The morning sports report on NPR has been mentioning Gonzaga quite a bit lately. I don't pay enough attention to sports to know what they're doing to get so much airtime, nor do I really know where Gonzaga is. I think it's Gonzaga University, in Spokane, Washington (www.gonzaga.edu).
What I do know is that it sounds rather crude: “Hey, baby, nice gonzagas!”
The Illinois Democratic primary isn't until March 16th, but the newsdroids are saying that John Kerry has already won the nomination. They're not saying it in so many words—they're just running stories asking why the other candidates haven't dropped out yet, and hinting that Howard Dean's persistence is just a little bit quixotic.
Sometimes I have the gloomy suspicion that the primaries are just for show: that unknown party bosses have already decided who is to be the Democratic nominee, and all this pointless campaigning & voting is just to let the voters feel like they're still in charge.
Sort of like the 'elections' held in the Soviet Union: Comrade Brezhnev has been re-elected in a landslide! What a surprise.
Every now & then, I visit the TiVo web site (www.tivo.com) to see what they're up to. TiVo is interesting, but there are some pretty serious obstacles to actually buying one:
- It's expensive: $200 up front, $13/month.
- It wants a telephone line, to phone home for broadcast schedules & TiVo updates.
Do we watch enough television to make TiVo worthwhile? (Should we watch that much television?)
There's also the question of privacy. The cable company can't monitor what I watch, but TiVo can—and, apparently, does: the day after the Super Bowl, TiVo announced that the Janet Jackson [censored]-flashing incident was the most-replayed bit of programming in TiVo history. If I had a TiVo, I wouldn't want it reporting to corporate HQ what I watch.
(I also wonder why TiVo needs a telephone line. Why can't it just hook into the house network?)
Installed the OneNote 2003 trial edition at work this afternoon. As with all those e-book downloads over the weekend, the reasons for doing this are unclear. OneNote is a Tablet PC application, hence won't work very well on a desktop; but even if, by some miracle, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, it's a trial version. It will expire in 60 days, and WRI is unlikely to spend $200 on a copy just because I ask them too.
More geekstuff!
Checked the Windows Update site, and found Critical Update KB833407, “…remove unacceptable symbols from the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font that is included with Microsoft Office 2003.”
I'm guessing that the two swastikas are the symbols deemed unacceptable. I can see why Microsoft might want to remove them: the bigger the company, the more anxious it is not to offend potential customers. But the update takes more drastic action, and wipes the entire Bookshelf 7 font: it's still there, but the symbols are all blank.
Sheesh, 'softies. What that really necessary?
Happiness is a gigabyte of memory.
(No, it's not nessus. Nessus has 512MB, which seems quite sufficient to our needs.)
Finished reading Shootdown: Flight 007 and the American Connection, by R. W. Johnson. It's been a little more than twenty years since flight 007 was shot down by the Soviet Union, and a little less than eighteen since I bought this book (from the Book of the Month Club, as I recall); reading it was a curious time-warp back to the Cold War.
Shootdown raises some interesting questions. Alas, the governments in question don't seem interested in providing answers. Perhaps in another twenty or thirty years the relevant documents will be declassified (if they haven't been shredded already), and we'll find out whether flight 007 really was a probe to light up the Soviet radars for observation by US ELINT forces.
I did a little googling this afternoon, and discovered that the conspiracy theories have flourished over the last twenty years. I'm surprised no one has suggested that the loss of Columbia last year wasn't an accident: it was intentionally destroyed to keep people from finding out its role in the flight 007 mission.
You heard it here first!
