Bugzilla isn't bug-free (there's an entire Bugzilla development team tracking and patching Bugzilla bugs, using Bugzilla to monitor their progress!), and you need to be pretty tech-savvy to get it to run, but it's well worth the effort.

Every time I use Bugzilla, I think to myself, "Here is a tool that can and should be used by most every organization, a central repository of tasks and efforts that can be searched and accessed and referred back to."

Anyway, the new Bugzilla's for OS X is out, and I've got my copy. Link Discuss

I was a millionaire at 27
for thirty seconds.

I dug grunge.
then eighties.
Tony Bennet.
then Chumbawumba.
how bizzare.
how bizzare.
smoked Cohibas.
(Not that there's anything
wrong with that.)
but I didn't inhale.

The revelation came after doctors realised that a woman with no sense of touch still felt a "pleasant" sensation when her skin was caressed.

Normal touch is transmitted to the brain through a network of fast-conducting nerves, called myelinated fibres, which carry signals at 60 metres per second. But there is a second slow-conducting nerve network of unmyelinated fibres, called C-tactile (CT), the role of which was unknown. The CT network carries signals at just one metre per second.

First, Dave Barry:

Yes, I am talking to YOU, Mr. or Ms. Small Investor. Wall Street is getting sick and tired of your namby-pamby ''wait and see'' attitude toward the stock market. Wall Street wants you to show some courage and resume handing your money over to Wall Street, the way you did back in the excellent 1990s, when we had a New Economy, and leading Wall Street analysts were touting all these amazing new companies that were in the exciting new business of . . . OK, nobody really knew what exact business they were in, but it was NEW!

And now Carl Hiaasen:

Rigas, 78, is the founder of the now-bankrupt Adelphia cable-television empire. He and two of his sons were hauled away by postal inspectors and charged with looting millions from Adelphia as it went down the tubes.

Those who have dealt with their local cable company couldn't be shocked to hear that there might be stealing and deceit at high levels. The surprise was that the feds actually had busted somebody for it.

Apparently, the mere sight of a CEO in handcuffs was enough to help send the stock markets soaring.

Today everybody from George Bush to Mike Powell to the wise executives of Silicon Valley are talking about broadband, broadband, broadband. But broadband without real internetworking, without the pure, stupid, end-to-end Internet, will be as useful as a television that can order pizza. I'd rather have the Internet over a plain-old dial-up connection than broadband with some form of pseudo-internetworking.

So if you hear that somebody is going to "enhance" the Internet -- to make it more efficient, to Pay the Musicians, to Protect the Children, to thwart hackers, to enhance Homeland Security, to find Osama, or whatever -- this is almost certainly propaganda from the powerful businesses that are threatened by the Internet. Remember that the Internet became the success it is today -- and the threat that it is to existing telcos -- because it is a Stupid Network, an end-to-end network.

I have a vague sense that it's about time for a new cohort of exciting SF writers. You could say we had the Golden Age guys in the 40s, the New Wave in the 60s, Cyberpunk in the 80s, so there ought to be something interesting in the 00s. But I'm not out there reading the magazines and the first novels, so I'm not the right guy to ask. Just at random, one first novel I did recently happen to read and like is Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, due from Tor Books this fall. He does this next-generation thing of pretty much taking for granted certain far-out SFictional notions that I still think of as a big deal; for instance, his characters are online all the time via implants, which still strikes me as a kind of shockingly evil possible development. Why evil? How would you like to have Muzak, spam, telemarketing calls, political ads, polling, and surveillance going on in your head 24/7?

Charismatic, muscle-bound and six-foot-two, he's the dominant figure at the bar he often frequents, which stands tenuously together with bamboo poles and plastic sheeting somehow obtained from the U.N. World Food Program.

Whatever the future holds, Strasser will always have his high-profile past to relish.

"Oh it was good. I was the youngest ... head of state in the whole wide world," he said with a guffaw, looking around the bar for support.

Then he leaned forward with a wide smile and slapped a high-five on the hand of someone sitting across from him.

From: ADG01369 (adg01369@aol.com)
Subject: Re: Woody Guthrie's picking style question
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk

I may have answered too quickly... thumb on the down-beats and fingers between works better...

After a heated bidding war on eBay, Mark Lanier recently paid $2,125 to win a 1941 Naval Machinery manual.

