I was watching TV while holding Dinah this evening. One of the things I watched was That 70′s Show. I thought to myself, “Everything I ever needed to know about being a father, I learned from watching Red Forman.” Okay, not really, but Red kicks ass.
My favorite bit of Red Wisdom:
“You know, son, alcohol and women can be a lot of fun when used seperately. But when mixed, they can make you a real dumbass.”
Edward Kasner, with the help of his nephew, Milton Sirotta, coined the term googol. We all know it now to be 10100. Kasner’s relatives are supposedly upset that everyone’s favorite search engine Google is making money of the word he coined. Peri Fleisher, Kasner’s great-neice, is appearently talking to NPR and anyone who will listen about this injustice.
First note, in that second article, I love this quote: “I had heard of Google in 1988 before most people were aware of it. I didn’t know if the company was going to take off or not.” (Emphasis mine.) I’m sure this is a typing mistake, but its still funny to me.
Second note, this seems really silly to me. I guess the controversy comes to these two points: 1) In Google’s favor, Google spelled it differently. 2) In the family’s favor Google acknowledges that they based their name on this term, but doing a play on the word. The family might have some merit, but once a word is released into the lexicon for general use, its too late. Especially a seemlingly general term like googol. Unless you’ve trademarked it and defend that trademark, or something like that.
Being a geek, I knew the world googol long before Google came along. How many “normal” people did? Scrabble and Upwords players maybe. And that’s why the family is all ticked off.
Seems like a lot of sour grapes to me.
Looks like the Chicago area Fry’s is still moving forward. (Thanks to MARK NOTARUS for the link.)
From Suburban Chicago News:
Fry’s Electronics wants to broaden its national presence and hopes its first venture east of the Mississippi River will pay big dividends.
After almost two decades of operating exclusively in the western and southwestern United States, the consumer electronics retailer is ready to make its Midwest debut in Downers Grove. The store is near interstates 88 and 355 and was built on the site once occupied by Auto Nation.
Update:
Martin Maney has pointed out on the LUNI mailing list, that our friend whyme has a newer update at his site that says Fry’s is actually hiring.
Back when I went to UIUC it was the last days of USENET. (Not to say USENET is dead, but its certainly not the healthiest animal in the zoo.) The university had set up a number of local newsgroups to be used by classes, student organizations, and the like.
Of course, like any good local hiarchy, we had uiuc.general and uiuc.test. uiuc.test was a more or less underground forum for discussion. I hear its degenerated a lot since its haydays and when I started reading/posting it was already on its way down. uiuc.general is pretty much what it implies it was. I did a lot of writing to those newsgroups. Not all of them were pretty, not all of them were well written, a whole bunch of them were just plain stupid, but many of them were not bad. (A search of Google Groups can show you many of those or I’m sure you can ask Tim Skrivin, UIUC’s patron saint/wacko of USENET, for copies. uiuc.* wasn’t supposed to exist in the wild, but it made it out there anyway. )
In any case, I spent a lot of time doing somewhat creative writing. Most of the writing I do these days is either e-mail or more technical writing for work. I feel that I’ve let those skills atrophy. Those skills weren’t great in the first place, but its never to late to get them going again. I’m not sure I’ll ever just sit around and wax poetic like I have in days of yore, mostly due to the lack of time, but I think I’ll be more willing to do it now that I have a place to do so.
The only “problem” with the blog format is that its less inclusive of “the general public” than usenet is. To fully participate in everyone’s thoughts, I need to visited at least 20 sites, instead of those 20 people all posting in one place. Oh well, the world has moved on, and USENET has moved to the west, or something. 
Well, I’ve finally done it. I’ve done what I said I thought I wouldn’t do. I’ve set up a blog.
I’m not sure how often I’ll actually use it or what I’ll use it for, but I’ve had random things I’ve wanted to throw up, and a blog seems as good a place as any. In the past, I’ve resisted setting up a blog because I felt like I didn’t have much to say. I still don’t, but that hasn’t stopped millions of other people. As my friend Leah just said, I’m such a conformist.
However, not too conformist, it seems. I’ve deceided to try WordPress, just to be different. (It came to my attention thanks to slashdot.) Many people I know are using Moveable Type, but I’ve had this weird aversian to it. I also thought about writing my own, but that was just too much reinventing of the wheel.