Marney's birthday was yesterday! At her birthday party, I was reminded of the Toddler Property Laws. This certainly has more relevance in my life than it did when I first saw it 5-6 years ago.

Today was the first day of a two day Oracle training conference here in DC. Tom Kyte, of asktom.oracle.com gave an enjoyable presentation. He strongly believes that application development should start in the database, use all features and facilities provided by the database (e.g. use dbms_job instead of cron), and freely admits that coding for database independence is not usually a good thing. In defense of this last one, he quoted this recent rantanswer he gave to a question on his website.

By now you've probably seen What's Wrong With This Picture, now see a video clip of somebody else seeing it for the first time.

As Tom and Ray say, "From the Car Talk section of cars.com"... downloadable sounds, some would make nice error messages.

Three pages of inspirational sport statues. Why does Jesus need skates when playing hockey? Does the whole "walking on water" thing not translate to ice?

This page at the National Park Service's website has a link to a great pdf map of tourist Washington. It prints nicely on legal size paper.

National Geographic has a couple nifty map utilities... printer-friendly pdf maps and the MapMachine - dynamically generated, informative maps, sort of a MapQuest for people who want geographic information not limited to U.S. street maps.

Check out the results from the Washington Post's latest Style Invitational "seeking cynical definitions a la Ambrose Bierce ... looking for jaded drolleries". Such as:

• Peacetime: When there are no wars anywhere you care about
• E-mail: An urban legend delivery system
• Telemarketer: A Caller ID salesman

For further edification, you can read Bierce's Devil's Dictionary here (black-on-white HTML), here (white-on-black HTML), here (plain text, yet oddly double-spaced), here (formatted for PalmOS readers), or find other versions.

In a past life I was a NeXTSTEP programmer, so I particularly enjoyed "Mac OS X Hidden Secrets Revealed" from stepwise.com.

Should I change the tone of Cognitive Overflow to something like this? (fair warning and disclaimer: I am not responsible for what happens after your boss looks over your shoulder and sees what is generated by that link)