9 tons at the heavier, revised estimate? Elephants can weigh close to 7 tons. Thanks for ruining my childhood
I felt that way also when I read about T-Rex size estimates some years ago. Then they were six or seven tons (i.e., elephant-sized). But I had to remember that they were not, of course, the elephants of their time. They were the tigers of their time. So, you scale a tiger up to elephant size and you've got a pretty impressive predator.
Science writer Olivia Judson has a post about tools for organizing the source materials for an article. I'd like to know what she writes the actual article with.
Here's her biographical blurb from the NY Times: Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist, is the author of "Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex," which was made into a three-part television program. Ms. Judson has been a reporter for The Economist and has written for a number of other publications, including Nature, The Financial Times, The Atlantic and Natural History. She is a research fellow in biology at Imperial College London.
They didn't make up the term "sea scorpion" for this find. It's the colloquial term for eurypterids, which are a well known class of extinct arthropods.
The stinger may be the most well-known feature of land scorpions to to lay people, but there are a number of body structures of sea scorpions that are similar to land scorpions. These features, and the general shape of the creature, led to the term sea scorpion.
The claw might be from a creature with outsized claws, but it's likely that it's from a creature with claws that are in the same proportion to its body as all the others they've found from the same species. This type of extrapolation is not unusual in paleontology, where they deal with incomplete fossils all the time.
And regarding the "arms race," note that body size itself is a weapon. That is, weapons don't have to be what we immediately recognize as weapons: claws, teeth, armor, stingers, etc. There were dinosaurs that developed what were obviously weapons to fight increasingly-large predators (triceratoops with the horns, ankylosaurus with the body armor and tail club, stegosaurus with the spiked tail) but the gigantic size of a brachiosaurus was a weapon as well. Similarly, a sea scorpion growing larger, but maintaining the same proportions, is also participating in an arms race.
My guess is that the claw is similar in form to other fossil claws they've found that were attached to more completely fossilized eurypterids, which are colloquially known as sea scorpions. It's not really ninety-percent guesswork. The claw might be from a creature with outsized claws, but it's likely that it's from a creature with claws that are in the same proportion to its body as all the others they've found from the same species. This type of extrapolation is not unusual in paleontology, where they deal with incomplete fossils all the time.
From the above page: the authors are Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss. Freeman is on the teaching faculty of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Organizational Dynamics, where in addition to his regular courses, he teaches workshops research methods and survey design (a domain that includes polling.) Bleifuss is editor of In These Times. An investigative reporter and columnist, his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Utne Reader, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Dissent, among many others.
U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr., wrote the forward.
Correct: Trac is open source, and works as a front-end to Subversion. Also, Subversion was designed to be better than CVS, while still being similar enough to allow CVS users get rolling with it quickly. Subversion itself is also open source.
Since I'm not an expert in...anything, really, I tend to be quite interested in the choices experts make. A lot of people use Subversion, including the Pragmatic Programmers and the Ruby on Rails developers. The Ruby on Rails developers also use Trac, and you can go to their Trac installation and see how it all works.
Of course, my needs are slightly different from those of high-level experts, but I still like to see what they choose to use, when they have complete freedom from PHBs (and often the money to buy a commercial tool, if they prefer). Finally, as I do do some development with Ruby on Rails, I'm quite happy to use Subversion, just like the Railsers themselves. It's a nice system.
I'd like to see a law passed that requires police or any authorities who order you to show your ID card, or papers, or driver's license, or whatever, to hand over their own identification to you at the same time, and give you time to write down the information. Or scan the convenient bar code on the ID with the bar code reader built into your cell phone, which immediately emails it to whatever addresses you've designated. And I don't want the law to say that you have the option of asking the police, but that federal law requires the police to put their ID in your hands at the time you hand over yours, even if you say you don't want it. Just as the Miranda warning is read to anybody placed under arrest.
I can see problems with this, of course. We do need police, and bad people do retaliate against them. I don't like the idea of a police officer pulling over a Scientologist and then having to deal with vicious harrassment because the Scientologist has his full name, address, description, etc. But it might help prevent mistreatment of innocent people by the police, or make it easier for them to call offending offices to account for their actions.
