Commentary - blogs & posts
Writing - published works
Photo album - all the pix
Résumé - work history
Family - ancestry & stories
Miscellany - favorites & links
June 5, 1999 – Private company BourneSpace has announced a deal with Microsoft, under which it will work to make Windows 2000 the "preferred platform for the Bourne Shell, including proprietary extensions and inclusions." BourneSpace added that "Under Windows 2000, we hope that our Bourne Shell will provide the functionality that Unix users have only had for 30 years. Plus, we'll add command-line tab completion and command recall, things that Unix users have only had since tcsh or bash. Support for it will only be $20,000 a year." Perl originator Larry Wall added, "These people are used to working with Windows. You're doing them a favor by charging them for oxygen."
June 5, 1999 - Large Computer, a large company which makes many of the software products that people use, has announced that it will make the font "Times New Roman" open source. PR representatives from the company enthused that "our font was kind of buggy, so we're hoping that some loser code-jockeys eating Ramen noodles will take their time to fix it for us." The two remaining open-source enthusiast programmers who were not already committed to Linux, Sun's Java, Apple's Darwin and QuickTime, Corel's WordPerfect or Microsoft's P-FAT said, "We'll get around to it."
June 5, 1999 - Red Hat Linux and VA Linux, in a joint announcement today, declared that Linux's GNOME GUI environment is easy enough to use and modify that a two-year-old child can do it. "Linux is ready to take on the desktop," said a Red Hat representative, "because I'm assuming that most newborns can competently edit their .xinitrc profile." The VA representative noted, "There's not much need to work on the user interface, since we figure that almost anyone with a semi-functional right hemisphere knows how to compile Enlightenment and patch their kernels." A Red Hat spokesman noted, "Duh."
June 5, 1999 - Microsoft Overmind Bill Gates has issued a new set of directives to its lawyers, claiming that priorities have changed. MS Senior Counsel and Overlord Jerry Thomson said, "The overmind has issued new directives, that the foolish threat of the Terran anti-trust forces are to be ignored. We must provide the necessary units of control to keep our forces prepared for the onslaught of the Protoss. Over the next few weeks, we will be working to evolve our Drone lawyers and programmers into VBLisks, Infested Javans, and Perl Defilers."
June 5, 1999 – Steven Archibald has just won his third consecutive championship in the national Magic: The Gathering tournament. However, the 26-year-old champ, dressed in jean shorts, a Metallica T-shirt and Quake II baseball cap, reports that "this still just doesn't seem to be impressing the hotties."
Industry analysts are puzzled. "Archibald's string of championships in Magic, Half-Life and Myth II: Soulblighter, as well as his high ranking in Ultima, should have made him a major celebrity and gotten him major buns," says 24-year-old Chris Donnelson, online games analyst for Forrester Research. "But evidently, something's wrong. Perhaps the real lack of major hotties on battle.net has contributed to this." Other industry observers note that "they just don't get what's up with chicks."