Hoowee! Even with a bad cold, New Year's in Hawaii is a special thing: with July 4th, it is one of 2 days per year that fireworks are legal. I imagine that it's the Asian influence on the society, but for whatever reason, New Year's is much louder than the …

According to InformationWeek, Umakant Sharma, seeded 2nd in a tournament in New Delhi, was caught with a Bluetooth headset stitched into a cap that he wore "pulled down over his ears" during competition. According to the All India Chess Federation, accomplices fed him moves from a chess program. He's been …

OK, here's some trivia for you: a case fan situated 17 miles from the epicenter of a 6.6 earthquake can be shaken lose to the extent of creating a significant rattle.

Now you know.

That sucked. We're directly onshore from the epicenter, as we understand it.

We're okay, though, and the house (pretty incredibly, given the experience) doesn't seem to have any structural damage. Much more extensive blog posting to come.

Power is on (for the moment?) and water is back on.

On Queen …

I've been writing a series of articles for DevX on concurrent programming. The final installment was supposed to be "Multicore for multimedia." Plan A was to speed up the MAD (MPEG Audio Decoder) processing library using OpenMP. That went well enough except for the fact that the code was so …

"Dog The Bounty Hunter" Duane Chapman, his son Leland (who we see around town), and Tim ("Youngblood") have been arrested and are facing extradition to Mexico. They are charged with kidnapping (bounty hunting being illegal in Mexico) a man who's now serving a 124-year sentence for rape. I wonder if …

BookMooch is a good idea -- give a book, get a point, get a book, take a point -- but the logistics proved too off-putting for me. Not that they were egregious, but given my life, the last thing I need is another errand on my "to do" list.

Perhaps you've noticed the "Universal Service Fee" on your telephone bill. This is a government-mandated subsidy to support phone access in rural areas. Fair enough, perhaps. Here in Hawaii, SandwichIsles Communications Company receives more than \\(16M dollar per year to service... are you ready? ... 1,238 customers. That's \\)13,345 …

Eric Sink, who among other things wrote "The Business of Software," says I seem to "really understand both technology and business at a deep level." Me? Understand business? Lord, no! The industry, I pay attention to, but I'm an insanely bad businessman. I've flirted with personal bankruptcy, been a VP …

If you've been following my "Offtopic" or "Hawaii" topics, you've been hearing me lament what it's been like assembling a non-standard desktop machine (dual processors, huge hard drives, All-in-Wonder 800XT) by mail order when you live 3,000 miles from the mainland. Well, aside from cleaning up the boxes everywhere …