Bar Mitzvah budgeting…
By Brian | December 14, 2005
Avery is five years old now. That means his Bar Mitzvah will be in roughly eight years. So if Bar Mitzvah’s cost $10 million today, how much do you think I should set aside for the event in 2013?
Also, note to self: make sure someone in the band brings a naked woman to the affair, er…., party:
For his estimated $500,000, I hear that 50 Cent performed only four or five songs – and badly – though he did manage to work in the lyric, “Go shorty, it’s your bat miztvah, we gonna party like it’s your bat mitzvah.”
“Fitty and his posse smelled like an open bottle of Hennessy,” a witness told me, adding that when the departing rapper prepared to enter his limo in the loading dock, a naked woman was spotted inside.
OK, everyone say it with me: Oy…
Categories: The World Wide Weird | 1 Comment »
The Year in Review…
By Brian | December 13, 2005
James Lileks sums up 2005 for The American Enterprise Online. This will likely tick some people off, but I thought it was hysterical. (Hat tip: Instapundit)
Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 2 Comments »
It’s the thought that counts…
By Brian | December 5, 2005
I had a little stomach flu last week, and here’s the e-mail I get from my 5-year old son:
Categories: Family Matters | 2 Comments »
And they said 8-track tapes were dead…
By Brian | December 3, 2005
OK, anyone remember this guy?
Simulators are so cool…
(hat tip: Mike Starr)Categories: Tech Talk, The World Wide Weird | 2 Comments »
Homecoming pics ain’t what they used to be…
By Brian | December 2, 2005
Every year, at the University of Pennsylvania’s homecoming, my kids bring along their toy trumpets and have fun playing along with dad. It’s become a bit of a tradition for someone from the alumni magazine to shoot approximately a roll of film of the kids doing this, and then include one of them in both the online photo album and The Gazzette, the alumni magazine.
Well, this year’s version has broken with that fine tradition. Not only are there no pictures of my kids, there aren’t even any pictures from the football game. Just a bunch of shots of old folks in formal dress (some gala reception or some such thing, I guess). There’s one picture of cheerleaders, but even that’s taken indoors (as opposed to on the track during the football game where, you know, they lead cheers).
Anyway, in my ever-so-humble opinion: bummer.
Categories: Family Matters, University of Pennsylvania | Comments Off on Homecoming pics ain’t what they used to be…
Just don’t call them dummies…
By Brian | November 29, 2005
A lingerie shop in Augusta, Maine is using live models in their store window to attract (mostly male) customers. Here’s the quote that caught my eye, though:
“It’s like a New York thing. It’s urban. It’s edgy,” said Stacy Gervais, owner of Stacy’s Hallmark Store and a founder of a downtown merchants group. “We need a shtick
Categories: The World Wide Weird | 2 Comments »
Kids today…
By Brian | November 21, 2005
My wife is flying back home from a business conference in Orlando today. My mother-in-law is babysitting the kids until my wife or I return home. There’s some nasty weather in the northeast, and her flight was delayed about an hour taking off.
My mother-in-law called the airline a couple of times to get a status and ETA on the flight. My 5-year old son showed my mother-in-law how to get on the internet, find the airline’s website and bring up a (near) real-time map showing the plane’s current position along it’s route and ETA.
I’m told he’s also drawn a map on paper, and is tracking the flight as it makes its way home, just so Mommy knows what happened while she was in the air.
Remember that movie where the teenage kid builds a space shuttle in his spare time & launches it through the roof of his house? Talk to me in 2015…
Categories: Family Matters | Comments Off on Kids today…
Dick Cheney and the Dangling Participle
By Brian | November 21, 2005
“Although our coalition has not found WMD stockpiles in Iraq, I repeat that we never had the burden of proof. Saddam Hussein did. We operated on the best available intelligence gathered over a period of years and within a totalitarian society ruled by fear and secret police.”
A quick note to Jeff Porten, among others: the totalitarian society he refers to here is Iraq, not the United States (at least I hope that’s what he meant…)
:-)
Categories: Political Rantings | Comments Off on Dick Cheney and the Dangling Participle
Important People Born on This Day
By Brian | November 18, 2005
Sojourner Truth (1797)
W. S. Gilbert (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) (1836)
Dr. George H. Gallup (1901)
Imogene Coca (1908)
Alan Shepard, Jr. (1923)
Mickey Mouse (in the first Steamboat Willie cartoon) (1928)and oh yeah… ME!
Categories: Family Matters | Comments Off on Important People Born on This Day
GDBMS – Google Base arrives
By Brian | November 16, 2005
Google just put their Google Base product into beta. All of the articles I’ve read about this are repeating the same meme – this will be competition for auction sites and classified ad sites (like eBay or Craig’s List). That’s true, of course, but I think this has the potential of being much, much bigger.
A database is the backbone of just about every significant software application, regardless of its business model. If you’re a large company, you’ve got your application living on one or more web servers, talking to a database living on one or more database servers, and all the architectural components that come with that (routers, load balancers, etc.). The hardware, software and support required creates a barrier to entry for smaller, start-up companies. These folks are generally relegated to hosting their applications through some ISP-provided add-on service (like Blogger, GeoCities, CafePress, etc.), and manage their data through FTP tools, with an occasional canned server-side script or two.
If Google gets serious about this service (and by serious, I mean they guarantee some level of uptime, response time for high volumes, backup & restore functionality), they could become the default web server for thousands of small businesses that are limping along with a half-baked solution today. This is fascinating because such a solution would be a big boon to their customers (who may even pay a fee for it), but wouldn’t do much to augment their search services. What good would it be, for instance, if a Google search for “Nike sneakers” returned an online shoe vendor’s current inventory or a distributor’s customer record for Nike’s shipping department?
There’s also the omnipresent issue of security. The very idea of putting your database server outside the firewall is heresey today if the data is at all sensitive/private. If Google builds a security architecture that people can trust, they may gain some larger customers as well. At that point, though, the data needs to be actively excluded from the search results.
There are lots of options here. I think we’ll see it develop into a lot more than a classified ad engine.
Categories: Tech Talk | Comments Off on GDBMS – Google Base arrives
