - am still stuck here, got airplane ears on the flight here, which turned into a full-blown ear infection (hey, I even gave up my Eric Clapton ticket), and now the doc ordered me not to fly, to avoid risk of permanent damage.  Yikes! 

But this is all temporary inconvenience, nothing compared to what others have to go through.  Yesterday an old family friend passed away.  He was originally my Dad’s best friend, I remember seeing him around when I was a kid.  Later he taught me how to drive a car. (He had his car tuned like a rocket - manual shift, mind you -  and I think he got the fighter pilot and driver roles confused.  I only got to the driver level…).   Even later I played with his little daughter, was something of a “big uncle” to her - she is now a Mom herself.   A three-decade, multi-generational friendship, passed from my Dad to me - cut off so abruptly.   Just two months ago I was in Hungary and met him - energetic, dynamic, good-humored as always. Hospitalized a week later, diagnosed with leukemia another 2 weeks later.  And now gone, forever. This is just crazy.  We’re all so vulnerable.

All this put a bit of a damper on my blogging - but I’m coming back soon.  And to all those new readers - not sure what brought you here, but thanks!

<rant>

TV news in the background - they talk about how we can expect more laptop searches at airports, agents searching for child pornography.  This is insane.  I am not supporting child pornography, but fighting it should not be the mission of airport security or customs officials.  Air travel is already bad enough, searching through today’s huge hard disks would bring it to a screeching halt.

</rant>

Tags: air travel, customs, laptop search, rant

Pardon my French.. it’s not exactly my style, especially not in the title, but enough is enough. I’ve long given up detailing Vista’s countless failures, but somehow, unconsciously I still hoped things would get better after installing SP1.

Not that I could get it - I was one of the “few” who had an offending Intel graphics chip in my HP PC, so I could not get it for a while. Then today it showed up on Windows Update, so off I went to a spare laptop (XP) since I knew the update would take about an hour or so.

Checking it an hour later:

Service Pack did not install. Reverting Changes. Do not turn off your computer.

WTF? So now it’s gonna spend another hour, a total cost of two hours to get back to where I was in the first place? And they wonder (?) why everyone says Vista Sucks.

P.S. Windows 7, whenever it comes, should be released as “Vista Final”, free to all Vista victims along with Microsoft’s letter of apology.

Tags: sp1, vista, vista sp1, vista sucks, Windows

Update (4/20): parislemon:  If Twitter Breaks in the Woods and No One Can Tweet About It, Is It Really Broken? 

Tags: Twitter

This gives “hands-on” education a new meaning…

Update: originally I posted this with a typo in the title - one that made the whole title dull and meaningless:

College Curriculum Includes Brother Visit.

Ouch.

This would be funny, if it wasn’t said. Yet I can see all the late night shows making fun of Mexican police trying to shoot on a moving target: killer bees.

Africanized Bees Attack Mexican Police

MEXICO CITY (AP) — At least 70 police officers were hospitalized after so-called Africanized bees swarmed a police shooting range in southern Mexico, authorities said Tuesday.

Talk about precision targeting.    But wait, there’s more:

The attacked occurred Monday in Tapachula, Chiapas, after one of the policemen hit the bees’ hive with a bullet.

Oh, so Police started shooting first.  AP has the wrong title, it should read:  Police Attack Killer Bees - They Launch Counter-attack.

Update (4/9):  Simple math from the Beemaster Forum:

70 cops with 36 bullets each (appox) = 2520 shots
1 hive = 50,000 bees (minimum on a healthy well established hive.

Sounds like the bees win.

Tags: killer bees, mexico, police

Zazzle, the online T-Shirt business has been ill for a while.   I wanted to order my own T-shirt, but needed a slight addition to the design.  Well, it’s kinda difficult to work on the design when images are not displayed properly…

Today Zazzle’s condition appears to have worsen: any time you try to talk to her, she just blurts out:

An error occurred on this page which may make it unusable. If this occurs please refresh the page.

I did. Refresh. She blurts again. Again.

Ouch.  Dear Zazzle, I hope you recover soon…

Update: I am not experiencing the above errors from another laptop, running XP.  But it’s not browser-specific either: on this Vista computer I run into the same problem whether using Firefox or IE7.  And yes, I cleared everything (cookies, permissions, cache) on both browsers.

Tags: cafepress, online retail, online t-shirt, t-shirt design, zazzle

Simple: just fly Aloha.  The last two flights today.

Update (4/3): Now ATA went belly up (again), leaving passengers stranded in Oakland and Hawaii. This is criminal.

Tags: airlines, aloha, bankruptcy, chapter 11

BreakingNewsOn BREAKING NEWS — MAJOR TRAIN CRASH IN CANTON, BOSTON. UNCONFIRMED REPORTS OF OVER 200 INJURIES. DETAILS SOON. — BREAKING NEWS 6 minutes ago from web

I just read the above on twitter.  The news is nowhere to be found on the major wires.  In the past few days two earthquakes were reported in a similar manner - first on twitter, to be followed by news agencies 20 or so minutes later.

I don’t know how they do it - but they are apparently based in The Netherlands.

Tags: news, Twitter

A few days ago a 7.2 magnitude Earthquake in China was first reported by several Twitter users, and only got picked up by the news agencies 20 or so minutes later.   Today it’s happening again:

地震！Earthquake in Tokyo! http://urltea.com/2zug

27 minutes ago from Zooomr

Reported by Kristopher Tate on Twitter.  No news agencies reported it yet. Google blog search reveals one post:

March 24
(3-24-08) EARTHQUAKE IN TOKYO, JAPAN!
I am sitting her at home in Shimoakatsuka, Itabashi-ku , Tokyo and I just felt an earthquake at about 12:41pm! Did anyone else feel the earthquake?

So it’s twitter and a single blog post.

The USGS site has the precise information: magnitude 5.3 Monday, March 24, 2008 at 03:40:13 UTC Honshu, Japan.

Still nothing on news wires.

Update:  Still nothing on the majors, but the Times of India and the Trend News Agency, Azerbaijan report it now.  Perhaps we need to redefine what a major news agency is

Tags: earthquake, japan, Twitter