Point out the flaws in my plan, and we'll move forward.
"Narcissism" might not be an accepted medical term, but Narcissistic Personality Disorder is. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), assigns it code number 301.81. That code number is what a therapist would put in the diagnosis section of a bill. Health insurance companies require an official diagnosis for reimbursement, and Narcissistic Personality Disorder counts as one. Of course, people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder rarely seek therapy, given the nature of their disorder. Also of course, the fact that insurance companies recognize it does not prove that it is universally accepted, or scientifically valid.
The DSM-IV disorder that most closely matches Psychopathy is 301.7, Antisocial Personality Disorder. However, see Robert D. Hare's 1996 article in the Psychiatric Times for a discussion of the controversy surrounding the switch from the term Psychopathy to Antisocial Personality Disorder, and the reworking of the diagnosis itself.
This kind of controversy is common in psychology, and much less so in medicine. Everybody agrees on what a broken bone is, and strep throat can be diagnosed with a throat swab and a microscope. The diagnostic criteria for mental disorders are often fuzzy, and not universally agreed upon. So I would not be surprised to find that a later revision of the DSM restores the diagnosis of Psychopathy, and I wouldn't object to it either.
I think that a lot of people who are called psychopaths are "just" narcissists. They're still inconceivably awful.
The DSM-IV Diagnostic Criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder are:
A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five or more of:
1. has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
2. is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
3. believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
4. requires excessive admiration
5. has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
6. is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
7. lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
8. is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
I agree that the name is silly. And I like Python the language, and Python the Monty as well. It's just time for Graham Chapman's colonel to come in and say "Right, this is too silly, I'm closing this site down. Move along."
Somebody in another comment responded to a complaint about the name by saying "Right, because yacc, bison, parrot, beagle, mozilla, apache, zope, gkrellm and superkaramba are all such normal names." Point taken, but Cheese Shop, or Bicycle Repairman, go beyond these others, in my opinion.
The Cheese Shop site at least looks clean, like CPAN, and unlike the Vaults of Parnassus. I'm grateful for the VoP, and for the work of the dedicated people who run it. It is useful and valued. But the look is rather like a fourteen-year-old's Dungeon's and Dragon's site. It's a bit embarassing, really. And the metaphor is wrong, just like the snake on the cover of the O'Reilly Python Pocket Reference is wrong. But I guess the O'Reilly book looks cooler and more professional with an actual snake than a Terry Gilliam drawing. I'm not ungrateful. Just picky.
Also, as has been noted, the Cheese Shop is where you don't get any cheese. If they wanted a Python reference, they could have chosen the Travel Agency. At least you get Carol Cleveland inviting you upstairs. And they could name their discussion boards the Argument Clinic.
Yahoo calendar does let you send calendar events, but only to other users of Yahoo calendar. It doesn't work across systems, but it's something. Also, if you share your Yahoo calendar, you can search for blocks of common free times with other Yahoo calendar users.
I used Yahoo to manage my life in grad school, and it worked beautifully. I still use it.
The calendar lets you specify two different alert times, and you can have the alert sent to two different addresses. Regular alerts went to my Yahoo mail account. Important ones also went to my cell phone. (Like girlfriend's birthday reminders.) I didn't need anything more elaborate than that.
I used Yahoo mail to get my university email. Since I moved between work, school, apartment, and girlfriend's apartment, having mail and calendar remotely hosted was perfect.
The Yahoo address book fits my needs fine.
After school I paid the $19 a year to upgrade. You get 2 gigs of storage, more filters, and no ads in the mail system or calendar. I like Gmail, but I prefer the Yahoo mail interface (especially the ad-free version.) And even the free version with the ads lets you choose your colors.
Security: Yahoo updates their virus profiles more often than I update mine. And I do it at least once a week; usually more often. But the Yahoo security experts are just better than I am, as I'm no security expert at all. So Yahoo mail and a non-IE browser, and you've already closed off a lot of holes, even when you're forced to use a Windows machine.
I like Gmail, but to run my life I need an integrated calendar. I'd like to see a Google calendar. Who knows what features Google would come up with? Just because I can't think of something brilliant to add to a calendar doesn't mean they won't.
