Pipes Network Clog Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.

Voting

I don't know how accurate this information is, but it is rather scary if it is true. Makes me wonder how corrupt or whatever the government actually is. This is just an excerpt of the first 4, there are 20 in the article (link below).

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.

2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the US voting machine industry.

3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

link

GPS

The one thing I wish my truck had that STILL isn't offered yet, is factory GPS Navigation. It is much more common in other countries such as Europe thus far, and they are apparently still working out some of the bugs...

According to The Times, drivers going through the village of Luckington have driven right into the river by following their navigation systems.

via AutoBlog.com <link>

Some people are apparently too stupid for GPS. Hopefully I'm not one of them.

Finals Week

One final down, one to go. It sucks having a finals and your normal life meshed in with it. Maybe its the pressure of having to do well in Grad School or else work doesn't pay for it (which means $$ out of my pocket) and it doesn't count towards my degree (which means more time in school). Whatever it is, I can't wait till its over. Then I have a week off before I start all over again. The good news though, is that my summer class is supposedly an 8 week course, which means I have 2 full months off before fall semester. That will be nice, I'll actually get to enjoy the summer for a little while this year. Just not the first 8 weeks of it.

Google Calendar API

Google has now released the API to go with Google Calendar. This means all sorts of third party applications are going to start popping up, integrating it with Outlook and other existing products. Since classes are done one week from today (only for a week though), I will hopefully have some time to play with it and maybe create a little something myself. I would like to create a simple desktop application to allow viewing events without getting onto the web. This can already be done with the iCal and XML feeds, but something a little more useful would be nice. We'll see if I can find the time...

Google Calendar API link.

Bad Drivers

Ever wonder why some people drive like they do? Maybe its the norm where they came from. Take a look at this, it explains a lot.

Google Calendar Review

So I had some time to play with Google Calendar over the 4-day weekend that has finished. I decided that I am in love. Not really, but it is as good as I had hoped it would be. It is VERY easy to import calendars from programs such as outlook or thunderbird. You can even subscribe to iCal feeds and view those calendars on top of yours so you don't have to add the events to yours manually (which is useful if you, for example wish to add the 2006 Purdue Football Schedule). Importing all of your old calendar data allows it to be searchable as well, which is nice if you are trying to find an old appointment.

It even has the ability to email you reminders, or send them to your mobile phone.

You'll have to play with it yourself to get the full effect, but lets just say I no longer need outlook or my PDA as far as I'm concerned...

IT FINALLY HAPPENED!!!

Google has finally released "Google Calendar". I haven't had a chance to do anything with it yet, but I will be in the next few days. It looks pretty cool, and has gotten some good reviews. I've been waiting for this for a long time, I hope it does not disappoint.

Check it out here.

Software Engineer

While I was eating today I stumbled across an article I thought was very interesting.

Directly from slashdot:

"CNNMoney and Salary.com have ranked the title of Software Engineer the best job in America. Computer IT Analyst also ranks 7th on the list, placing both technology positions in the top 10. From the article: "Designing, developing and testing computer programs requires some pretty advanced math skills and creative problem-solving ability. If you've got them, though, you can work and live where you want: Telecommuting is quickly becoming widespread.""

Good news for those of use who are software engineers. Here is a direct link to the cnn article, which lists the top 50 jobs (including average salaries, and annual openings):

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bestjobs/

Funny lecture slide

OK, I wasn't really paying attention while I was watching my online lecture this morning, but this slide caught my eye:

I wonder if he wrote this slide or just happened to copy it from online somwhere? I didn't hear any snickers from the people in class, but I thought it was pretty funny.

Passwords

There is an interesting article I just read about password strength. It gives estimated times to "crack" a password based on what it contains (numbers, letters, different case, etc). Pretty interesting.

http://www.lockdown.co.uk/?pg=combi&s=articles

For those of you using lowercase only password with no numbers, it doesn't look good.

Explain this to me...

OK, maybe I'm just dumb. Explain to me how the oil companies are not price gouging all of us that buy gas? Consider this. Exxon Mobil made 36 billion dollars last year alone. That is more than any other U.S. company in a single year in history. Also consider that their revenue increased by 126 billion dollars from 2004 (that is more than all but the 8 biggest companies in America have for revenue figures in an entire year). That is enough to move them ahead of Wal-Mart to the #1 spot in the Fortune 500.

Chevron (now #4 in the Fortune 500, was #6 last year) also increased their revenue from last year by 77 billion dollars.

Conoco Phillips (now #6, was #7) increased their revenue by 67 billion dollars (up 40% from last year).

Valero Energy (now #15, was #34) increased their revenue from last year by 44 billion dollars (that is more than double what it was in 2004).

I'm sure there are more as well, but those are the ones I noticed quickly. Look for yourself at the 2004 results compared to the 2005.

Again, maybe I'm dumb, but when the oil companies all have record profits and revenue growth and gas prices have increased by record amounts, wouldn't that explain why we pay so much at the pump?

Funny sign

Is it just me, or is this a bad name for a crematory?

I took this picture a couple weekends ago in northwest Indiana. I had seen it before and thought it was funny, and we happened to be driving by with a camera so here it is.

Google Romance

For those of you lonely souls out there, Google has just released Google Romance.

Directly from the site:

Google Romance is a place where you can post all types of romantic information and, using our Soulmate Search™, get back search results that could, in theory, include the love of your life. Then we'll send you both on a Contextual DateTM, which we'll pay for while delivering to you relevant ads that we and our advertising partners think will help produce the dating results you're looking for.

Check it out.