Since the Earth orbits the sun elliptically and therefore a) accelerates and b) has to turn about a degree more than a full circle to bring the sun into the same position, sunrise and sunset are not symmetrical around local noon. Here in Hawaii, the sun set today at 5 …

In Vincent Maraia's The Build Master (recommended) there's a helpful little chart on the size in lines of code for Windows NT:

Ship Date Product Dev Team Size Test Team Size Lines of code (LoC) Jul-93 NT 1.0 (released as 3.1) 200 140 4-5 million Sep-94 NT 2 …

At the PDC, I bought a bluetooth "Freedom" keyboard, unaware that at the time there were no drivers available for the Tablet PC. Although Freedom eventually released a driver, the keyboard is unacceptable for typing.

I then purchased a wireless keyboard from Motion (reduced to \$89). It arrived promptly but …

My latest column for SD Times discusses Windows Live.

According to Russ Beattie, an average of 3,700 "ad unit impressions" per day results in around \$111.79 in revenue. I recently added Google AdSense text ads on my Web pages, and will be interested in seeing the results, since I know that most people read this site in …

Project Gotham Racing 3 has an undocumented (as in, not in the documentation, not as in "unknown") split screen mode that allows head-to-head racing on a single XBox360 with multiple controllers. At the opening screen select "More" and then "Change Profile" and, start hitting "A" on the other controllers to …

OptionsScalper's kid got a 3.93GPA on her report card and he feels relieved she won't be a hairdresser. I once heard a computer programmer testifying in his bankruptcy hearing that his ex-as-of-last-month-wife was a hairdresser in Palo Alto and made \$160,000 per year. (I was there under the …

Tina's been a little, errr ... skeptical ... about how enjoyable it is that our living room now reverberates to the sound of up to 8 Ferraris simultaneously trying to negotiate a corner in downtown New York City (in surround sound!). So I thought I'd investigate XBox360 as a media extender.

First …

A few weeks ago I bought a Griffin RocketFM Transmitter, a super-clever USB gadget that allows me to stream music from my desktop machine (in my office) to my living room stereo system. It works perfectly -- I can listen to KEXP, podcasts, what-have-you. The fidelity, I'm sure, isn't what you'd …

So my determination "not to open the XBox 360 until I finished my month's work" lasted about 24 hours. Yesterday was Thanksgiving, for heaven's sake! A holiday! Heck, I wrote 700 words in the morning. Only 3,500 to go before next Wednesday. I'm cruising, for heaven's sake.

The first …