A flashmob in San Francisco will attempt to build a "supercomputer" out of laptops on April 3rd. "We are attempting to popularise supercomputing," says John Witchel, the USF graduate student running the project. "Ordinary individuals, people with good ideas will now be empowered to put a flash mob together to solve a specific problem."

In the past I have been a champion of checking out e-rumors & online hoaxes BEFORE sending them out to people. A couple good places to check are truthorfiction.com or urbanlegends.com. On wied.com, this story goes into detail about some of the more common hoaxes getting revived.

All you trekkies out there take note: Teh Science Fiction Hall of Fame opens in Seattle in June. Many famous figures, such as Harlan Ellison, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, are lending their names to the project. Some will donate valuable editions of their books and manuscripts to the museum.

SF Giants trail the division leading San Diego Padres by one game on teh last day of the season. Giants lead the Dodgers in the 8th by one run. Teh scoreboard shows the Padres & Diamondbacks are tied in the 7th...but those things are always an inning behind. Waht do you do? At SBC park in San Francisco you can just open up your laptop and check out mlb.com for live feeds from San Diego! It's true, SBC park has gone wireless.
Baseball fans bored by the slow pace of a game or wanting more statistics and information will be able to connect computer devices via wireless computer networking, or WiFi, at San Francisco Giants home games this year, the team announced Tuesday. The Giants' stadium is, after all, called SBC Park, for telecommunications giant SBC Communications Inc.
"We've created, if not the largest, one of the largest hot spots in the world," said Larry Baer, the team's chief operating officer. "We're the first professional sports facility to provide people universal WiFi connectivity."

Aah...my favorite time of year. Early spring: when the lawn is plush green and you don;t even have to water it. all the trees and flowers are blooming & every once in a while in the pacific northwest we get a sunny day. But most importantly...baseball! Everyone gets excited when spring training opens, but to me it jsut signifies we still have time to wait. The season gets under way in less than a week and now I am excited. My beloved Dodgers are still going to be a terrible team on offense, but it still should be fun to watch.

Being a "child of the 80's" I sent my sister this story about Prince signing to do an album (so they still call them albums?) with Sony/Columbia (My sister works for Sony). She sent me back a response that I jsut had to post (keeping in mind most my family still beleives my sister is stuck in the 80's...daisy dukes and all):
this is cool. Prince will definitely rake in the bucks for himself and for Sony. I heard yesterday that this upcoming tour will be his last as far as his "old style" music goes. All I can think about every time I hear the name prince is being back in the 80's playing pool at the bolero house listening to "i'm gonna party like it's 1999" and think how far away that would be....now I think back to how long ago that was.
True...true

Google Search Goes Local:
Local.google.com is the address of the beta site set up to help searchers get more local results. as an employee of Verizon Directories I still beleive there is nothing better than the online yellow pages when actually looking for a local business. Keep in mind there will still be people who are just doing research on the site as opposed to actually looking to do business with the company they click on. That means Google advertisers will still be paying for clicks that don't generate business. With online yellow pages, people searching are buyers. Especially with our new Pay Per Click campaign where advertisers only pay for their placement if someone clicks on them. Not to mention the Verizon Superpages is force behind MSN, Lycos, Infospace, NetZero and many others' online Yellow Pages.

It's official, we can no longer poke fun at ourselves. At a banquet for the media yesterday President Bush made fun of himself & his party by showing some pictures of himself and adding funny captions to them. One of them was him looking under a couch saying, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere ... nope, no weapons over there ... maybe under here?" or something to that affect. Of course, now the Democrats are mad that we are poking fun at a serious situation. GIVE ME A BREAK. If we can't poke fun at ourselves, who are we supposed to laugh at/with?

Hey all...I'm still looking for one owner for my Seattle, WA area rotis baseball in-person auction league. The draft is March 27 @ 9 am. The website for the rosters is: http://mysite.verizon.net/res1oh86/buycuttraderotisseriebaseballleague/
Let me know if you are interested.

I remember back in the late 80's a 128K disk drive was considered phenomenal. Toshiba today announced a 4GB disk drive that is approximately the size of a quarter.

Heh...Geek-dom makes it to Tractors. some of my wife's relatives in North Dakota ought to look into this.

