dotPlan.org

At last, the scam is revealed!

I don’t know if any of you remember this. Back in like 1997 or so, an email forward was passed around about a company promoting itself by giving away shares of its stock. I decided ‘what the hell, it doesn’t cost me anything,’ and signed up. I pretty much forgot about it after that. Three months ago, on a whim, I decided to see what happened to these supposed 10 shares of stock I signed up for. Imagine my surprise that the stock was at $10/share. That means I now have $100 I didn’t have before. I dug through my old emails and, after much searching, found my old account number and requested my shares. Today, the price of TZOO hit $26/share. I now potentially have $260 because of some e-mail forward I bought into in High School.

Hey everyone. I’m going to be in Gainesville briefly on Sunday the 20th of June. I’d like to meet everyone for brunch before I haul ass to Orlando to catch my flight back to LA. The suggestion that was made was Mr. Han’s. So, Sunday the 20th of June at Mr Han’s when they open. If anyone knows when they open on Sunday please post the time here.

This would normally be posted as a ’short,’ but it was too funny to let people that don’t realize I post things to that little sidebare to miss. So, without further ado, I present Apple Users are Godless Darwinist Hippy Communists.

Some time ago I read an article about this man that spent 27 years making the World’s Largest Ball of Paint. I’m starting to think that my company should try and purchase this ball of paint as a symbol of our software design strategy. Think of the baseball at the center as the basic design and framework for our product. Each layer of paint, then, represents a hack added to this care design. In the end you have this heavy unwieldy ball that could crack open at any minute.

For the last couple months I’ve been working on research and prototyping for our next major product release, version 5.1. This is our chance to fix all of the problems with our designs and remove all of the duct tape and chewing gum that’s been holding our product together, replacing it with a better thought out design and a more define module-to-module contract. Each time we come up with something it’s shot down because it’s too big a change. Now we’re basically reduced to putting a new layer of paint on our crumbling ball to hide the cracks that’ve been revealed with time.

I’ll be in Florida again come Thursday to attend another wedding. This time, however, I’ll be staying for a week. I’ll be in Melbourne for most of that time if anyone is in the area or wants to drop by.

I’ll be flying Southwest this time around. The best price I could find for a round-trip ticket was around $400, so I decided to use my free Southwest ticket voucher. I also have book of twelve drink coupons that came with the ticket voucher. Since this is probably the last time I’ll be flying Southwest (I’m doing Delta SkyMiles now) I’m going to use the drink coupons on this trip. It’s 3 coupons for a beer and 4 coupons for a mixed drink. I’m going with the mixed drinks. I’m taking suggestions for what I should order on the plane because I have no idea.

It seems like everyone that’s gotten married so far has registered at Target and Bed Bath & Beyond. Some day far in the distant future when I get married, I think I’ll register at less typical places. For example: Amazon.com and The Home Depot.

The world of Snow Crash draws nearer.

This question started with my new web project. I was testing some changes with the Zen-Lib Editor by trying to create a new one. In the process I needed to describe a type of word and discovered I don’t know the name of this grouping of word. I’m hoping someone here will be able to answer my question.

There is a family of nouns, let’s call the family ‘Y,’ that can not be used in the phrase “a/an Y.” For example, you can’t say “a bread,” “a gold,” or “a geese.” So, to refer to these nouns there’s another family of nouns, let’s call the family ‘X,’ that can be used in the phrase “a/an X of Y.” For example, “a loaf of bread,” “an ingot of gold,” or “a flock of geese.” So, what do you call X and Y?

One June 21, Scaled Composites will make a historic launch into space. They’ll be the first privately funded group to successfully build and launch a manned spacecraft. Very cool.

I wonder what this means to Space Adventures and the Russian space program. If Scaled is successful, they’ll have a relatively low-cost orbital launch vehicle. They’ll be able to offer the same basic adventure for a fraction of the cost.

Scaled isn’t the only group making an attempt at The X-Prize. Armadillo Aerospace, founded by John Carmack is also competing for the prize. They have a couple cute 3d animations of what they intend to do, complete with a cartoon armadillo. From the looks of their image gallery, however, it doesn’t look like they’ve made much progress. Perhaps Carmack is a bit busy trying to get Doom 3 released.