As a self-described American Idol addict, I was looking forward to the women's performance tonight. What a let down. Must have been sophomore jinx, cause not one nailed a performance. But the show must go on and two must be voted off. This is tough ... I'll say Heather and Brenna are going home.
Let's hope the men learn something from tonight and bring it tomorrow.
PS - My picks for the top two are Katharine and Taylor Hicks, who just oozes music.
Katherine started up spring soccer today. The team was a little rusty, but pulled out a 1-0 victory.
Decided 2 kids and 2 dogs aren't enough. Next up: The Fish. Going to start with 4 goldfish or mollys, one for each of us.
With Southern California going from 85 - 55 in a week, with rain, there was sure to be snow. Headed out to Fraser Park, just 45 minutes away, and found some dry powder. Fun fun fun!
Listening to NPR on the way home from work, I heard what I thought was a new term: The Great Firewall of China. Performing a search on one of those great firewalls, I found that the term isn't so new. To do business with China, the search engine companies do have to filter their results removing entries for the likes of Tibetan independence, Falun Gong, and Dalai Lama. Of course, search engine companies aren't the only ones that have to censor content. Microsoft blocks certain blogs and Cisco provides China's law enforcement much technology to block China from the WWW.
Some of those companies testified before Congress this week and draft legislation was introduced to Promote Global Internet Freedom and provide Minimum Corporate Standards for Online Freedom. Whether this Bill passes and how much it is watered down remains an open question, but the guests on NPR think something will come out of these hearings.
Censoring the internet is a game of cat and mouse. For every site blocked, 10 more spring to life. For every word blocked, a misspelling routes you around to blockage. As the internet expands to every corner of the globe with global communication at your fingertips, it's hard to see how countries are going to keep their users within national electronic borders.
For more information, RConversation leads the charge.
One inopportune quote about "Big Brother" from our Product Manager months ago and the product is branded forever :-(
After beta testing its "Big Brother" database appliance with a handful of customers, Symantec is moving ahead with plans to bring the device to market. The Californian company is also toying with the idea of selling the appliance's monitoring technology as a software product, according to a Symantec executive.
Big Brother is the first product to emerge from Symantec's Advanced Concepts group, formed in early 2005 with the goal of bringing Symantec research projects to market.
We call it SDAS - Symantec Database and Audit Security Solution.
While the Eastern seaboard has been hit with its first snow storm of the season, I'm contemplating running air conditioning at 10:30am. It's mid February and should hit 850F in Los Angeles. So though it rained on the Rose Parade for the first time in 50 years this year, I think the migration west may yet continue.
While I may be a crap investor on the stock market (don't get me started), we sure were lucky with the timing on the house.
Check out the prices in your neighborhood with a great new tool from Zillow. Think Google Maps with prices overlaid on the homes.
Symantec is having a programming competition for college students later this month. We had an dry run of this in January to make sure everything worked (two of my squash partners won first place). The prizes are quite substantial -- $10,000, $5,000, $3,000 for the top three entries. The contest runs for only 1 week, so the prize money is quite significant for a little investment of your time.
Good luck!
Now this should make an interesting James Bond thriller:
New Zealand filmmaker Lee Tamahori, who directed the James Bond movie "Die Another Day," has been arrested in a Hollywood prostitution sting while dressed in drag.Read it all
