News You Can Bruise for 2000 April 23

Now in Bakersfield. Going back (again with Josh) today. Before that happens I will see all of my Richardson relatives. Except for Rachel, who is unaccountably in Paris. I was told about Rachel's impending trip to Nebraska but not about her current trip to Paris. Where are the priority snows of yesteryear?

I've never even been to Nebraska.

Something seriously needs to be done about the "news and satire" classification of Segfault stories. Every time a story is published under its rubric, either some idiot reads it on our site and thinks the events described in the story really happened, or it gets forwarded and forwarded and our credit for it gets stripped until it reaches someone who doesn't know the source.

I don't know which, and it may be one or the other on a case-by-case basis, but whatever happens the inevitable result is that someone slaps the text of our story onto a real news site and it wreaks havoc. I'm worried because this does not bode well for online journalism and also because it gives the impression that segfault.org are a bunch of hoaxters.

Well, we are a bunch of hoaxsters, but our hoaxes are planned well in advance and we don't put them on our front page as news articles. That's the difference, you see.

So I'm seriously considering dropping the "news and" from the category title and just making it "satire". I think this is what should have been done in the first place, but we were distracted by that nifty "news" icon that Garrett drew. I didn't design the type system, though, so I don't know how much rewiring that will take. I'm consulting with Scott on this.

I rearranged Susanna's journal, under her direction. I just now put up a little HTML help thing for her as well.

I finished Name of the Rose yesterday morning; great book! Read it! Foucault's Pendulum was better, though.

Yesterday Susanna and I went to the Goodwill and I got two really nice surfer dude type shirts (those are my new favorite kind of shirt). I also replaced my copy of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (lost in the huge book disaster of 1996) and got the O'Reilly HTML reference (which I will likely never refer to as it only covers HTML 3.2, which I understand completely). Both books were $.35, so I got the O'Reilly book for about 1/80th its cover price.

Then on to the used bookstore, where I got Pebble in the Sky (continuing my tradition of reading Asimov's Robots->Empire->Foundation series completely out of order), The Colour of Magic (Hi, Scott!), and Across A Billion Years (which I'd never heard of before and which wasn't very good). TCoM, which I got only because I figured I should know something about Terry Pratchett, turned out to be the best of that lot. All of those I read yesterday afternoon.

There's a halfhearted but decent interview up with Eric Hovland of the SCLUG. I'm mainly linking to it to promote the SCLUG, who do a lot of cool things.

Josh tells me that everyone in this quarter's CS111 (Operating Systems) class has been given a free copy of Windows 2000 Professional by Microsoft. I honestly think Microsoft has just missed the point here. Even if their operating system were great, it couldn't be used in that class.

It's time for vision and leadership!

Okay, it's no longer time for vision and leadership.