Funny Joke

Filed under: General News — ej2 at 12:42 pm on Friday, June 18, 2004

Here’s a funny joke I read today:

A cowboy was herding his herd in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure. Why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored.

He then accesses a Micrsoft SQL Server database through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says the cowboy.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re an IT consultant,” says the cowboy.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required.” answered the cowboy “You showed up here even though nobody called you, you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you don’t know anything about my business.”

“Now give me back my dog.”

It’s Here!

Filed under: Open Source Software — ej2 at 8:08 am on Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Firefox 0.9 is now available for download.

New features in Firefox 0.9:
* Extension Manager
* Theme Manager
* Data Migration/Import
* New Visual Theme
* Better Bookmarks
* Better Search
* Smaller Download
* Online Help

More Aggregators

Filed under: Software — ej2 at 9:55 am on Wednesday, June 9, 2004

If none of the aggregators I posted about yesterday float your boat, pcworld.com has an indepth review of 18 different rss readers.

Free RSS Aggregators Review

Filed under: Software — ej2 at 8:58 am on Monday, June 7, 2004

Sharp Reader
Good solid aggregator. Old school UI. Not a lot of features, not a lot of bugs.
Written in C#.

RSS Bandit
Cool UI. It has tabbed browsing (like Firefox). It has a few bugs, but it is open source so you can just jump right into the code and fix’em.

Abilon
I just downloaded it this morning, but I am very impressed so far. Lots of features (no bugs discovered yet). The UI is very similar to RSSBandit. It also has tabbed browsing with one difference: the browser tabs are the full width of the application window. Very cool! It’s a small download too, only 470kb.

It’s coming…

Filed under: Open Source Software — ej2 at 10:38 am on Friday, June 4, 2004

Firefox 0.9 is set to be released on 6/12 or 6/14.