Morons in the News: Just In Case You Doubted the Hatred of Far-Right Loonies…. Ann Coulter, a far-right kook, believes that the U.S. should execute “American Taliban” John Walker to send a message to “liberals.” [Morons Dot Org]

I just got back from dinner with 3 elderly programmers, all old-time IBMers who moved to Boca in the early PC days. They had some fascinating stories about working on machines like the IBM 650, which used drum storage. One of them talked about writing his code so the inner loop was run from the precious core memory instead of a spinning drum, so it ran at incredible speeds.

Quite a different world than we have now, working with 1GB of RAM and 100GB of hard drive space & CPU speeds above 1 GHz. I only started programming around 1980 & I felt like a newbie talking to them.

Morons in the News: Roy Moore Denies Lesbian Mother Child Custody, Gives Kids to Abusive Father. “The Ten Commandments Judge” strikes again… [Morons Dot Org]

14843 ª February 16 10:57 AM. Operation No Living Thing Part of the larger website-Postcards from Hell- a website of A. Raffaele Ciriello’s photojournalism. I still can not believe what happened in Sierra Leone actually happened, much less remains obscure to most people. These are photos of some people who survived. Their quiet dignity is beyond words. [MetaFilter]

I first heard of the events in Sierra Leone years ago when Dr. Harding, an executive of Seeq Technologies, went home to look for his family and lost everything there. I don’t know if he’s safe, but it’s pretty doubtful.

I just made a new CSS theme based on A Theme Apart manila theme. You can download it here.

I got an email from a former co-worker at Teaching Network. He was laid off last week, along with some of the other remaining people. The company ran out of money, but they’re going to try to keep the web site running another 3 weeks or so. I was hoping they’d be able to survive.

I lost my job there in September (the week before 9-11), along with about half the company when the death of one of the partners caused a financial crisis.

Signs of Intelligence: Colin Powell Encourages Condom Use, Fundies Upset. “Forget about conservative ideas”, said Powell. Fundies took offense. [Morons Dot Org]

I wonder if those conservative tight-asses remember what it was like to be a kid & if they abstained.

I’m now officially a home owner. I closed on my new home today. I paid a shitload of money, got writers cramp from signing documents, and left with the keys and a gift basket. Starting next month I’ll never pay rent again! The mortgage payments are much less than the rent on my current tiny apartment.

Ken Bereskin from Apple asks what apps are in your Dock right now?

Thought you might be interested in the apps that I have on the Dock of my Titanium PowerBook. Here’s the current collection:

• Finder, Mail, Internet Explorer, Sherlock, OmniWeb, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, Preview, TextEdit, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, OmniOutliner, Watson, LaunchPad, XDarwin, BBEdit, Radio, Apps folder, Downloads folder, Projects folder.

What’s on yours? [Ken Bereskin’s Radio Weblog]

Here is what is running on my Dock at the moment, from left to right (* denotes what is running):

*Finder, *PowerMail, Palm Desktop, BrainForest Professional, Fire, Adium, *Radio, Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, *Mozilla, *URL Manager Pro, iTunes, *AppleWorks, *TextEdit, *GraphicConverter, *iPhoto, BBEdit, RBrowser, VNCThing, *CopyPaste, *Terminal, Internet Connect, Disk Copy, Script Editor, Epson Printer Utility, Quicken Deluxe 98, Microsoft Word 98, Photoshop 6, System Preferences, Apps folder, Documents folder.

What do you have in your Dock today? [Mac Net Journal]

Here’s what I have in mine:

Finder, Internet Explorer, Entourage X, ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Mozilla, iTunes, QuickTime Player, System Preferences, Terminal, Palm Desktop, Radio UserLand, DragThing, BBEdit, CodeWarrior IDE, Favorites Folder

I keep the dock on the right side of my screen, where it takes up less usable space and doesn’t get in the way.

What Is .NET, Anyway?. Almost drowned out in the din generated by Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET developer tools

release was a question that many ordinary computer users are asking: What is .NET

(pronounced dot-NET), anyway? Matthew Berk, site technologies and operations analyst at

Jupiter Media Metrix, gave NewsFactor a one-word description of .NET — mystical. [osOpinion]