Odds & Ends: September 2003 Archives

Microsoft is poise to slither into another market segment: search engines. This isn't just part of their plan to dominate the world, oh no. It's a benefit to all humanity, or at least to the small portion of humanity with Internet access:

"Search engines are doing a good job but not a perfect job," said [Microsoft executive] Koenigsbauer, adding most search results today "don't deliver the results people are looking for."

What a pile of mendacious crap. You can find everything you need to know with Google. It's darn near perfect once you're good at searching with it. Heck, it's fantastic even when you're not.

If the past is any guide, Microsoft will come up with something that's 80% as good, then drive Google into the ground by out-marketing it and making it the default search engine for Internet Explorer. Then we'll be left with one fewer company to come up with new innovations and improvements. Search engines will be as stagnant as word processors, spreadsheets, and Web browsers, markets that Microsoft already dominates.

so we don't lose our "Catholic Light" ethos.

On his blog, Mark Shea quoted an e-mail message from me about extraterrestrials. You can read it here.

Our power went out Thursday night and came back on Sunday at 12:10pm. My wife and I had just sat down to eat grilled hamburgers when we heard the whirr of the A/C and heard people in the neighborhood hollering. We had started to get miserable we had nothing: no power, phones, running water, etc. Our kind neighbors across the street let us shower at their house because they had a generator.

I wish I could say that I made good use of the down time, but I ended up doing little reading and praying because I was busy feeling sorry for myself. So there's my confession for the day.

Coming in the next Left Behind book: the Washington Beltway is renamed as Interstate 666. Plausible, eh?

Here's a Dominion Power outage map, showing I live in an area where there's 1,000+ people who are without power. I'm at the office, where thankfully, we have power. But it's been 24 hours since I had a shower.

How many pets are too many pets?

There here's your answer.

I just wanted to give a link back to A.A.E. for making CL a daily visit and linking back here. We have a bit in common in terms of our involvement with music ministry and are only 4 years apart in age. There you have it. I'm only 31. But I'm in to my 10th year of directing a choir at my parish.

To follow up on John's post below, let me ask a question: of these three, which is the worst crime?

1. A guy burns down a warehouse, destroying millions of dollars of computers.

2. A guy sabotages Internet lines, causing millions of dollars in damage.

3. A guy releases a small program that disrupts hundreds of thousands of computers, causing millions of dollars in lost labor and lost data.

Answer: #1 is the worst, because it could involve physical harm to human beings, but #2 and #3 do not. That being said, the other two are still very bad. The day after they caught the 18-year-old miscreant who released the Blaster worm, I saw some guy from MSNBC saying that he was only a kid and that authorities shouldn't be too hard on him. I don't care if he was celebrating his 18th birthday the day he released the worm. He's a felonious vandal and he should go to jail.

I'm guessing the reason people aren't more outraged is because his damage was intangible -- how do you figure the monetary value of the time and data the guy destroyed throughout the world? That, and because he's a fat, nerdy white kid instead of a muscular black youth. People don't feel as threatened by the former.

Still not convinced that this kid committed a serious crime? Then let's acquit the corporate criminals at Enron. After all, their crimes were (mostly) intangible, turning on things like accounting mirages, false statements, and stock price drops.

I'm guessing that American virus and worm production would drop dramatically if more of these guys ended up in the federal pen.

[/rant]

Or: Your Search String Speaks!

Here, just for fun, are a few of the curious things people were looking for when they found Catholic Light:

al franken is a liar
animals souls catholic (I like Fr. Hardon's take on the subject.)
marty haugen lyrics gather us in
catholic feng shui
bsforum (Maybe they were looking for the "Belgian Social Forum", a left-wing media group)