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- By GERSH KUNZTMAN THE sure signs that summer is upon us: Days are longer, temperatures are higher and people are paying more for watered-down coffee. Yes, iced-coffee season is upon us, which means iced-coffee scammers are gearing up to charge you more for less. |
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- Ian Messer Bloomberg News Tuesday, May 20, 2003 Competition leads Japan unit to a loss TOKYO Has the froth come off of Starbucks' cappucinos in Japan?On Tuesday, Starbucks Coffee Japan Ltd. said it lost money last year and added that it would slow the pace of new store openings and said cut payroll costs to restore profit. |
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- By Michael Booth, Denver Post Entertainment WriterStarbucks wants to run your life. Denver Post / John Prieto Are you going to fight it?Or are they doing such a good job at it that you can't wait to see what they think up next?Twenty-two million people visit the mammoth coffee purveyor every week for their caffeine addictions. |
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- The plight of the world's coffee farmers topped the agenda at a specially-convened meeting in London on Monday. Many coffee farmers are on the brink of starvation after prices plummeted to their lowest level for 30 years. Over-production and an increase in poor quality coffee - particularly since Vietnam joined traditional coffee growing countries in Africa and Latin America - are to blame, analysts say. |
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- Jason Folkmanis Bloomberg News Monday, May 19, 2003 BUON MA THUOT, Vietnam Vietnam, Asia's biggest coffee producer, has cut down about 7 percent of the coffee trees in its main growing province, to help end a world glut that has cut prices and farmers' incomes. |
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Eh,Eh... (May 20 2003 23:58 GMT) - Een reactiedingetje kan af en toe toch geinig zijn... Bij currykennisnet choppercurry: (voor alle duidelijkheid; mr.b is niet Dr. |
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- The 470-year-old Church of England has broken with tradition to publicly advertise for a bishop in the classified sections of... |
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- Drivel: The outliner I have been looking for has finally been released. If you are a Mac and Palm user, you can't live without BrainForest. It is a desktop application with a Palm conduit. The Palm app is actually more feature rich than the desktop app. |
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- If you read Techdirt, you're probably aware of things like adware and spyware that invade computers through various "free" applications. Many people don't know about them, though, and are increasingly falling victim to them. The companies who provide those products are getting increasingly desperate to trick users into installing them. MSNBC is writing about how eUniverse, a public company, is sneaking adware into their "free" patriotic cursors that they're trying to convince people to download. Of course, in the fine print, it tells you you're actually installing adware, but you really have to hunt for it. |
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- Although security issues have slowed implementation of the specification for Web services, a number of vendors backing UDDI say version 3 should address those concerns. [Computerworld News] '-- Together with XML, SOAP and the Web Services Description Language, UDDI forms the foundation for the standards-based Web services architecture many vendors are endorsing as a way to link disparate data and applications. --' ...John |
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- I saw The Matrix Reloaded last night. This, for those of you just coming out of a coma, is the second part of the story of Neo (Keanu Reeves, luckily speaking only marginally more than in the first one) qua The One. All of the regulars from the first one reprise their roles for the sequel (and presumably will for the third part as well since they were filmed more or less concurrently). I didn't find it terribly difficult to follow, but that could stem from just having seen the previous one two weekends ago. It's hard to express my opinion of the movie because most of what I said in my earlier review still applies. |
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Dang! (May 20 2003 23:58 GMT) - Just when I get excited about Java again, James Duncan Davidson rekindles my interest in Objective-C.I think I'm just going to stick with Java and move to Objective-C once I've got my bearings right. Can't hurt, right? |
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In Training (May 20 2003 23:58 GMT) - I'm at Corillian for some training (as I've mentioned before) and this place seems like a typical dot-com environment, except that it's survived the dot-com crash barely. There's interesting furniture aplenty, free beverage station, pool tables, foosball tables, ping-pong tables, and fancy everything.I am most intrigued by some of the seating options. There's a long, cylindrical vinyl stool that looks like it wouldn't be comfortable but really is. My favorite are these stools that look like old-style tall ashtrays or largish dumbbells standing vertically. |
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- I think that tomorrow or Tuesday I will go see The Matrix Reloaded. I've seen enough crap on TV and read enough reviews on the Web to want to see what all the fuss is about. I didn't like the first one, but I'm all about benefit of the doubt. Naturally, seeing this one will force me to see the next one—stupid Wachowski brothers. |
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- There's a good article on Java performance myths at developerWorks. Slashdot provides some interesting context.My favorite is myth #3 that immutable objects are performance killers. I was just having a discussion with a developer from our online banking system vendor and he mentioned that some of the code in our existing implementation uses straight-out string objects instead of string buffers. I realize that VB and VBScript is a little different from Java, especially since very little of the language seems to be optimized and string concatenation does seem expensive. |
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- I'm currently writing this while flying high (35,000 feet) over Nevada en route to Portland, Oregon for some training. I'm also listening to Superchic[k] on my iPod.I'm busily annotating my recommended daily links, something I had never really planned on doing because it seemed like such a waste of time for little return. However, there's something different about flying: it feels like doing that is more productive than just sitting here listening to my AACs. |
