An interesting look at Nevada's tax structure [via Hal]. My parents still live in Nevada, and I knew it had no personal income tax, though I never realized that it was forbidden by the state constitution. It looks like Nevada needs to fix their tax code with the giant deficits they're running up.
As seen on Slashdot: Dell to drop floppy. Well, it's about time. I've been trying to wean my users from floppy drives for a while now. All of their machines are equipped with Zips, and all of them bought in the last 18 months have CD-RW drives as well, so there's really no reason to use floppies anymore, other than their mental attachment to them. It may be my imagination, but I swear that floppies are a lot shoddier now than they were back in the olden days. I used to use disks for years, now it seems that any disk I grab from my bin has a 75% chance of having errors on it, even if it's only a few months old and was never abused.
If this list of items sounds familiar to you, you probably grew up in a small town. Almost all of them rang true for me, my graduating class had 22 members, and we all did go to the same party afterwards. My town didn't even have a stop light to reference though, just a flashing light to mark the intersection with highway 18, and a 4-way stop in the middle of town.
I had an amazingly productive day today. I organized all thirty of the faculty requests for new machines, estimated their cost, and prioritized them all to determine which to fund, then I spent 3 hours cleaning my filthy office. Why the sudden burst of productivity? I think it's because I had music playing all day. Last night, I was moving some files around, and realized "Hey, you know, I've got a lot of good music on my work machine, I should listen to that more often", so I set up Windows Media Player 9 today, and just threw my entire CD collection (ripped to .wma files on my hard drive) at it, and set it to random play. Having some tunes playing really made me a lot more productive, or at least that's my excuse for when the neighboring faculty will inevitably ask me to knock it off. :)
The arching sky is callingSpacemen back to their trade.
All hands! Stand by! Free falling!
And the lights below us fade.
Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps the race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet.
We pray for one last landing On the globe that gave us birth; Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies And the cool, green hills of Earth.
--Robert A. Heinlein
