This happened just around the corner from my office!

Marney News: She turned nine months old this week. She's crawling faster and faster every day. She pulls herself up to standing whenever possible.

New photos available (including crawling, standing, and covered in green beans) in the "Dec 2001", "Jan 2002", and "Marney's Friends" albums at her photo album.

Here's an interesting article about downtown Wellington's 13 sq. mi. LAN providing 1 gigabit network access to all subscribers. Seen on slashdot.

Follow das BlinkenLights in my new home network set up... my web browser tickles the led on the 802.11 card which tells the wireless base station which has makes two lights blink (one for wireless, one for ethernet)... that second light is talking to the broadband router and more lights blink, one from the base station and one going out on its WAN port... to its supplier, the cable modem with its own array of blinking lights! Pity our poor guests who have to sleep in the guest room where most of these lights live.

Photos, specs and history of ballparks.

Stolen iMac recovered due to remote control software installed on machine and help from friends on USENET group. Full story at macscripter.net

Slashdot's current poll asks readers about their preferred case material. The comments highlight some creative solutions, such as one guy who makes nice wooden cases "Personally, wood, sanded smooooth, and painted with an ultra-glossy black laquer finish (think about a nice black piano) is the killer case" or the guy who put his computer in a large tupperware container so that he could put it outside his bedroom window.

Nice marketing. With Flash v5, a high bandwidth connection and either Windows Media Player or Real Player, you can listen to the full soundtrack for Ocean's Eleven. Fun movie, fun soundtrack except for one annoying rap track. Some reviewers at amazon.com complained about the dialogue excerpts, but I don't mind them.

A cow-orker pointed me to Rotten Tomatoes which collects movie reviews from many sources and presents a consensus rating.

From themail, a mailing list about DC-related topics, a reader voices his opinion:

Though I have never been considered very politically correct, being a throwback to a former era, I strongly object to the name of the local professional football team, the Washington Redskins. This name is more than irritating, it is offensive and insensitive. It is timely to change the name of this team right now. The team should be called the Maryland Redskins

Jones? Ray? no big deal, right?

Best use of ebooks in the public domain... get them serialized by email from classic-novels.com

An article in that fine liberal rag, The Nation about Huey Freeman of the comic strip "The Boondocks" pointed me at the Thanksgiving Day strip.

From flutterby, by way of borklog, links to opt out of pop-up ads.

I received spam on my seldom-used hotmail.com account with the subject line "Make Your Love Life R Rated". Here's a paragraph from the official guidelines for achieving an R rating from the MPAA:

An R-rated film may include hard language, or tough violence, or nudity within sensual scenes, or drug abuse or other elements, or a combination of some of the above, so that parents are counseled, in advance, to take this advisory rating very seriously. Parents must find out more about an R-rated movie before they allow their teenagers to view it.

Hmmm, hard language, tough violence, drug abuse, teenagers watching with their parents... that's not exactly what I strive for in my love life. "Nudity within sensual scenes" is nice, though.

Humorous, biting Star Trek episode reviews for TNG, DS9, and Voyager. Lots of spoilers, lots of fun. Also known as "Star Trek: The Next Cliché"

Malkovich

Two guys show up at 2:00 a.m. to check in to their guaranteed hotel rooms and are told there are no rooms. After rude service, they send this powerpoint presentation to the hotel's manager.

Marney Update... At eight months, she's at the 80th percentile for height, 75th percentile for weight, and 40th percentile for head circumference. Her head doesn't look out of proportion. (28", 19.25 lbs)

In other Marney news, she crawled across the floor for the first time last night (and the second time and third and fourth...). Karen and I were sitting in our basement, eating chinese food and watching TV while Marney napped. A little bit after she woke up, she spied my plate and crawled straight toward it. Once there, I picked her up and moved her back across the room... and she went striaght back to the plate. Repeat 10-20 times.

We had seen her take a couple tentative moves forwards, but this was truly the first time that we've seen her crawl so directly and speedily.

Time to babyproof the house.

A little known data transmission protocol IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. I doubt that it's used much either.

Nifty geek clothing for carrying my Visor, cellophone, wallet, keys, etc...the eVEST.

Here's a game to play... what's your score? Add the rank of your first name and last name. Does high or low win? Names not on the list are ineligible to win high score. My mother scores a paltry 16 (1+15), I'm a simple 60. My sister in law is 11,751.

I was just looking at the lists of the most common male and female first names previously mentioned and noticed astounding differences in distribution of names. Each of these files account for approximately 90% of the U.S. population by gender, yet...

• there are 3.5 times as many female names as male names (4,275 female and 1,219 male).
• there are eleven male names which represent more than 1% of the sample, and only three such female names
• the top 10 male names represent 23.5% of the sample, the top 10 female names only represent 10.7% of the sample

More fun than the many lists of common baby names. Here are lists of the most common first and last names from the 1990 U.S. Census. Just call me 45-15. My daughter doesn't appear on the list, at least not the way we spell Marney. Maybe it's because she wasn't born yet and her namesake died in early 1990, probably before she filled out her census form.

My wife always bemoans having to use a common last name like Harris. I didn't realize that it's the 15th most popular in the U.S. That's a lot higher than other names.

FOXNews.com reports on a workable dot com business plan: sell your dot com for $82.5M in late 1999 to ExciteAtHome. Then, when ExciteAtHome goes bankrupt, buy your company back for $2.4M.

More blogstickers

All the hoopla about the security hole in AIM had one pleasant effect. A slashdot reader's comment pointed me to Trillian, the first windows based messaging client which satisfies my need for just one program for AIM, icq, Yahoo, irc and logs all conversations, too. Be sure to download one or more alternate skins, the default one is ugly and huge.