http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog Glenn Vanderburg's personal weblog. en-us http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Life/People/no_surprise_here.blog <p> Not that anyone will really be surprised by this &hellip; but it's nice to have ironclad proof. At Foo Camp, I finally learned for certain that James Duncan Davidson sleeps with his PowerBook under his pillow. </p> <p> <img src="http://www.flickr.com/photos/453635_39605758@N00.jpg"/> </p> http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Life/People/happy_birthday_mike.rdoc I just realized my childhood friend Mike Datwyler would have been 40 today. (He didn&#8217;t make it to 20.) <p> I still miss you, Mike. </p> http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Life/People/overheard.blog <p> "Oh. That's not your baby ... that's the Stevie Ray Vaughan boxed set." http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Life/People/ego_surfing.blog I'm sitting in Jason Hunter's Web Services Tutorial at the Northern Virginia Software Symposium. It's not the usual web services talk ... Jason gives a lot of interesting examples, and essentially ignores the low-level mechanics of SOAP in favor of showing you how to <em>do</em> it, and do it easily. Most of his examples deal with the most useful web services out there right now: the Google and Amazon web services APIs. It's a great talk full of extremely practical information. <p> But I do notice a disturbing trend in the example services. So far we've seen: <ul> <li>Does Google know how to spell my name? <li>How often does Google crawl my website? <li>Darn! Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, is a more popular Hunter than I am. <li>How's my book selling compared to the latest Tom Clancy? </ul> <a href="/cgi-bin/glv/blosxom/2003/01/24#Life/People/mind_of_jason">This</a> is getting more meaningful all the time. :-) </p> http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Life/People/duncan_on_couch.blog James is taking his TiBook along on visits to his therapist now: <p> <img src="/blogimages/DuncanOnCouch.png"/> http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Life/People/mind_of_jason.blog Jason's too-hip AIM icon and iChat combined to give me a good laugh yesterday: <p> <img src="/blogimages/JH.png"/> http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Life/People/risk_management.blog An alarming proportion of drivers are complete idiots. I know this isn't news to anybody, but it's still occasionally amazing. <p> Today on the way to work I was approaching a toll plaza. This plaza comes fairly soon after a major entrance ramp, so people who enter the turnpike at that entrance have to cross multiple lanes quickly if they want to make it over to the high-speed tolltag lanes. This morning some goon cut across about four lanes, <i>just</i> in front of the toll plaza. <i>*sigh*</i>. <p> Cutting across multiple lanes isn't ever a really bright idea. But this was worse for several reasons: <ul> <li>Traffic was heavy <li>The lanes were moving at different speeds ... most of them were full of people slowing down to drop coins in the toll baskets or to get change from a real live human, but the lanes she was aiming for were heading full-speed through the tolltag lanes <li><i>There was no room for error.</i> We were all traveling pretty fast, with only about 25 feet left before the concrete pylons that divide the lanes of the toll plaza. </ul> All that to save probably 20 seconds or less.