Oh, and My Yahoo offers you a lot in the way of news aggregation. Their RSS system is a bit less than perfect, but I do use it. What Yahoo does is a solid job of integrating good, but not fantastic, components, and the integration is what makes it extra useful.
Having said all that, their system for storing bookmarks sucks (for now). I use Furl for that. Excellent system.
Simon Peyton Jones, a Microsoft researcher in England who does a lot of work on Haskell (for Microsoft?), has a cheat sheet that "summarises all the things I do to make my Win2k machine more useful to me."
Mnemonic is suggesting that if Germans worked the same number of hours a year as Americans do, and with as little vacation, they would be praised for their industry, not condemned for having such a stressful, out-of-balance culture.
Mnemonic has made no statement about how much Germans work. He is suggesting that many people tend to condemn America reflexively and, as tentative evidence for this phenomenon, he predicts that the same work requirements in a different country would result in praise for that country, not condemnation.
Yes. Or, in short, Jeff can not write and will never be able to. Check out his bio. College seniors who write like this don't improve. It's too late. He sounds like every MCSE our IS department has ever hired: an idiot.
You're right. There is a lot of rudeness here, at least in the big cities. I consider many of the clerks I deal with to be empathically illiterate, or maybe just ill-bred. They haven't the faintest idea that they're supposed to stop having a conversation among themselves when a customer walks up and asks a question. They honestly don't know that they're supposed to stop reading their magazines immediately when a customer puts his purchases on their counter. My guess is that nobody at home ever showed them a shred of respect. They look at you cross-eyed if you interrupt their lives to ask them to do the job they are being paid for.
But I do get a lot of good clerks as well, sometimes in the same stores where the bad clerks are. And see Bill Bryson's book In a Sunburned Country for some descriptions of appalling service in Australia.
> Smart people DO still get respect if they're > not smug about it and have other aspects to > their personality.
People are supposed to be respected (or at least not beat up) just because they're people. That's supposed to be enough. It's not supposed to be a requirement that the intelligent people also have a personality that pleases others, or that others regard as cool.
It's SUPPOSED to work like this: You go to school, you don't hurt anybody, you fail your classes or you outscore the entire school, and either way you're not harassed or bullied. Period. The schools are supposed to make this happen. The fact that they can't always is a failing of our culture. Teachers are overwhelmed by kids who are, to a great degree, uncivilized.
You're free of obligations to a wife or children. When you do have those obligations, especially the children, it's completely different.
Plus, it makes you a more interesting person. You'll at least have good stories to tell. So when you're meeting new women, you're not just an IT guy, you also spent several months (at least) touring with a band.
So do it, and report back from the road. I'd be interested to hear how it works out.
Once, for the hell of it, I tried www.boogle.com. It's Google with a different quote and a different pretty picture each time you go. So, just for more hell of it, I tried a bunch of other oogles just now. Here are a few:
joogle.com - a directory site. Never used it or heard of it.
> nice comment...until you consider that the > simpsons (creative american comedy) is > outsourced to thailand.
I'd need confirmation on this one. The most creative part of the Simpsons is the writing, and that's done here. Conan O'Brien used to write for the Simpsons. I know the animation is outsourced (some to Korea I think). But they're illustrating stories written here.
He's not talking about the page designer using big fonts. He's talking about when you use the Text Zoom command in Mozilla, or similar functions in other browsers, because the site's text is too small for your eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
9 tons at the heavier, revised estimate? Elephants can weigh close to 7 tons. Thanks for ruining my childhood
I felt that way also when I read about T-Rex size estimates some years ago. Then they were six or seven tons (i.e., elephant-sized). But I had to remember that they were not, of course, the elephants of their time. They were the tigers of their time. So, you scale a tiger up to elephant size and you've got a pretty impressive predator.
Science writer Olivia Judson has a post about tools for organizing the source materials for an article. I'd like to know what she writes the actual article with.
Here's her biographical blurb from the NY Times: Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist, is the author of "Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex," which was made into a three-part television program. Ms. Judson has been a reporter for The Economist and has written for a number of other publications, including Nature, The Financial Times, The Atlantic and Natural History. She is a research fellow in biology at Imperial College London.
