Thursday March 7, 2002

Not much linkage or pictures from me this week. I've been working on an application (a new game!) and most of my time and brains have been lost in the muddle.  I wanted to break out for a moment and whine about books, notably programming books.

<whine>
From now on I'm not buying programming books thicker than 1 3/4 inch, or greater than 800 pages (maybe I should set a pound limit as well).  There seems to be a new school of technical book publishing where more is better...1500 pages, must be a masterpiece!  I have a 1200 page book which broke it's own binding the first time I opened it on a desk, which means it *really* wants me to always read that section, all other sections require two hands. It's not like the author is providing more insight or knowledge, it's typically a case of no one editing the excess verbage. Hey, I like to read books while soaking in the tub...lighten up!
</whine>



bumper dumper Team up Uncle Booger's Bumper Dumper with last week's new toilet paper and we've got the makings of some seriously strange mobile toilet experiences.

But Uncle B., did ya have to shoot the turkey??




When a good sun goes bad...

Dear StarBand Member,

We know that some members have experienced occasional outages recently, and as we mentioned in our last member newsletter, this is the time of year the natural phenomenon of "sun outages" occurs.

What is a sun outage? The sun never goes out! Well, that's not what we mean. Sun outages occur when the sun positions itself directly in line with your location and behind the satellite in the sky.

The reference to an "outage" is when your StarBand antenna cannot hear the signal from the satellite -- the satellite signal did not go away, but the sun overpowered your antenna with "noise".

Sun outages happen usually twice a year, in the spring and in the fall. The length of the "outage" varies from day to day during this period, and should subside over the next week or so. Please be patient and bear with us, as we have no control over this natural phenomenon.

Thank you.
The StarBand Team

Not that this explains why their proxy is being so chinchy in handing out fresh pages...here, here's a nice page I cached last week...hardly ever been read.