How much are you worth?... The more honestly you answer the questions, the more realistic the dollar value returned will be.

LANCE IS NUMBER ONE! TOUR DE FRANCE 2001/... For the third successive year, Lance Armstrong has proven that he’s the most complete cyclist of July. And in the minds of most riders – particularly the likes of, Jan Ullrich, who also has just one focus for the 11-month season – the American is the most accomplished rider of the current generation. Lance’s hat-trick win came through consistency. This year, however, it was also a stage-winning blitz – two time trials and two mountain-top victories – which confirmed the dominance of the rider who, in his own words, wants to be remembered as a cancer survivor. Last year Lance came back for his second consecutive win after fighting testicular cancer into remission.

Lance's story is available in: It's Not About the Bike : My Journey Back to Life.

Old Friends Found Again... More than just a hyper text link - a link to my past and hopefully to my future as well. Friends from the sixties and seventies, rediscovered. Mike's site contains, among other things, many interesting links to gardening information, haiku and Zen.

Big Ball of Mud... A BigBallOfMud">BIG BALL OF MUD is haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape and bailing wire, spaghetti code jungle. We’ve all seen them. These systems show unmistakable signs of unregulated growth, and repeated, expedient repair. Information is shared promiscuously among distant elements of the system, often to the point where nearly all the important information becomes global or duplicated. The overall structure of the system may never have been well defined. If it was, it may have eroded beyond recognition.

Still, this approach endures and thrives. Why is this architecture so popular? Is it as bad as it seems, or might it serve as a way-station on the road to more enduring, elegant artifacts? What forces drive good programmers to build ugly systems? Can we avoid this? Should we? How can we make such systems better?

Talking Moose : Moose Sales Strategy...Ever wonder what a saleperson does? The Moose says, "You know, we all sell. Some sell our bodies. Some sell our minds. Some sell products. Some sell other stuff. So, why do we spend so little time studying the sales process?"

How Californians got burned... The state electricity system is in a shambles, and the worst may be ahead. How did things get to this point? - - - Sacramento Bee. An excellent article on how just about everyone involved in California's power "deregulation" dropped the ball.

Here's a link to free online courses offered by HP.... NOTE! THESE CLASSES ARE NOT HP SPECIFIC. Classes are self-paced, instructor-led, and can be accessed 24 hours a day. List chages each month - some courses added and some removed.

Le Tour... Lance Armstrong leads Jan Ullrich Overall By 6'44"! Lance Armstrong's 1'38" advantage over Jan Ullrich in the 18th stage has pushed the American's overall advantage over the German to 6'44". Joseba Beloki's 6th place today - 2'08" ahead of the rider who started the day in 3rd overall, Andrei Kivilev - is enough to put the ONCE rider in 3rd overall. If the current top 3 hold their advantage through to Paris (as is highly expected), it will be only the second time in Tour history that the same three riders have finished in first, second and third! Go Lance!

DaveNet : Transcendental Money... How much money do you need to feel secure? Ask this question in different parts of the world, and you'll get different answers. In a poor country like India, it might be $1 million. In poorer parts of the US, $3 million. In California where you can hardly throw a pot sticker into a crowd without hitting a billionaire, the answer might be $25 million.

Test Your Temperament... According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, in psychology, temperament is the aspect of personality concerned with emotional dispositions and reactions and their speed and intensity; the term often is used to refer to the prevailing mood or mood pattern of a person. The notion of temperament in this sense originated with Galen who developed it from an earlier physiological theory of four basic body fluids (humours): blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. According to their relative predominance in the individual, they were supposed to produce, respectively, temperaments designated sanguine (warm, pleasant), phlegmatic (slow-moving, apathetic), melancholic (depressed, sad), and choleric (quick to react, hot tempered).

Foot-and-Mouth First Virus Unable To Spread Through Microsoft Outlook... Atlanta, Ga. (SatireWire.com) — Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center today confirmed that foot-and-mouth disease cannot be spread by Microsoft's Outlook email application, believed to be the first time the program has ever failed to propagate a major virus

Oliver "Ollie" Yantis - Old West Gravesites... Yantis became a member of Bill Doolin's gang, The Wild Bunch, by request of Bitter Creek Newcomb. It was rumored that Newcomb had a thing for Yantis' sister.

I send you this file in order to have your advice. ... Does that line sound familiar? If so, you're one of the tens of thousands of Internet users around the world who have received the SirCam virus since it was released into the wild last week. BEWARE! This one isn't some cookie-cutter toy from the script-kiddies it was created by a coder who knows what he's doing. Insideous and diabolical come to mind.