They didn't make up the term "sea scorpion" for this find. It's the colloquial term for eurypterids, which are a well known class of extinct arthropods.
The stinger may be the most well-known feature of land scorpions to to lay people, but there are a number of body structures of sea scorpions that are similar to land scorpions. These features, and the general shape of the creature, led to the term sea scorpion.
The claw might be from a creature with outsized claws, but it's likely that it's from a creature with claws that are in the same proportion to its body as all the others they've found from the same species. This type of extrapolation is not unusual in paleontology, where they deal with incomplete fossils all the time.
And regarding the "arms race," note that body size itself is a weapon. That is, weapons don't have to be what we immediately recognize as weapons: claws, teeth, armor, stingers, etc. There were dinosaurs that developed what were obviously weapons to fight increasingly-large predators (triceratoops with the horns, ankylosaurus with the body armor and tail club, stegosaurus with the spiked tail) but the gigantic size of a brachiosaurus was a weapon as well. Similarly, a sea scorpion growing larger, but maintaining the same proportions, is also participating in an arms race.
My guess is that the claw is similar in form to other fossil claws they've found that were attached to more completely fossilized eurypterids, which are colloquially known as sea scorpions. It's not really ninety-percent guesswork. The claw might be from a creature with outsized claws, but it's likely that it's from a creature with claws that are in the same proportion to its body as all the others they've found from the same species. This type of extrapolation is not unusual in paleontology, where they deal with incomplete fossils all the time.
The book is "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?" There's a page about it at:
www.electionintegrity.org/book.shtml
From the above page: the authors are Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss. Freeman is on the teaching faculty of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Organizational Dynamics, where in addition to his regular courses, he teaches workshops research methods and survey design (a domain that includes polling.) Bleifuss is editor of In These Times. An investigative reporter and columnist, his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Utne Reader, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Dissent, among many others.
U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr., wrote the forward.
Correct: Trac is open source, and works as a front-end to Subversion. Also, Subversion was designed to be better than CVS, while still being similar enough to allow CVS users get rolling with it quickly. Subversion itself is also open source.
Since I'm not an expert in...anything, really, I tend to be quite interested in the choices experts make. A lot of people use Subversion, including the Pragmatic Programmers and the Ruby on Rails developers. The Ruby on Rails developers also use Trac, and you can go to their Trac installation and see how it all works.
Of course, my needs are slightly different from those of high-level experts, but I still like to see what they choose to use, when they have complete freedom from PHBs (and often the money to buy a commercial tool, if they prefer). Finally, as I do do some development with Ruby on Rails, I'm quite happy to use Subversion, just like the Railsers themselves. It's a nice system.
I'd like to see a law passed that requires police or any authorities who order you to show your ID card, or papers, or driver's license, or whatever, to hand over their own identification to you at the same time, and give you time to write down the information. Or scan the convenient bar code on the ID with the bar code reader built into your cell phone, which immediately emails it to whatever addresses you've designated. And I don't want the law to say that you have the option of asking the police, but that federal law requires the police to put their ID in your hands at the time you hand over yours, even if you say you don't want it. Just as the Miranda warning is read to anybody placed under arrest.
I can see problems with this, of course. We do need police, and bad people do retaliate against them. I don't like the idea of a police officer pulling over a Scientologist and then having to deal with vicious harrassment because the Scientologist has his full name, address, description, etc. But it might help prevent mistreatment of innocent people by the police, or make it easier for them to call offending offices to account for their actions.
Point out the flaws in my plan, and we'll move forward.
In the current version of Yahoo Mail, There are no ads in the paid version. And no ad signatures tacked onto your messages either.
I'd be interested in benchmarks as well. But note that CherryPy is not new; it's been in development since at least 2001.
"Narcissism" might not be an accepted medical term, but Narcissistic Personality Disorder is. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), assigns it code number 301.81. That code number is what a therapist would put in the diagnosis section of a bill. Health insurance companies require an official diagnosis for reimbursement, and Narcissistic Personality Disorder counts as one. Of course, people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder rarely seek therapy, given the nature of their disorder. Also of course, the fact that insurance companies recognize it does not prove that it is universally accepted, or scientifically valid.
