19. November, 1999 - Sunday will be the 2-year anniversary of Dave's Picks.

• Also of note today, today is the last odd day we'll see until 1-1-3111 (that is, where all the digits in the date are odd). The next even day will be 2-2-2000, which will be the first since 8-28-888. Anyway, it's a good excuse to celebrate today, since it's the last odd day we're likely to see.
• The San Francisco Chronicle has a series called The Dark Side of Silicon Valley, which starts with Phantom Riches, a story about how many tech companies cook the books to get high valuations in the stock market, and how Bill Lerach takes them on. Lerach is protrayed as more of a hero than I'm comfortable with (how the heck can they praise him for winning a $5 million lawsuit against Seagate, when the lawyers took $4.26 million (that's 85.2% of the settlement) of the judgement?), but the series sounds good overall.
• Why I Love Gema. Gema is a text-manipulation language. Looks like it kicks butt over perl, sed and awk.
• Forbes Magazine: The End of Privacy is their cover story. You'll be amazed at how easy it is to get at information you might think is private. There are also a few tips on how to protect your privacy.
• MSNBC: "Y2K fuels America's fear of flying". Nobody wants to be in the air on New Year's Eve.
• When the government goes too far, what do you do? James Knott is fighting back against the EPA, who he says falsified evidence against him.
• The New York Post's The Top 25 Most Evil People of the Millennium has some interesting results. Milosevic loses to Timothy McVeigh, for example. The fact that a write-in almost won is as interesting as who that write-in was.
• kaus files dot com is Mickey Kaus' venue. He's a columnist who's gone freelance in a big way, publishing his own material (though Slate now picks up his columns a day in advance). I like his writing, since he's willing to take a shot at mainstream media.
• It's not 'only' a baseball stadium is a requiem for Tiger Stadium. The corporate greed-heads continue to try and kill the game. It's what drove me completely away from MLB back in 1994 and 1995 (though I already had the Saint Paul Saints).
• LostInstruction.com is running a database of instruction manuals for products. It'll be awfully handy if they can pull it off.
• Junk mail from MS: whose spam is it anyway? It's very easy to get onto a MS mailing list (by registering any of their products), but it's nearly impossible to get yourself removed. ... most Microsoft marketing people don't have Internet experience, and so fail to grasp the implications of what they're doing.
• 'Women's Only' Language Found Among Chinese and Last rites for secret women's language talk about a secret language developed in China. Not only is the language dying out, but thousands of ancient books were burned during the cultural revolution. Thanks to Bruce Schneier's November 1999 Cryptogram for the links. Also, that issue of Cryptogram has excellent commentary on the DVD encryption breakage.
• The NSA has patented a new technology for a system of automatic topic spotting and labelling of data in speech. It's Patent #5937422. This patent should worry people. Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency.
• Jean-Louis Gassee on Microsoft ruling is another good analysis of the findings.

Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek. Last updated on Tue, 08 Jan 2002 15:56:31.