In CNN’s report on the discovery that Mars once had liquid water – and thus may have once been hospitable to life – it mentions that the Spirit and Opportunity missions cost about $820 million. The IMDB estimates the budget for Spider-Man 2 at $200 million.
In other words, each mission cost two big-budget summer movies.
Maybe we should get Hollywood to finance space exploration. It might help placate the “We’re wasting too much money in space!” crowd without abandoning the pursuit of knowledge.
A loud clap of thunder sent half the office to the windows about 20 minutes ago, and prompted cries of “Save now!” That got me thinking. In theory, we’re supposed to have e-voting in today’s election. Are the voting machines on UPSes? If the polling place loses power, is there any kind of backup to (a) let people vote during the blackout, and (b) make sure none of the already-collected votes are lost?
Assuming the polling place does have power when I get there, I’ll have to ask.
When I got into work this morning, our receptionist remarked to me, “Sorry, no coffee.” I assumed she meant “No coffee yet,” so I went back to my desk, read email, etc. Then I went back up to the lunch room for some coffee.
That’s when I discovered she really meant, “No coffee.” Apparently the maintenance guy didn’t hook it back up right yesterday, because the first person to walk into the room this morning discovered a medium-sized lake on the floor.
This after staying up late last night stuffing envelopes… I’m drinking cola with breakfast. And I’m seriously considering taking a cue from another coworker who went downstairs to the café on the first floor.
Last month I finally got around to installing antivirus software on the one Windows computer we have at home. While I’ve found Norton Anti-Virus has worked well on my system at work, I ended up choosing McAfee Internet Security Suite for two reasons: (1) unlike Symantec, they don’t use a product activation scheme, and (2) since McAfee bought Deersoft, purchasing a McAfee-related anti-spam product should help fund SpamAssassin development.
Big mistake.
Since installing McAfee, this computer has crashed at least once each time I’ve turned it on (usually with a McAfee dialog box visible). The privacy service adds another login prompt, whether you want it or not. It tends to pop up dialogs when you’re in the middle of, say, running ScanDisk to make sure the system survived the crash McAfee caused five minutes earlier. And, ridiculously, the software and virus definition update runs through Internet Explorer.
By this I don’t mean that it expects you to go to the website and download an installer. That would be inconvenient, but acceptable (since you could choose what web browser to use). No, it pops up a “Check for updates” dialog box which then opens Internet Explorer, goes through a set of redirects until it opens a pop-up that looks like a download manager (but is clearly done using HTML), and then downloads and installs the update.
Now forget any issues you might have with buggy rendering, feature parity, monopoly abuse, antitrust, etc. Just look at IE’s track record on security.
Why would you want a security system to rely on something so notoriously insecure?
Symantec has its own update program that calls out, checks for updates, downloads them and installs. You can run it manually, or you can set it to grab and install virus updates automatically. Nowhere in this whole process does Internet Explorer come into the picture – or if it does, it’s hidden away where the power user won’t see it and say “What the hell do they think they’re doing?”
I’m aware that I’ve been grumbling for a while that my drama-queen examiner (who has reappeared, by the way, and pretty much kept from disappearing again) would get more done if she’d delegate stuff to me. However, I don’t think that the week we’re cleaning up in the wake of a major system upgrade when all the examiners are trying to close files for month end and I’m handling the work of a guy on his honeymoon is really the best time to start…..
We started out with the intent of not doing everything ourselves, since that way lies madness and lack of free time. Then we found out just how annoying 90% of wedding vendors are and how little patience we have with large doses of that, and switched to coordinating everything ourselves. When it became obvious that if we continued in this vein we wouldn’t be having a wedding, we sucked it up and started vendor-hunting again. Only this time, they’re twice as annoying since all of them are now programmed with the auto-repeat loop of “It’s just around the corner! You’re really cutting it close! It’s almost here! It’s really down to the wire! It’s just around the corner!” and have been for the last six months. I’m beginning to feel my eye twitch whenever someone says any of the above.
This includes my family. Continue reading
It seems like every time they try to get on track with painting the apartments, it rains. They actually started shrouding everything in plastic yesterday and primer-coated the balconies, and some of the stucco got painted. I’m interested to find out how much they got done before the clouds let loose today. And how long it’s going to take them to regroup. (At least the plastic on the bushes and satellite dishes will have served some strange purpose…)