Hello Nick...this is your Sub-conscience speaking. Pay attention to this article about how we always seem to live paycheck to paycheck no matter how much we earn.

Letterman doesn't make TOP TEN list...at least according to Comedy Central who named Chris Rock as America's Funniest Person.

I owned my own season tickets for the first time this year. No it wasn't the Mariners or Seahawks. It wasn't even the Sonics. It was a startup expansion Western Hockey League team called the Everett Silvertips. Of the 36 home games I've mede it to 31. The 32nd, and last one of the regular season, is tonight. I've been to hundreds of Major League baseball games, about 1/2 as many football games and probably two or three dozen basketball games...none of them hold a candle to the experience of going to a "minor league" event like this.
A lot of these feelings come from the fact the Silvertips are having a special season. In this their first year they have broken the record for most wins by an expansion team and are on the verge of becoming the fist expansion team to win a division title. Even if they don't achieve that goal, the season has been a resounding success. After starting off 0-3 I certainly didn't see any reason why this would be anything other than the typical expansion season...maybe a 20 win campaign.
Behind the coaching of ex-NHL/San Jose Shark head coach Kevin Constantine & the superior play of goaltenders Jeff Harvey & Mike Wall the defensive minded team has made huge strides throughout the season. As the team hung around near the top of the standings you could see the players (considered castoffs from other teams around the league) started believing they could compete with anybody. So did the other teams. Early in the season we always got the #2 goalie from the competition....now we get their best.
The thing that makes the whole experience worthwhile is the excitement of the games & the ease of access. I live 45 minutes away from downtown Seattle...an hour with traffic. To go to a 7:05 pm Mariners game I have to leave the house at 5:30, pay $10 to park a mile away, grab a dog & a beer for $12 then go to my $15 seats in the outfield bleachers. After the game (10 pm) I herd out of the stadium, walk the mile back to my car (hopefully it's not raining) then trudge my way to the freeway and finally back home by 11:30. By the time I wind down & get to bed it's after midnight. For the Silvertips, which is every bit as exciting, if not more so, than baseball...I leave the house/work at 5:45, park two blocks away for free, sit down for a nice relaxing dinner by 6 pm across from the Events Center at Stadium Thai (a GREAT place to eat), get to my seat by 7 pm and watch a great game. Afterwards I am in my car within 10 minutes and home in another 10. I think the latest I've arrived at my house after a game was 10 pm. What a pleasant experience for me, the consumer.
Needless to say I've already re-upped my tickets for next season. The team will go through some growing pains...especially after such a successfully season this year...but hey, it will be entertaining without the burden which goes along with attending those "big league" events.

House bans fast-food lawsuits...Woo-Hoo! Some Sanity in an otherwise insane world!
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill Wednesday to ban lawsuits by obese customers who say they became overweight by eating at fast-food restaurants.
"We've got to get back to those old-fashioned principles of personal responsibility, of common sense, and get away from this new culture where everybody plays the victim and blames other people for their problems."

Couldn't have said it better myself...so I won't try!

Gates told to stop sending free software to the ARMY:

Microsoft has been mailing free copies of its pricey Office productivity software to government employees, but CNET News.com has learned that at least two federal agencies are warning recipients to return the gifts or risk violating federal ethics policies.

A great piece on what it means to be a Republican: Thank you to the Snohomish County GOP web site.

I am not going to defend Todd Bertuzzi's hit on Steve Moore a couple days ago. What I will say is I don't think it was as bad as people are making it out to be. The RESULT is bad...Moore is out with a fractured neck (which has been determined not to cause any long term paralysis). The hit itself was a cheap shot. An attack from behind on a smaller player. It was cowardly. That being said, I've seen worse hits. Somehow, someway it just landed in the right spot to hurt the guy bad. If he gives him a blow to the back of the head and they fall to the ice, start to fight and all hell breaks loose on the ice between the teams, none of this gets scrutinized nearly as close. It was also payback. Moore's hit a couple weeks earlier on Vancouver's captain was also a cheap shot. The only difference is the league deemed it "legal." Warren Sapp's cheapshot this past football season was deemed legal too, but anyone who saw it knew it was a cowardly cheap shot. The best story I've read on this situation comes from Bill Clement of ESPN.com.