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- The guys from DirecTV—actually Ironwood Communications (no link), a subcontractor—are here and they're getting me hooked up. The TiVO unit looks breathtaking: resplendent in shiny, silvery goodness with more hookups on its back than the humans in The Matrix. |
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- If there is a hell—and I don't think there is—then I think an especially putrid level should be reserved for those moronic cow-orkers who use corporate mail systems to generate unsolicited commercial email aka spam. What sort of mentality thinks that everyone cares to read their drivel? At home, I can get rid of the spam but at work it's not often obvious when something is spam since people craft sucky subjects. |
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- I just made a good comment about a post in the Signal vs. Noise blog. I'd repost it here, but you should really see in its original context. |
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- I've spent the last day and a half in a series of requirements-gathering meetings with our online banking vendor. Normally this would be the part where I express my loathing of meetings. But I can't help it, I'm really excited about this project to redesign our online banking system after four years of near-stagnation.First, the project itself excites me because the original was designed before our department existed or I had any responsibility for its maintenance. That means that it's mostly been a royal pain in the ass for me and my co-worker. |
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- I just got done watching Crazy/Beautiful and I am really impressed. I think Kirsten Dunst is an underrated actress who hopefully has a very long career ahead of her. She is convincing as both a spoiled daughter of a Congressman living self-destructively and as a troubled teenager coming to grips with her feelings.On the one hand, it's a typical teen flick about the seeming life-altering impact of being in love at that age. Nicole (Dunst) falls in love with Carlos (Jay Hernandez), a kid bused in from a poorer neighborhood with ambitions of making something of himself. |
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The Matrix (May 20 2003 23:58 GMT) - I know that today is the release of The Matrix Reloaded and that many people really, really like it, but I watched The Matrix this weekend and I didn't care for it. Okay, ignore for a moment that I went four years without seeing the geek's movie and that I am expressing a controversial opinion.My dislike of the movie stems mainly from its flaccid rehashing of an age-old philosophical paradox: how do we know that we're not just dreaming and that reality isn't really like this dream. It's a tired question posed in every PHI101 class in the world, but the principle that it ignores— |
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For linux (May 20 2003 23:57 GMT) - I need to read up on sudo and apache's suexec 'er whatever it is? This is of course for more things that I want to do, that I haven't updated my Things to Do with.sudo will be needed for the sa-learn scripts that ardent so wonderfully sent to me. suexec will be needed for the running of mailmans cgi scripts so that they can update mailmans aliases and virtual databases. |
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- Okay, so uninstalling office 2k disc 2 stinks. There's apparently a TON of clipart that the installer does some weird stuff with. I'm putting up a zip file containing screen shots, from which you can draw your own conclusions.Regarding the above screenshots, trust me -- had the customer not been in the room, you would have seen some mad solitaire and/or minesweeper action also...So, what's the maximum number of files that FAT32 supports in a directory... |
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- David Horowitz has published a blistering attack on the top leadership of the Christian conservative organizations for their strong criticisms... |
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- Liberalism proposes to make social life rational and equal. To that end, everything habitual, irregular, particular and opaque to liberal... |
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- Phyllis Schlafly enumerates seven bad Clinton policies that George W. Bush has perpetuated. It ain't a pretty picture.... |
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- I'm going to be away at the ISC Symposium in St Gallen in Switzerland over the next few days. The Symposium is an unusual alternative Davos, organised and run entirely by the students at the business school at St Gallen University. Every year for over 30 years, the Symposium draws in some of the biggest names in business and politics -- mostly managing directors, chief executives, ministers or prime ministers address the crowd over three days, and some 700 people attend. Companies can only send a single rep and s/he must be at senior level in the company. Then about 200 of the audience are international university-level students, who win the places through an essay competition. |
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- CRAZY Every street has Crazy People. Statistically “X” number of C.P. |
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- In what is a later debut than normal, McLaren are set to start testing with their new car the MP4-18... |
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- I have done a lot of writing recently about knowledge management and the openness of information microsocieties, using blogs as a case in point. I would welcome comments by the power networkers here at the ecademy, for possible citation in a story I am writing on social networks (with your permission, of course). The latest post is here. |
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- As I was discussing with a friend this morning, today is a marketing day. That's a polite way of saying I need more billables. One can only churn out so... |
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- Uno degli ultimi banner di Clarence è così bello e soprattutto assolutamente non offensivo nei riguardi di quelli che dovrebbero essere il buon gusto e l'intelligenza comune che me lo metto qui. Spero che riceva un sacco di click e convinca altri con simili prodotti, in modo da veder diminuire le altre sciocchezze. Anzi, magari andate pure dentro al sito nell'appostito sondaggio dicendo che la campagna pubblicitaria è |
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