Do not watch The Criterion Collection: Night and Fog right before going to bed.

I do recommend that everyone get a DVD and watch it at least every 10 years. Just to remind us…

Every Rock Band needs at least one set of Bagpipes.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I removed Weather Bug, since it appeared to be malware, and replaced it with Weather Pulse. What was really neat about WP was that it allowed me to select the weather map of my choice and save it as a desktop background. I selected the Pueblo Doppler Radar picture and it would be updated during the day so I could see the storms moving through the area.

Unfortunately, I started some PC frezing symptoms that I associated with Weather Pulse. The problem seemed to start when it notified me at boot-up that an upgrade was available and I asked it to upgrade the app. then the PC would freeze up and I would be forced to power off the PC to proceed. Not Helpful. So, I reluctantly went to Uninstall WP and it announced a successful uninstall. But it still tried to start up, various errors messages shoed up saying modules weren’t available and the weather map stayed in the background. But no temperatures would show up in the tool bar, just n/a. Turns out the the directory was still in Program files with the .exe file. So I deleted the directory and will see what happens now.

While browsing the program files, I noticed that the Yahoo Messenger and AOL onDesktop directories were still there. I had deleted the software a month or two ago. So I deleted those directories, too. amazing how much the uninstall process doesn’t uninstall.

But my current Weather tracking tool is a Firefox extension – Forecastfox. I have it set to report on the Monument weather from weather station USCO0276. It appears at the bottom of my Firefox screen, it’s sunny and 27 degrees (F) at the moment.

U.S. Tells D.C. to Pay Inaugural Expenses (washingtonpost.com)

As the WP reports, DC is supposed to pay for the Bush Inaugural Security. Don’t do it. Only spend the money that Congress has allocated for it. (About a third of the total)

On top of it all, it’s a federal holiday in the District so the District loses $66M. (I assume that’s all the city vendors combined and not the tax revenue. )

Maybe not. $66M per business day, 260 business days a year. $16.5 B a year. What is DC’s annual tax revenue? Runs about $3.5 B a year I guess that is the expected general business loss for a federal day off.

COSine science fiction convention

I’m chairing a convention shortly. The tag line is:

COSine – A Science Fiction Convention
Coming to a Colorado Springs Near You!

And January in COS is usually quite pleasant.

InformationWeek > Business Technology > Business Technology: Put These Words Out Of Our Misery > January 3, 2005 Some of these words I have never heard of, so I doubt I will miss them (What is BlueSnarfing?)

On the other hand, I think google is a perfectly respectible verb. It gets across the the intent and action, quickly and simply. What more can you ask of a word?

Some Perspective 5 Years After Y2K An interesting article to remind us of the remote past, lo these five years ago. Check out the links in the article to remember what was being said back then.

I never did get that power generator I was coveting….

I just thought of a great generic term for the first decade of this millenium, the 2K’s. I would pronounce it “the too-kays”. I think it rolls off the tongue easier than “the Oughts” or “the Naughts”. When we get to the the 2010’s someone else can label that decade.