Todd Bertuzzi deserves to be suspended for 20 games for his attack on Steve Moore. It was a cowardly, premeditated act against a smaller player that did plenty of damage. Even worse is that Bertuzzi went after Moore from behind. A suspension lasting 20 games would potentially cost Bertuzzi seven playoff games and send a message to the rest of the league that this type of behavior is not allowable.
But it should be pointed out that, were it not for the NHL's instigator rule, this situation would likely have resolved itself back on Feb. 16 after Moore knocked Canucks captain Markus Naslund out for three games with a concussion. Any player deemed the instigator in a fight earns an extra two-minute minor penalty and an additional 10-minute misconduct. But without the threat of additional penalties the Canucks would have been able to police the situation immediately, send a message and be done with it.

As it is, though, the instigator rule is allowing certain players to skate around using their sticks as weapons without fear of retribution from the other side. I have yet to meet a player or coach who likes the rule. Abolishing it would be a good thing for the game because teams would then have the ability to regulate themselves before the league has to step in.

Dumb Criminal of the day: $1 million bill leads to arrest
COVINGTON, Georgia (AP) -- A Georgia woman who tried to use a fake $1 million bill to buy $1,675 worth of merchandise at Wal-Mart was arrested, and police later found two more of the bills in her purse.

Consumer Reports list of Best Cars for 2004: U.S. Cars bested it's European rivals in reliability for the first time.
SMALL SEDAN: Ford Focus
FAMILY SEDAN: (tie): VW Passat & Honda Accord
UPSCALE SEDAN: Acura TL
LUXURY SEDAN: Lexus LS430
FUN TO DRIVE: Ford SVT Focus
SMALL SUV: Subaru Forester
MIDSIZED SUV: Lexus RX330
THREE-ROW SUV: Honda Pilot
MINIVAN: Toyota Sienna
GREEN CAR: Toyota Prius

I've been trying to tell my Dish Network friends for years that DirecTV was the way to go. This just proves it: EchoStar service pulls local stations, MTV, Nickelodeon in bitter dispute about rates. Besides the MTV music network, channels not available included children's network Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Black Entertainment Television. Also pulled were 16 local CBS stations owned and operated by Viacom, including stations in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. According to Viacom officials, "They recently hiked their subscribers' bills by as much as $3 a month. Yet they are unwilling to consider paying an additional 6 cents a month per subscriber for the right to carry our channels."

For those of you, like me, who don't have RSS feeds and barely know what they are (a news aggregator so you don't have to bookmark and visit every single website just to see if there is something interesting that day...this is a great story about RSS and how to get started using it (for free).

Some things just don;t add up. In the story I wrote about below...the legislature is complaining about Tim Eyman taking money out of their pockets due to his tax legislation revisions....while in this story, they are debating over whether to approve a "flood plain" location that will bring hundreds of thousands...if not millions...of dollars in tax money into the coffer! Look, I am all for conservation, but this is flood plain land that isn;t even very good for farming. If your worried about flooding that write the provisions into the contract to make the dealership pay for the improvements. Take it or leave it. Can we get a little amen?

Gawd I love Tim Eyman! In his latest two proposals he is estimating a savings of over 1 Billion dollars in Tax money. Simply awesome. One of the quotes in this story is from state budget Director Marty Brown, "I would just hope Tim Eyman tells us where he's going to cut spending." Um....memo to Marty...that's YOUR job. You had no problem figuring out where to SPEND the money when property taxes have increased from 1 billion dollars to 6.5 billion dollars in 25 years. Now, hopefully, you'll ahve to figure out how to cut some of that fat!

Wouldn't you want to see your boss have to scrub a toilet? New reality TV show has some of the highest of executives doing low-pay jobs.

All Mickey D's, all the time
Filmmaker eats nothing but McDonald's for a month. Finding: fast food makes you fat.
This reminds me of one of those government studies where we spend billions of taxpayer dollars to discover why dandruff makes your head itch.

Red Robin serving fingertip salads. Gives a whole new meaning to tossing your salad!

According to this story on CNN.Com...Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is proposing we start buying "stamps" for e-mail as a way to cut down on SPAM. I'm guessing he's not so much worried about how much SPAM we are getting but more about how much revenue he could be getting!