News You Can Bruise for 2003 January 15

Ow.

One of the things that makes me think that my life is a nutty sitcom is that my nutty cubemate, Kevin, is always telling me that today is "[some stupid thing] Day", eg. "Teddy Bear Day" or "Hug Your Landlord Day". He gets this information from the radio. Today he said that it was the anniversary of the Boston Molasses Disaster. ("You would think a molasses disaster would be a unique event. However, another molasses disaster occurred in 1932 in Sucarnoochee, Mississippi.")

The other thing that makes me think that my life is a nutty sitcom is that today at lunch Kevin spilled coffee on me.

The latest non sequitur "Back off..." bumper sticker. I was thinking... what if it's any arbitrary facts about the universe that go on those bumper stickers? You might see BACK OFF... A HEXAGON HAS SIX SIDES or BACK OFF... THERE IS ICE ON MARS.

What we at CollabNet have known for a long time: Never mind the economy, stupid -- it's the burritos

Despite the hilarious cries of KatzDot ("American Kids: Fact Or Fiction?!" "The Spiritual Net Factor From Cyberspace!") I got rid of the high-profile random and/or seldom-updated junk between the intro and the weblog. This brings NYCB center stage, which is important because NYCB click-throughs (that's when you click the permalink) bring in a whopping 1000% of my profits from this site. Feel free to complain, but I just can't resist those, sweet, sweet profits.

You know what would be a cool state quarter? One with a totally blank reverse side.

Well, it's cooler than the actual California quarter options. Though I do like the idea of putting concentric grooves on a quarter.

Maybe North Dakota could have the blank quarter.

I submitted my abstract. Whew! I'm afraid of getting bonked on some procedural thing like providing examples of prior art instead of references to papers. I guess I'm more afraid of getting bonked because they think my idea is stupid. Should I put up the abstract so everone can read it? <--my gut reaction for everything, as noted below

Thanks to Jason for proofreading the abstract and giving me lots of help on how to write an abstract. Thanks to Kevin for making it all the way through the motivation before falling asleep.

Right now (or sometime around now), Sumana is introducing Bruce Sterling. I wonder how that's going.