The DSM-IV disorder that most closely matches Psychopathy is 301.7, Antisocial Personality Disorder. However, see Robert D. Hare's 1996 article in the Psychiatric Times for a discussion of the controversy surrounding the switch from the term Psychopathy to Antisocial Personality Disorder, and the reworking of the diagnosis itself.
This kind of controversy is common in psychology, and much less so in medicine. Everybody agrees on what a broken bone is, and strep throat can be diagnosed with a throat swab and a microscope. The diagnostic criteria for mental disorders are often fuzzy, and not universally agreed upon. So I would not be surprised to find that a later revision of the DSM restores the diagnosis of Psychopathy, and I wouldn't object to it either.
The Bully Online site may be of interest.
I think that a lot of people who are called psychopaths are "just" narcissists. They're still inconceivably awful.
The DSM-IV Diagnostic Criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder are:
A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five or more of:
1. has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
2. is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
3. believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
4. requires excessive admiration
5. has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
6. is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
7. lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
8. is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
I agree that the name is silly. And I like Python the language, and Python the Monty as well. It's just time for Graham Chapman's colonel to come in and say "Right, this is too silly, I'm closing this site down. Move along."
Somebody in another comment responded to a complaint about the name by saying "Right, because yacc, bison, parrot, beagle, mozilla, apache, zope, gkrellm and superkaramba are all such normal names." Point taken, but Cheese Shop, or Bicycle Repairman, go beyond these others, in my opinion.
The Cheese Shop site at least looks clean, like CPAN, and unlike the Vaults of Parnassus. I'm grateful for the VoP, and for the work of the dedicated people who run it. It is useful and valued. But the look is rather like a fourteen-year-old's Dungeon's and Dragon's site. It's a bit embarassing, really. And the metaphor is wrong, just like the snake on the cover of the O'Reilly Python Pocket Reference is wrong. But I guess the O'Reilly book looks cooler and more professional with an actual snake than a Terry Gilliam drawing. I'm not ungrateful. Just picky.
Also, as has been noted, the Cheese Shop is where you don't get any cheese. If they wanted a Python reference, they could have chosen the Travel Agency. At least you get Carol Cleveland inviting you upstairs. And they could name their discussion boards the Argument Clinic.
Paul Graham's site has a short piece about Orbitz's use of Lisp, called Inside Orbitz.
Yahoo calendar does let you send calendar events, but only to other users of Yahoo calendar. It doesn't work across systems, but it's something. Also, if you share your Yahoo calendar, you can search for blocks of common free times with other Yahoo calendar users.
I used Yahoo to manage my life in grad school, and it worked beautifully. I still use it.
The calendar lets you specify two different alert times, and you can have the alert sent to two different addresses. Regular alerts went to my Yahoo mail account. Important ones also went to my cell phone. (Like girlfriend's birthday reminders.) I didn't need anything more elaborate than that.
I used Yahoo mail to get my university email. Since I moved between work, school, apartment, and girlfriend's apartment, having mail and calendar remotely hosted was perfect.
The Yahoo address book fits my needs fine.
After school I paid the $19 a year to upgrade. You get 2 gigs of storage, more filters, and no ads in the mail system or calendar. I like Gmail, but I prefer the Yahoo mail interface (especially the ad-free version.) And even the free version with the ads lets you choose your colors.
Security: Yahoo updates their virus profiles more often than I update mine. And I do it at least once a week; usually more often. But the Yahoo security experts are just better than I am, as I'm no security expert at all. So Yahoo mail and a non-IE browser, and you've already closed off a lot of holes, even when you're forced to use a Windows machine.
I like Gmail, but to run my life I need an integrated calendar. I'd like to see a Google calendar. Who knows what features Google would come up with? Just because I can't think of something brilliant to add to a calendar doesn't mean they won't.
Oh, and My Yahoo offers you a lot in the way of news aggregation. Their RSS system is a bit less than perfect, but I do use it. What Yahoo does is a solid job of integrating good, but not fantastic, components, and the integration is what makes it extra useful.
Having said all that, their system for storing bookmarks sucks (for now). I use Furl for that. Excellent system.
