Live from Austin!

You know, when a LiveJournal user attempted suicide live on webcam, I was fairly sure LJ would get lots of (unwelcome) publicity from the story. I expected to see it on WIRED news, and cited as an example of the evil (or value) of the Internet in paper publications of all kinds.

But no. It seems that merely committing suicide live on webcam isn’t enough to engage the attention of a jaded public these days. “Webcam suicide? That’s, like, so 1999.” Apparently to get publicity these days you need to drown five children in a bathtub. Now there’s an idea for a reality TV series.

HomeRuns made my life just that little bit more pleasant. I bought groceries from them all the time. Then they changed their web site so you couldn’t show fat or sodium content, and couldn’t sort the lists of items, so I switched to Peapod. Now they’ve gone bust. I wonder how many other customers their boneheaded redesign drove away?

Russian experts have identified a serious flaw in Microsoft database software used to track nuclear warheads, which results in gradual data loss. The buggy software has been in use for over ten years. Los Alamos uses the same software, and has destroyed its paper records. Locating the ‘missing’ warheads will require a full inspection of all US nuclear sites, at an estimated cost of $1 billion. In the mean time, terrorists wanting to steal warheads can pick one of the ‘missing’ ones, and nobody will notice…