This week , The Onion (”America’s Finest News Source”) has abandoned their usual parody format in favor of completely factual reporting of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. It is nice to see that they are willing to take things seriously in this time of need.

Remember the furor in 1997 over the talking Barbie that said (among other things) “Math is hard”? I never understood why that was controversial; math is hard. If you don’t think so, maybe you can drop by sometime to help me with partial differential equations. But I digress…

Maciej Bartosiak emailed me a new set of PNG image files for the Voyager calculators (HP-11C, HP-12C, HP-15C, HP-16C) which look even nicer, so they will be in the next release.

On the way to lunch with my coworkers this afternoon, I somehow managed to slam the tip of my left middle finger in the car door. It happened so quickly and hurt so much that I can’t recall the details of how I managed to do it. It severed most of the fingernail [...]

If you thought shrink-wrap software licenses were bad, now the Ninth Circuit has upheld “box-wrap” patent licenses. When Lexmark sells you a printer cartridge, the box is labelled “single use only”, and the court has decided that when you open the box, you are agreeing to the terms of this “license”.

Dan and I saw the film “2046“. I’d seen a review that said it was science fiction, but that was incorrect. Set in Hong Kong in the 1960s, the film is about a journalist who does write some science fiction, but the film itself is not really science fiction. However, the plot [...]

A CNN article describes how the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is adopting a new requirement that government documents be distributed only PDF and OpenDocument formats. The objective is to ensure that the documents are accessible to the public now, and will continue to be accessible in the future. There have been many known cases [...]