Simon Peyton Jones, a Microsoft researcher in England who does a lot of work on Haskell (for Microsoft?), has a cheat sheet that "summarises all the things I do to make my Win2k machine more useful to me."
www.research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/win32-cheat.ht ml
It's rather funny, as much of what he does is make the system more like Unix, with tools like:
He describes how to set things up so he can:
And more. Useful stuff in general for when you're forced to work on Win machines.
Mnemonic is suggesting that if Germans worked the same number of hours a year as Americans do, and with as little vacation, they would be praised for their industry, not condemned for having such a stressful, out-of-balance culture.
Mnemonic has made no statement about how much Germans work. He is suggesting that many people tend to condemn America reflexively and, as tentative evidence for this phenomenon, he predicts that the same work requirements in a different country would result in praise for that country, not condemnation.
Yes. Or, in short, Jeff can not write and will never be able to. Check out his bio. College seniors who write like this don't improve. It's too late. He sounds like every MCSE our IS department has ever hired: an idiot.
A quick, if not beautiful, way to access all the preferences in either Mozilla or Firefox is to enter this in the location bar:
about:config
Double click an entry and you can change the settings.
You're right. There is a lot of rudeness here, at least in the big cities. I consider many of the clerks I deal with to be empathically illiterate, or maybe just ill-bred. They haven't the faintest idea that they're supposed to stop having a conversation among themselves when a customer walks up and asks a question. They honestly don't know that they're supposed to stop reading their magazines immediately when a customer puts his purchases on their counter. My guess is that nobody at home ever showed them a shred of respect. They look at you cross-eyed if you interrupt their lives to ask them to do the job they are being paid for.
But I do get a lot of good clerks as well, sometimes in the same stores where the bad clerks are. And see Bill Bryson's book In a Sunburned Country for some descriptions of appalling service in Australia.
> Smart people DO still get respect if they're
> not smug about it and have other aspects to
> their personality.
People are supposed to be respected (or at least not beat up) just because they're people. That's supposed to be enough. It's not supposed to be a requirement that the intelligent people also have a personality that pleases others, or that others regard as cool.
It's SUPPOSED to work like this: You go to school, you don't hurt anybody, you fail your classes or you outscore the entire school, and either way you're not harassed or bullied. Period. The schools are supposed to make this happen. The fact that they can't always is a failing of our culture. Teachers are overwhelmed by kids who are, to a great degree, uncivilized.
You're free of obligations to a wife or children. When you do have those obligations, especially the children, it's completely different.
Plus, it makes you a more interesting person. You'll at least have good stories to tell. So when you're meeting new women, you're not just an IT guy, you also spent several months (at least) touring with a band.
So do it, and report back from the road. I'd be interested to hear how it works out.
Once, for the hell of it, I tried www.boogle.com. It's Google with a different quote and a different pretty picture each time you go. So, just for more hell of it, I tried a bunch of other oogles just now. Here are a few:
joogle.com - a directory site. Never used it or heard of it.
koogle.com - same as joogle.com.
moogle.com - Part of Strayer University. Never used it or heard of it.
noogle.com - Part of moogle.com
ooogle.com - sex
roogle.com - not taken
toogle.com - got a casino alert box and then sent to usseek.com
uoogle.com - redirected to sharewareisland.com
voogle.com - get free email addresses and a disturbing picture of a frog in a bikini.
woogle.com - same redirect as toogle.com, to usseek.com
xoogle.com - not taken
yoogle.com - under construction
zoogle.com - Xaraya Content Management Solutions
> nice comment...until you consider that the
> simpsons (creative american comedy) is
> outsourced to thailand.
I'd need confirmation on this one. The most creative part of the Simpsons is the writing, and that's done here. Conan O'Brien used to write for the Simpsons. I know the animation is outsourced (some to Korea I think). But they're illustrating stories written here.
He's not talking about the page designer using big fonts. He's talking about when you use the Text Zoom command in Mozilla, or similar functions in other browsers, because the site's text is too small for your eyes.
Double Choco Latte is part of GNU Enterprise. It has nice screenshots.
Dmoz has a bigger list of project management tools.
I personally have never found one that did what I wanted without making me do too much. That applies to bosses as well.