Charles on… anything that comes along

Fun times at the Gulker household, where the bedroom is 1 mile east of Woodside, California. Linda asked me if I’d felt the earthquake when we rose this morning at 5:30. I hadn’t, but she was quite sure… and the ornamental pillows from the bed, that spend the night on the rocking chair, were on the floor. Sure enough, USGS recorded 2 small temblors overnight, magnitude 1.3 and 2.3 centered ‘1 mile east of Woodside.’

Impressive… that’s some one-upmanship, to get the USGS involved. “Did the earth move for you too?” “Hang on, I’ll check with the USGS.”

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Orange, are you there? Because soon I'm not going to be with you. (30 January 2007; score: 30.17%)
• Moving to a Mac, and other news in the Indie (17 August 2004; score: 26.81%)
• Dialup is a pain (5 July 2006; score: 22.36%)

Pretty much every time I’ve seen Bill Gates do a demo with some cutting-edge technology, it’s gone wrong. A few years ago he was doing a talk at the AAAS in Seattle showing off an eye-movement tracking system; didn’t work. Rehearsal be damned! This guy can zap a computer at 20 paces! He’s fortunate he’s not Stephen Hawking - people would be saying “It’s a pity his voice machine doesn’t work, he looks like he’s got a lot to contribute.”

The latest example came in the midst of what sounds like a jawbreaking (as in rigor mortis “keynote” speech at the CES show in Las Vegas - his seventh - which was marked by BSODs and witty comments from the talk-show guy who was being his sparring partner. Best of the reports is Iain Thomson’s: Blue screen of death crashes Gates at CES - vnunet.com. Read it and weep (with laughter).

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Why Bill Gates's CES speech had bugs: not actually Windows (well, not all) (13 January 2005; score: 59.15%)
• Apple vs Apple: now read the 1991 agreement (14 September 2004; score: 37.16%)
• "The state of Windows" (27 October 2004; score: 35.87%)