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April 25, 2006
my new favorite place on the web
Not quite sure how I originally stumbled over this web site, but I just spent some time exploring Paul Graham and am rapidly becoming a big fan. I do find some of his articles to be rather lengthy, but always on an interesting topic, and definately with a lot of great thoughts and ideas. E.g. How To Do What You Love. And, it turns out that he is the author of one of the books I used in CS...what a coincidence : )
Enjoy!
Posted by lara at 02:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
ARGH
Once again, a charming example of the whole "one step forward, two steps back" phenomenon. Those of us who care about such things have been happily registering that more and more hip and cool college students have been switching over to browsers other than IE, and have shared all sorts of lovely thoughts about the progression of technology. Then this happens: Microsoft Sends Windows Live to College. This might sound all peachy-keen, until you read about some of the limitations of Microsoft Live:
- It only works in IE 6 and higher
- It doesn't support mail forwarding
- It doesn't support IMAP or POP
- Microsoft reserves the right to turn on ads after you graduate
The reason for Microsoft pushing this out to all 72 colleges? The article softly hints at it... it is of course, all about promotion.
The Redmond company believes that catching the students early on will turn them into life-long users of Windows Live.
Yeah, good old microsoft...
Posted by lara at 01:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 20, 2006
yay natural framing!
finally got Flickr configured to post pictures to this blog (had some password trouble, found the solution here, the lovely Flickr forums
Thought I'd celebrate by posting this neat picture!
: )
Posted by lara at 03:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 18, 2006
Things we laughed at back then...
ok, so i remember watching that charming movie Spaceballs, a spoof on the Star Wars movies (and other SF movies)... it was cute, it had a few funny lines, a couple of well done parodies on the characters and events of the originals and a lot of crazy ideas... one of these ideas was canned oxygen. a brief background: there was some kind of oxygen depletion on planet Spaceball and part of the main plot revolved around kidnapping another planet's supply of oxygen. Anyways, the sinister President Skroob at one point is in his office and pauses to enjoy a refreshing can of scented air. "how silly!" you say... "those poor bastards, they polluted the air on their planet so much that they now sell canned oxygen"
But now, this is in the news: Canned oxygen flavored air. Wow. I had previously read about oxygen bars, but only now made the connection to that funny piece of comedy I saw in a bad SF spoof years and years ago. we know that the future societies predicted in A Brave New World and 1984 turned out to be just fiction, but perhaps the future societies joked about in fiction of the recent past will hold more water? a scary thought...
Posted by lara at 11:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Easter
So we had a really nice Easter dinner with 5 guests this year (although we remarked after the fact that having 5 more wouldn't have required any more work!) and I thought i'd share some pictures. Mainly of food, because that's my obsession : )
Our table
Our first course was a sampling of 3 homemade raviolini (small ravioli) with a roasted red pepper sauce.
Coconut cream cake with lemon curd filling
Also, in the spirit of Easter, a few pictures from our garden, which is slowly emerging from the snow!
Crocuses
One of the fattest bumblebees i've ever seen!
Posted by lara at 10:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 17, 2006
picture testing
Posted by lara at 04:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 13, 2006
Travel resource
yay for Ryan Air having suuuuper cheap flights to italy! we're going to Bergamo (right outside Milan) in May, and so i've been looking for some information about the city. i stumbled over Wikitravel and found it to be quite interesting and useful. Unfortunately there just doesn't seem to be much information about the city out there, but perhaps I can add to the site once i get back!
Posted by lara at 04:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 07, 2006
Heralding spring
So there are lots of signs of spring that people look forward to seeing as winter slowly draws to a grey and sodden end. Birds singing gaily, pussywillows and green buds on the trees, crocus and other spring flowers gradually pressing their way upwards from the soil. But I've decided that the absolute sign of spring for me is when the streets are swept. In Norway we don't use salt on the roads to melt the snow and ice and kill all living things... we use gravel and sand. So come springtime, when all the levels of snow and ice finally melt, there's a pretty thick layer of gravel and sand on the roads. When the weather has finally turned warmer, the streets are swept and all the gravel is picked up and put away to be used again next year. It's like spring cleaning for the streets and leaves them nice and soft and clean-looking, and tells me that spring is here to stay : )
Posted by lara at 01:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 05, 2006
What happened to all the pretty colors?
If you're wondering why this blog is stripped of all design today, read more about CSS Naked Day. The point of this effort is to first of all show the power of CSS but also remind people the practice good standards when writing the content of their pages.
Posted by lara at 03:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
