Disorderly Content

I have an ego. (Yes, I know that isn't news.) Couple that ego with a modest web presence of long standing, and what I am about to tell you will come as no surprise: I Google myself.

Heck, I bet you do it too. All the cool kids do. I used to do it reguarly, but now I let Google Google me all by its ownself and tell me when it finds something. Every day it emails me with new discoveries, most of which are no surprise. Heck, most of them are pages I put there myself.

But every now and again I get a surprise. Like just now, when in addition to noticing my studio photography page, it pointed me to an ancient article from my Sun days. The subject was moving a development team from C to C++, the author was a team lead on the project. I was mentioned in passing, as their instructor on the ways of C++ and the ways to avoid getting into a heap o' trouble. An entertaining read, especially as I don't feel any need to cringe over the advice I gave them in those long ago days before Java and web development and so much else. And proof that on the web, everything is indelible.

There are rare moments when I love Microsoft, and this morning was one of them. I woke up to announcements on various blogs that all over the world there were 30 GB Zunes that were frozen into inoperability. Granted, that's hardly a crisis for most of the world, who think a turd brown music player is a spectacularly unattractive thing to carry around. But for the few, the proud, it must have come as quite the inconvenience.

Now we have confirmation from Microsoft that they've identified the source of the problem, which is the device's clock's inability to deal with a year of more than 365 days. 2008 has/had 366, you may remember, which at least in the Zune's eyes (if it had any) is one too many. Microsoft assures the few, the proud that things will return to normal on day one of 2009. They haven't indicated any plan to provide a fix. Then again, what are the odds of a 30 GB Zune surviving to freeze again on December 31, 2012?

I'm a half hour from heading to a friend's house for Christmas dinner, and here I sit, listening to the commentary track on Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. A musical commentary, which is every bit as cool as the one in the program itself, if perhaps a little too self-referential. Or is that a bad thing? I'm so not sure...

What's the fun of kicking Conservatives, when they're so busy doing it themselves? From Talking Points Memo we have The Top Dozen Insights of Conservatives, 2008. Read them and weep. Or laugh. I plan to do both.

Wassamatta, Vegas? Can't anybody spring for a word processor with a spell check?

Spotted at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas.
Captured with my iPhone.