It sounds like a peculiar collecting hobby, but to Lanier it was serious business. The Houston lawyer, who sues companies on behalf of asbestos-exposure victims, was bidding against a defense lawyer to get his hands on an evidentiary trophy filled with details on where and how asbestos was used aboard ships...

"You are talking about activities that occurred 20, 30, 40 years ago," said Eliot Jubelirer, a San Francisco lawyer who represents corporations. "There's nobody alive today who was in those companies years ago."

hereabouts I last saw Danny on Tue Jul 30 at 21:53. I think he was hacking away on a borrowed iBook. I remember he told me to say: I'm in, at or about:

Aug 14? Portland, OR
Aug 29-Sep 2 ConJose WorldCon (must. buy. tickets)
Sept. 9th-21st (?) UK
Sept. 30th - October 3rd O'Reilly MacOS conference (awaiting press creditation)

Mail To be read: 14
To be answered: 38
Spam: 673 spam mails since Sat Jul 27 22:52:47 2002
If the "To be read" indicator gets too big, I'm probably busy.

Managing Activism is written for PR practitioners whose clients engage in risky businesses (fossil fuels, pesticides, genetically engineered foods, nuclear waste, toxic dumps, animal testing) and who therefore become the targets of "activist groups" including "environmentalists, workers' rights activists, animal rights groups and human rights campaigners." Don't expect much sympathy for the activists. Deegan is a battle-hardened PR veteran and a committed soldier in the war against activists who "in an increasingly pluralistic society" present what she calls "a growing threat to organizations of all shapes and sizes. And because activists employ a wide range of aggressive tactics such as generating bad publicity, seeking government and legislative intervention, encouraging boycotts, etc., they can cause severe disruption, including damage to reputation, sales, profitability, employee satisfaction and, of course, share price."

O'Canada has been running since the 1980's and that Canadian Tourism board are rumoured to be unhappy that it shows a dated view of the country

For the filmmakers, the greatest challenge was ensuring that something interesting was happening on every screen. Sometimes there might be beautiful scenery on one side of the road and nothing on the other. Full-round vision also made it difficult for the director to ensure that unwanted images stayed off the screen. Inconsistencies in the 1966 film America the Beautiful, for example, included tissues blowing across the battlefield during the Battle of Gettysburg, a child picking his nose and cattle jumping each other. Near the Liberty Bell, an elderly man trips on a crack in the sidewalk and quickly looks around to make sure no one can see him. Across from Independence Hall, a mother holding a cigarette lowers her hand an accidentally burns her young daughter's wrist. Since the cameras were assembled in a circle, there was no place for people to hide to watch the filming. Consequently, Walt Disney can be spotting in about a half-dozen scenes, watching the action from the shadows.

"It's the search for peak experience, something that's really going to be special," says Adam Eidinger, a District political organizer. "It happened to me just last week. There was a concert at Fort Reno -- Fugazi." His cell rang. "There's this guy, Bernardo, who's one of the biggest swarmer cell-phone people I know." Came the restless call: " 'Where are you? There are all these people here!' And he wasn't just calling us. He called 25 people. Pretty soon everybody he knew was sitting on the grass, and none of them knew they were going to be there that morning."...

Former Philippine president Joseph Estrada, accused of massive corruption, was driven out of power two years ago by smart mobs who swarmed to demonstrations, alerted by their cell phones, gathering in no time. "It's like pizza delivery," Alex Magno, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines, told The Post at the time. "You can get a rally in 30 minutes -- delivered to you."

The good: WLAN product sales for businesses are up, as high as 175%, and will continue to grow another 60% in 2002. Security specialists, of course, have done quite well in the last few months, as 802.11x security remains the consistent bug in most business implementations.

BlöödHag is a band from Seattle, WA. They are dedicated to the promotion of literacy in a Heavy Metal format. All their songs are short speed metal bios of some of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. With songs such as "J.R.R. Tolkein and "Michael Moorcock" they will blow your illiterate ass right back to the library...

Ray Bradbury

Pretty Good For Never Having Gone To College, Ray
But When I Saw You On TV I Felt You Owed Me An Apology
But Not For: Fahrenheit 451
Not For: Golden Apples of the Sun
Not For: Something Wicked This Way Comes
Not For: Martian Chronicles, Volume One