Quips

Here are pictures of vehicles that are overstuffed.

The fastest splitting continent in the world is Africa.

Wonderful Color Photos from the 1910's

A website named "Heritage to the Great War" includes a goodly number of color photos from the conflict. A small number of them are quite disturbing so beware. For the most part, though, they are fascinating to pour over -- especially if you've never seen color pictures from the pre-1920 era. I once saw a set of color photos from the turn of the century that featured idyllic park scenes and that was quite impressive. Until now my experience with the Great War was always black & white.

Protected View

Some Poilu

Picking Flowers

Book Notes

It is one of things that I avoid in life like the plague. No, it won't kill me. It won't kill you for that matter. In fact, it won't even hurt either of us. That thing is the practice of making visible notes on the pages of books I read. I have always had a great aversion to this practice and have a nearly perfect record in avoiding such transgressions with my books. The idea of a fresh, clean book that I have carefully read though is one of the enjoyments I experience from reading. Bert Webb tries to break through to those of us who have this aversion with this article on how to mark up your books correctly. The Horror! And from inside the comments section of the Webb article comes another article that compares the opposing mentalities of the Preservationists and Footprint Leavers.

Here's something that will scare the bee-jezus out of anyone who's ever thought about what it would be like to be caught at ground zero of a nuke blast. These pics and the shutter speed pretty much confirm that you wouldn't feel a thing.

I don't know about anyone else but I've become a fan of instant messaging. Yeah, it's been around for something like ten years but I haven't started until recently. I've been using it at work and really liking it. Actually, pretty much loving it. The only problem is that my co-workers are not fans of the application and after one particularly intense three-way IM'ing session I was told by both of them they don't perfer IM. Now I may try and get a far-away friend on the IM'ing path. We'll see how that flies.

One of the enjoyments I get out of IM'ing is that it requires me to type. I love typing. Never classically trained by the likes of Ms. Macon (or is it Ms. Beacon?), I learned through continual practice on home and work computers alike since the early 1980's. IM'ing serves to take my typing to another level because along with having to type quickly you only have one shot at getting your typing right lest you be swallowed up by your IM'ing compadre's quick fingers.

Take a look at the rates that these programmers from outside the United States (mainly Russia and Ukraine) charge for c+ developement and a whole host of other programming languages. And each programmer has their own bio. Here's Maxim K. from Smolensk, Russia who's currently charging $10.25 per hour doing C#/.NET development work for an American firm. Note that he has three stars out of five for his English skills rating. Looks like the $50/hour I was hoping to get doing freelance Access work is not going to happen.

I program Lotus Notes databases as part of my job at a healthcare company. All I've ever heard from programming know-it-alls (and non-programming ones) is how much they hate Lotus and how they'll be going out of business one of these years. Well, from all of my reading on the Web and hearing of people's first-hand experiences from this year's LotusSphere there's a new attitude in Lotus World and it's in the positive/aggressive vein. Ed Brill shares his thoughts on the big Lotus turnaround of the past year or so. Double-digit growth goes a long way to getting the attention of your ownership.