Because I’m busy programming!
A couple of items in the Dutch news bulletins that caught my eye: first, national grocery chain Albert Heyn is launching a new concept grocerystore (Dutch). To focus more on families and kids, the chain will start to ‘sell bulk and wholesale packages’, eat-while-you shop corners (meals ready within 15 minutes for 8 Euros, ‘a brand new concept!’, according an enthousiastic CEO), a ‘customer service corner’ and (amazingly) a washroom.
Widely (world renown, I hear) popular ‘Uitzending gemist’ from the Dutch public broadcaster, will finally include commercials. Darn.
The big buzz around appears to be the ‘editing of the history of podcasting’. Mr. Curry was caught while editing the ‘history’ of podcasting in his favour. The real issue is not that he was actually caught: it’s the fact that people can claim fame for something so normal as ‘podcasting’. ‘Timeshifted downloads’. Rats ass.
In the article podcasts are described as time-shifted. This seems rather incorrect. Unlike time-shifted material, podcasts cannot be listened to while the content is produced, which makes podcasts more akin to recordings then to time-shifted content.
Questionable practices, and a national hero taking a step down. Talking about cloning, where’s Clonaid? Where’s Eve? When can I finally start cloning a triplet brother? Not right away though, I’m still in the process of building a genuine StarTrek-like ‘transporter beam’ that works on TCP/IP. (Note I’ve considered UDP, but for technical reasons, it wasn’t quite feasible)
It’s the same story in Europe. Sold out.
I was testing Firebird for an SQL analyzer I’m currently working on. Installing Firebird on the Debian box was a breeze. I had more troubles getting the ODBC connection going on my Windows desktop. After being able to finally get the connection going1, I cannot even see my own tables. I’ll be hunting this problem down tomorrow or the day after: it might be some role/security problem.
Earlier, The Daily Show had Chris Elliott as a guest. He’s the guy who did ‘Get A Life’ (and you probably recognize him from ‘The Abyss’). I always thought that show was hilarious: I learned to appreciate his absurd humour after his excellent show on time travelling (truthfully detailing the paradoxes of time travel). Guess what, that particularly show’s script is online (script here).
1 If you want to use Firebird server from a remote client, you need to download the complete server package (available in many flavours) and select the ‘install the client only’ option during installation.