Nerds @ palmdrive

This is a personal website. Don't ask too much, you won't get too much. This website is intended to become usefull, or maybe just cool one day. Unfortunately (for the website) I got twins a few years ago and am therefore busy with other more impatient stuff. Don't get me wrong, babies are a blessing. It's just that they require a little attention from time to time and have to share my free time with the various websites I am working on.

In terms of hosting, I went for the cheapest option: My garage. My DSL line is proudly offering you a 1MB upload capability. So yes, it is a bit slow, and a slashdotting will just kill it off.

On the left, you see the main menu. You can click on the various items.

• Guestbook. Who doesn't know what a guestbook is? You can write feedback there.
• Tools. Two tools as of today:
  • Units: Want to convert temperature, length, area, volume or mass between metric and us/imperial systems? This page has been specifically designed for you.
  • Calendar: Allow you to put alerts on a specified day and receive notifications two and one week before, the day before and the due day.
• Video. As of today, a couple of tests of MPEG encoders (MPEG-2 and MPEG-4).
• Shopping. A collection of my best and worst shopping experience in the SF Bay Area.
• User-Agent. A small piece of code provided for free, to detect Browser and OS out of a User-Agent String.
• Garbage. All the stuff I didn't know where to put. Links, mostly. And all the old pages in this site that are most likely not going to be maintained anytime soon and is not directly relevant to anything I want to do with this site.
• Visits. This free counter is provided by Web Counter

curtation, n.:
	The enforced compression of a string in the fixed-length field
environment.
	The problem of fitting extremely variable-length strings such as names,
addresses, and item descriptions into fixed-length records is no trivial
matter.  Neglect of the subtle art of curtation has probably alienated more
people than any other aspect of data processing.  You order Mozart's "Don
Giovanni" from your record club, and they invoice you $24.95 for MOZ DONG.
The witless mapping of the sublime onto the ridiculous!  Equally puzzling is
the curtation that produces the same eight characters, THE BEST, whether you
order "The Best of Wagner", "The Best of Schubert", or "The Best of the Turds".
Similarly, wine lovers buying from computerized wineries twirl their glasses,
check their delivery notes, and inform their friends, "A rather innocent,
possibly overtruncated CAB SAUV 69 TAL."  The squeezing of fruit into 10
columns has yielded such memorable obscenities as COX OR PIP.  The examples
cited are real, and the curtational methodology which produced them is still
with us.

MOZ DONG n.
	Curtation of Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da
Ponte, as performed by the computerized billing ensemble of the Internat'l
Preview Society, Great Neck (sic), N.Y.
		-- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary"