A simply beautiful blog template here.
Government projects are not all doomed to failure and heinous cost overruns.
I went to see Mostly Martha tonight. It would have been a really great date movie, if it wasn't for the fact that a friend of mine, whose opinion I respect, told me that movies are terrible dates, and also that I don't know any girls who want to date me.
A friend of Bug Selig's spotted David Wells at a restaurant.
Let me take a moment to tell you about AOL and the great instant messaging wars. Does anybody remember the uproar when Microsoft tried to make MSN Messenger interoperable with AOL Instant Messenger? I do! AOL immediately modified AIM and decried Microsoft's attempts to "hack" the system. Microsoft soon gave up after taking the uncharacteristic position that all Instant Messaging software should support "open" standards and adhere to a common framework. AOL eventually agreed to join an industry wide effort to formulate instant messaging standards. In fact, as part of the conditions of Time Warner's merger with AOL, the mergedcompany was required to open its instant messaging network. AOL instead closed its network and promised to comply as soon as its engineers had finished making the necessary modification for opening the network. We are still waiting.
Into this mess walked the good folks are Cerullian studios. Their product, freely available from trillian.cc, is a universal instant messaging client that can operate on: AIM, MSN Messenger, IRC, ICQ, and Yahoo Messenger networks. People (like me for instance) who before had to open multiple im clients to talk to all their friends, could now talk to anybody from one Instant Messaging client. Best of all, users could stick it to AOL Time-Warner - who now owns AIM and ICQ. What is more, it gave harried AIM users an attractive alternative to the notoriously buggy AIM client. AOL constantly updates AIM now to introduce incompatibilities with Trillian, in contrast to Microsoft who actually notifies Cerullian of possible problems in Trillian and provides information on how to interact with MSN Messenger!
Here is an example of Microsoft playing the good guy and AOL playing the bad guy. The problem is that AOL pretty much always plays the bad guy and gets away with it.