Not Much Going On Here, 01/21/2007

I don't have much to say but I thought I would put a post out for those who wander by. Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is a Federal holiday but it is an optional holiday for my company, which means that I can choose to take or I can bank it and take it another time. I decided to bank it. Half my team did the same while the other half chose to take it. And what did I do all day? Not much. Read news articles on line, read about Ruby on Rails, read about Apache HTTP, caught up on e-mail, etc.

Now that my wife has her new laptop, I have acquired her old one and am in the process of turning it into a developer's machine, albeit it not the fastest one. I am installing a bunch of open source/free applications, utilities and programming languages. I have installed Java, Perl, Tcl, Python, MySQL and Apache HTTP (thus the reading about Apache HTTP at work). Tonight I was able to configure the Apache HTTP server to execute Perl scripts for CGI stuff. Granted, the test script just output a hello message, but it worked! It's the small things that excite me the most sometimes.

Tomorrow I go back to the oral surgeon to see how things are going. They seem fairly good to me but I do have a tiny fistula. Hopefully it's small enough to be a good sign.

Here are some news articles that I found interesting (most of these are not from my reading today by the way).

• Did you know that the U.S. has the world's largest reserve of helium gas? And did you know that scientists (or at least one of them) say that we Americans are using it up so fast that it could be all gone within 8 years? And that there's no economically viable way to produce it in the quantities in which we use it? So you better have all the parties with balloons that you want in the next 8 years because after that, your out of luck or it will cost you a small fortune to import it.
• A unique disguise for a bank robber - drywall compound. I bet that felt nice when it dried. Talk about alligator skin. He is one of those "not so smart" criminals.
  
• Many of you may have seen this one before but in case not, here it is - the FBI had an international wiretap disconnected because they did not pay their bill.
• People in Texas are seeing UFOs. And did you know, according to the article, Texas, California and Colorado are the top three states for viewing UFOs? Keep that in mind when planning your next family vacation.
• This next article is about a 14-year old boy who likes to play with trains. What's interesting about that you may ask? That seems pretty normal and healthy. Except that this 14-year old hacked into the city's transportation system and programmed a TV remote to control the city's trams, resulting in accidents and injuries but no fatalities. After he finishes his punishment, whatever that it, someone needs to enroll him in MIT (or send him to my house to program a remote to make stoplights green :-)).
• Iowa road is littered with chicken litter, 3 inches deep for 1 1/2 miles. Pew-wee! And some people drove through the stuff - that's one way to take care of that unwanted new car smell.
• Honduran prisons are not very secure, but you would not want to start a gang war in them unless you want a remake of Stallone or Schwarzenegger movie (lots of explosions and gun fire).
• Another incompetent set of robbers - the getaway man drains the battery on the getaway vehicle listening to music while his partner is holding up the bank, which by the way is the same building as the police station (Royal Canadian Mounted Police).