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March 28, 2009

Somebody Has a New Toy!

Somebody at work (not me!) just got a new set of wheels:

The windshield has this sticker which we thought was amusing:

Posted by AdamBa at 07:50 PM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2009

Quoted in "Planet Google"

Somebody at work was listening to the audio version of the book Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know and they heard my name mentioned. The author, Randall Stross, was quoting the third paragraph of this blog entry about how it is silly to demand that employees use your own products; if they use your competitor's products, it's a sign you should work harder on your own. He also quoted the first commenter from that same post.

The person who lent me the audio book has his name featured in this video (you have to look carefully to see it). I assumed that he was somehow involved in working on that product, but he said he wasn't. I guess his name appears on the "approved name list". I thought I had blogged about this but I couldn't find it...Microsoft maintains a list of "approved names" which you can use if you want to, say, want to create an ad that show a screen shot of a bunch of database rows. The names are all employees who have agreed to have their names used this way; you can request to be added to the list if you want. One time I arrived at the airport with my family and was greeted by a giant Windows Mobile poster that had my name included in a contact list. I know it was me (not the other guy with the same name) because right after it was the name of somebody else I worked with on a project in 1995, when our name were presumably harvested. I actually don't recall giving permission, but I assume I did (the kids were amused seeing my name up there, so I'm perfectly happy to be included).

Posted by AdamBa at 10:07 PM | Comments (1)

March 15, 2009

GCKSS, Jr. Is In!!

I realize this isn't quite momentous enough to end a 3-week blog gap, but yesterday Alabama State beat Jackson State 65-58 to win the Southwestern Athletic Conference tournament and an automatic bid in the NCAA men's basketball championship.

This means that the awesomely named Grlenntys Chief Kickingstallionsims, Jr., their starting center, will be playing in the tournament. Even better, the Chattahoocheeans (actually the Hornets) may be in the Tuesday play-in game, which means a national audience would be treated to announcers saying things like "And Kickingstallionsims grabs the rebound!"

Kickingstallionsims, who goes by "Chief", is 7 foot 1, so let me emphasize that I am not making fun of his name. He also wears size 18.5 shoes and can touch the net flat-footed. Here's some discussion of his first name; it's Navajo and means means "strength of falling rock". Sports Illustrated evidently called it the best name in college basketball, although it seems like this is a bit of an exaggeration of an offhand comment on this page. That page has an expired link to his bio at Stetson University, where he played before Alabama State; I was amused to note that presumably for technical reasons, involving their IT department failing to consider the scenario of a player with more than 12 letters in his last name, the page was called "kickingstall.php".

Posted by AdamBa at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)