Yesterday afternoon I went to check my RSS and Atom feeds at Bloglines, but it was no feeds for me. Just checked again and my list of feeds was still empty. But, that was in Firefox 3. All the feeds are showing in Safari. I disabled almost all my add-ons, but still no feed love.… Read More »
This past Monday I was one of the panelists for the CRMXchange Great Debate webcast on Speech Self Service. We covered the following topics, and a bit more, during the webcast: Enterprise and contact center trends that are driving new investments in IVR/speech applications Best practices for determining the most beneficial activities to offer your… Read More »
Some of wife’s and my greatest memories (and stories) come from our travels in Bolivia. Today’s NY Times has a really good article that focuses mostly on the salt flats near Uyuni and “The Death Road” from La Paz to Coroico. The Salar de Uyuni is so bizarre that I have always found it difficult… Read More »
This year I attended presentations by the EBay engineering team at the MySQL Conference and JavaOne in which they talked about some very interesting patches that had made to MySQL Server. I lamented the fact that they hadn’t open sourced it yet or contributed all the patches back to MySQL. Google has also announced some… Read More »
Linden Street Brewery in Oakland has been throwing open houses on every Friday for the last 6 months or so, with free beer (two beers, usually their Common Lager and a beer from Drake’s), free food (contributions to the basket by the taps help buy next week’s food), and a shared gas grill (my friends… Read More »
Today I needed to make the same kind of update to a field in a few rows of a large database table. There were too many rows to do it with a separate SQL update statement per row, so I hunted down the MySQL REPLACE function. Okay, it was only 6 rows, but I needed… Read More »
While analyzing a bunch of US Census data at work to build out an even more comprehensive geographical database for Voxify’s speech apps, I ran into an unexpected error. I wrote a Python script to parse a CSV file that contains population data from 2000 and estimates for 2001-2007. The code extracted the data I… Read More »
Yesterday I rode the 60-mile route of the 2008 Healdsburg Harvest Century bike tour. Some friends and I did it at a very leisurely pace, finishing in a little over 4 hours, which included 20-30 minutes hanging out at the rest stops shoving down piles of food. Or at least I was doing that. The… Read More »
Love this cartoon by Ben Sargent on the InBev acquisition of Anheuser-Busch. Over the last few months I’ve turned on quite a few friends to the rich and varied aroma and flavors of Belgian beers. Although it’s just a cartoon, I agree with William that you obviously shouldn’t stereotype the palette of a person based… Read More »
Last Friday my wife and I celebrated our 15th anniversary by going to Linden Street Brewery for their Friday afternoon open house and then the Oakland Museum of California for the Best of the East Bay party. Both were excellent. Some of our friends brought a penne pasta salad with fresh-grated parmesan and grilled tri-tip… Read More »