New shirt or cloth keyboard?... U.K. startup ElectroTextiles has demonstrated a keyboard made out of a soft, water-resistant cloth--something the company claims could be a breakthrough for mobile computing and text messaging.

George Chamberlain..states in his column "By George" for July 25, 2001, "Philip Morris deserves an award for having the nerve to suggest that early deaths of cigarette smokers is good for the economy. The tobacco company issued a report saying the Czech government saved the equivalent of $30 million in health care, pension and housing expenses for the elderly as a result of "cost savings due to early mortality" of smokers."

HP Awarded Key Molecular Electronics Patent... Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HWP) announced it has been awarded a key patent that could remove a major obstacle to making molecular-scale computing a reality.. "We have a strategy to reinvent the integrated circuit with molecular rather than semiconductor components," said HP Fellow Williams, director of quantum science research, HP Labs. "We've received two key patents and have several more pending that we believe will eventually enable computers to be millions of times more efficient than they are today."

Book Review: XML for Bosses... In XML and the Enterprise for Managers author Benoît Marchal doesn't try to be all things to all people. He writes for the CTO and project leader market. In the short time it takes you to read Marchal's thirty-five page piece, you'll know what XML is, what standards have been built around XML, how to apply XML in publishing and development, and a little bit about parsers, the Document Object Model, Document Type Definition and XML Schemas.

Fuel Cell Applications The emergence of fuel cell applications in transport, industry, the home, and even consumer products, is already hinting at the enormous potential of this technology. Honda R&D director Takeo Fukui projects: "Fuel cell vehicles will probably overtake gasoline-powered cars in the next 20 to 30 years." Ford Motor Company Chairman William C. Ford, Jr. said last year: "I believe fuel cell vehicles will finally end the hundred-year reign of the internal combustion engine as the dominant source of power for personal transport-ation." Fuel cell manufacturer PlugPower, in combination with General Electric, is offering home scale fuel cell systems on a pilot basis. And micro fuel cells are under development that could even power laptop computers and cell phones.

The Buckminster Fuller Institute ...A geodesic dome is the only man-made structure that actually becomes stronger as it increases in size. It's only one thing designed by "Bucky".

News: Hitachi to cash in on money chip... Hitachi has developed a chip that could be woven into paper money to help identify counterfeits, and which could also have wide ramifications for identification and surveillance technologies.

Joe Burns, Ph.D..-.And Remember: Mind your Ps and Qs! No matter which history of the term you give, someone has a different one they proclaim is correct. There are two that are most often stated as being the correct history. One is that Ps and Qs stood for pints and quarts. Barkeeps would keep a tab of drinks by marking P and Q down on a sheet. So, to mind your Ps and Qs was to keep an eye on what you drank. Tell that to someone. More than likely you'll get that that is wrong. He or she will most likely tell you the term came from early printing whereas the letters were placed, one by one into a plate that was then loaded into a press. The problem was that all the letters were backwards so they would print correctly on the paper. To mind the Ps and Qs was to make sure the correct letter was being used. Those are just the big two. Another is that the term is a shortened version of "Mind your Please and Thank-you" used in order to remind children to be polite. What about the theory that is came from the French? The term might have been from dance suggesting to students to mind their figures pieds and queues. I actually found seven different theories in just a quick look around.

Opensecrets.org--Money in politics data... Can big campaign contributions determine which bills become law? Find out where special interest groups stand on important issues, which elected officials received campaign contributions from those groups, and how Congress is handling related legislation.

Nolo Self-Help Law ... "When it comes to self-help legal stuff, nobody does a better job than Nolo." -- USA Today

A Busy Developer's Guide to SOAP 1.1... This document describes a subset of SOAP 1.1 that forms a basis for easy interoperation between different environments. When we refer to "SOAP" in this document we're referring to this subset of SOAP, not the full SOAP 1.1 specification.

Adobe helps graphic designers turn ideas into art. Adobe also helps turn security experts into felons.... On 16 July 2001, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested by federal agents in Las Vegas, Nevada. His crime: pointing out major security flaws in Adobe PDF and eBook software.

Computers are useless, they can only give you answers.... Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Case highlights law's threat to fair-use rights (7/18/2001)... Under the DMCA, it's a crime to spread the word about technology that maintains your fair-use rights. One of these days, it may be a crime to talk about anything that displeases the control freaks who run the entertainment and software industries.

Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches... Strawberry Pop Tarts may be a cheap and inexpensive source of incendiary devices. Toasters which fail to eject Pop Tarts cause the Pop Tarts to emit flames 10-18 inches in height.