Author: Bengt-Erik Norum

nicole and i have been planning a trip to europe for awhile. don’t remember exactly how i ran across these pictures, but the millau bridge in france has just been added to the list of places to visit. it’s a pretty suspension bridge with the deck hanging off one side of the towers. the tallest tower is…

nicole and i bought ourselves a “big-ass photo printer” for christmas. i spent some time looking for one that met our requiremnts. printer manufacturer must produce acid-free ink and photo paper for said printer. (nicole scrapbooks and this is important for “lasting memories” or something) printer must print b&w; text on letter sized paper pretty…

mt-blacklist installed. i’ve manually deleted over 40 comment spams in the past week; no more. it’s really sad how primitive the blog spam prevention stuff is. even the concepts adopted from email spam seem to have taken a turn for the unsophisticated. mt-blacklist is almost identical to the auto-fetch procmailrc scripts i had what 7-8 years…

omar posted about a very cool app in beta by microsoft (via the GIANT acquisition) for combatting spyware. as someone who’s reasonably savvy when it comes to keeping ie from accepting stuff it shouldn’t, i didn’t expect it to find anything. previous, even somewhat recent, runs of lavasoft’s ad-aware had only turned up doubleclick cookies and a few smaller names in…

living in the silicon valley for the past 7 years has clearly invaded the only remaining unconnected synapses (the rest were connected storing useless facts or soaked in good beer). fremont voters decided on measure FF in the november election. the election signs read “vote yes on measure 255” to me. even more sad, the second thought…

nicole and i had a conversation about how my grandmother used to say ‘your room looks like a tenement.’ i realized in the course of the discussion that i had no idea exactly what she meant. tenement connoted ‘poor,’ for nicole. if that’s a common definition, this could have been a somewhat offensive thing to…

upgraded to moveable type 3.14. mostly not stuff that will i’ll care about, but they moved to defaulting to full rss feeds, instead of just excerpts. that’ll keep me from having to hack the rss 1.0 feed to include formatting.

msn spaces (beta) went live. it’s not rocket science, but i’m suprised at how well it’s integrated with messenger (v7 beta). http://spaces.msn.com/

buying halloween candy at the grocery store, last night, i noticed an almost entire aisle of candy canes. dept. stores and “christmas” stores, sure… start in july. but grocery stores?! no wonder we have a hard time finding dried cherries for thanksgiving.

we’ll be famous. microsoft has a giving campaign once a year in which they encourage employees to donate time and money to charities. they match employees donations to tax-deductable organizations throughout the year, but make a concerted effort during the ‘give’ campaign and provide (albeit minor) incentives. banners in the hallways, placards on the tables…