An Exercise in Avoiding Boredom

Great advice from Ward Cunningham, slightly reworded:
“Where others call for discipline, look for opportunity.”
Taken from his Twitter page http://twitter.com/WardCunningham

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After the ant invasion a while back, today’s rain storm brought out the critter shown in the video below. Isn’t it cute? I just wished it would be spreading its cuteness elsewhere.

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Tomorrow, Stanford will announce a new and revised financial aid program. Following Harvard’s recent announcement, Stanford’s revised financial aid program will make attending the farm significantly more affordable. Wow!! I should stop being cynical about this, it is a great move! Looks like you are home-free if you earn less than $100K a year and [...]

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I’m visiting my parents over the weekend and when they heard that I was learning Chinese, they posed the following challenge to me: Whether I’d be able to translate for them the text printed or painted on the following plate:

I think I can recognize only about one character! I’m not even sure this is traditional [...]

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Wow, Larry Lessig weighs in on the Hilary vs. Obama race in the U.S. democratic primaries. He wonders about Hilary’s ethics and supports Obama for his general ethical stance. Listening to his videocast reminds me of two old English proverbs that still ring true today:

“If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” [...]

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“Hi,” said the beautiful woman in front of my hotel room, “I’m Sasha.” Confused and somewhat hesitatingly I answered: “I didn’t ask for anyone.” “Oh,” she said, looking over to the room number. She smiled both amused and apologetically: “I got the wrong room.” And left me to my solitary night.
(Found when cleaning up old [...]

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I sincerely hope that robots in our future are closer than they may appear right now. After the demise of my Roomba I have my eyes set on the guy (gal?) depicted below. (Photo courtesy of Anybots, another Stanford startup. Makes me wonder why I am where I am.)

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Here another piece of spam, not nearly as funny as the previous one. What’s remarkable is that it was sent to the email address “doostang.com@riehle.org”, which is an address that I handed out exactly once, namely when registering at doostang.com, a recruiting website, back in 2006. Looks like they got cracked or don’t take their [...]

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Today, I received the appended spam at work—in German! Looks like someone scooped up German SAP email addresses. What they are offering are “warez” i.e. pirated software for cheap. I wonder whether they are offering SAP’s business applications suite? For EUR 400, perhaps?

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