Some friends of mine were discussing the pro’s and con’s of college. My thoughts:

First, I’ll admit I have a degree.

However, it’s in Geography. I really enjoy the field, but I don’t want a job in it. GIS sucks.

Meanwhile, I used my spare time during college to immersively study PCs and networking. Now I work for a large Internet backbone access provider.

From what I’ve seen here, in this cube farm, all of the people in 5th level have degrees [in CS], and are paid very well to know what they’re doing. Most of the people in 4th level have degrees [some in English or Art History], but even the ones who don’t have degrees are very skilled, and have every intention of obtaining a degree. In my own group, most of the techs have degrees, but again, they may not be directly related to networking.

Have your friends ever received a phone call from Miss Cleo? Al Pacino? They can now with the Celebrity Soundboard!

and hilarity ensued.

Apple unveiled its new 10GB iPod today at Macworld Tokyo. For an extra $49, you can get your iPod personalized. Here’s a preview of my personalized iPod.

Look at the label on the last package you received from UPS, or at the back of your driver’s license. Chances are there’s a rectangular area on there containing tiny rectangles, circles, hexagons, or similar patterns. You’re looking at a two-dimensional barcode, which can store several kilobytes of data as compared to the roughly twelve bytes in the UPC barcode on that bottle of lotion you keep by the bed. Daniel sent me a story at the New York Times about a club in Boston that is pulling and storing the name, age, height, home address, and other specifics of its patrons. So I want to know just what is on the back of my own license. Here is a document that gives a brief introduction to the roughly twenty different types of 2D barcodes in common use today. Read more for further stuff as I find it.

Special thanks to Daniel for finding the bug in my Java code. Apparently the local javascript calls in my comment tags override my global javascript call in the page headers. All fixed now. Yay!

I read John Grisham‘s “The Summons” this week. He takes the reader back to Ford County, Mississippi — recall his first novel, “A Time to Kill.” Grisham writes characters in the South so well, without making them all ingrown fools… which may not seem so profound, particularly if you live here, but this is the first fictional book I’ve read in a while, so I’m accustomed to the tired Southern (and other) stereotypes of television.

2443 words that you can’t say on TV, by George Carlin.

Time for hot digital camera luv! Here are some of the newest photos of a few of the 404 geeks.

So, why would the Air Force want to mess with the weather?

If this is your car, please note: your car is not a Lotus. Nor is it a Ferrari, or even a mid-range Lexus. You drive a Saturn station wagon. Your car isn’t nearly important enough to park across two parking places.