I'm fed up with sick people in Japan.

I get sick, I stay home and try not to get others sick. My co−workers though come in to work sick therefore getting me sick.

2 days ago I brought back omiyage from Osaka. I put it on the team table. One of my sick co−workers comes over and coughs his sick all over the table. So much for eating the omiyage

Today I go to Subway Sandwich (one of the few places near my work). As the guy is making my sandwich I notice he's sick, sweating with a fever and coughing AS HE'S F*CKING MAKING MY SANDWICH!!! Rather than chew the guy out I just threw the sandwich away.

I get to work a different co−worker who had the good sense to stay home yesterday is in to day coughing and hacking non−stop.

Paul Graham recently posted an article entitled "What Business Can Learn from Open Source". I usually like to read what Paul Graham has to say but this time I think he really missed it completely.

He claims that amateurs in the form of open source developers and bloggers are showing that businesses and pros are not the right way to make stuff. He goes on to mention Firefox as one example. The problem is Firefox is not made by amateurs, it's made by paid employees, it just happens to be open source. So is Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, CVS, Subversion, Open Office and probably most other high profile open source projects. Maybe the gimp is made by amateurs?

I doubt many people know this story but back in the mid to late 80s there was compression program called ARC. It functioned similar to WinZip or WinRAR by taking a bunch of files, compressing them and bundling them up into a single file which made it easier to send across a modem and also take less time and therefore less money. It was THE standard. Everywhere you'd go there would be .ARC files.

I read somewhere on the net that Firefly was a really good new SciFi series so I checked it out.

Today Eric S. Raymond was interviewed on "Why we don't need the GPL anymore" so Let me just add this to the discussion.

I've been reading Steve Pavlina's self help site recently trying to figure myself out. His latest post is about Star Trek: The Next Generation as examples of they types of people to aspire to be.

It's an interesting universe and it would be nice to aspire to the but it only takes a little thought to realize it would never work.

No money? Then how do you decide who gets to live in the penthouse or beach front property and who gets a 1st floor apartment in downtown Detroit? You can't replicate those.

Or something like that.  My Japanese teacher brought in an article for me to read today about a survey some guy did from Nov˜Dec 2004.  The survey was about cell phone and computer use among elementary school students 4th grade and up through junior high and up to high school sophomores students throughout Japan.  All in all they got responses from about 15000 students.

Rhapsody upgraded their service today.  It's mostly great news.  They added local downloading of songs so you can listen offline ⭐️ and they added uploading songs to your portable music player.  They also added playing all your local music files (mp3, wma, aac, cda, etc) so that you can play all your music in one place.  But, they also made a few things less usable, at least for me.

A new book came out, the current headlines are "Watching TV makes you smarter" but I guess, according to the author of the book, the book focuses more on games rather than TV. It's just that more people watch TV so making a issue out of that he hopes will get more people interested in the book.

Why is it that anytime someone writes a piece of code and puts it on the net people say "you should open source it" and yet with nearly any other endevor people don't say "you should give it away"? Examples:

"Check out this house I just built". "Hey, that's awesome, have you considered giving it away to charity?"

"Check out this desk I just made on my own". "Wow, cool, have you considered giving it away?"

"I just finished writing my novel, it took 9 months. I'm so thankful my wife could support me".... "I just read it and it's great, have you considered make it availabe for free?"