T&G

Troy stole my life and blogged about it. What you can’t tell from the photo of the shakers I received is that they are joined by a little magnet at the hip.
Funny: I sent “people” shakers too. The hula people lift up out of their little grass skirts too. They must have crossed each other somewhere across the Pacific Ocean!

Tim Berners-Lee awarded $1.23 million for his invention of the web. It’s nice to see someone work hard and be rewarded.

I’m slow, but I learned something new today: intel’s hyperthreading appears to the computer as 2 CPUs. Imagine my surprise when I did a ‘cat /proc/cpuinfo’ on a new server and found it had 2 processors! The machine is co-located several miles away (so I couldn’t open it and look for a 2nd processor) and I was very confused when I looked at the picture in the motherboard manual clearly showing only one CPU socket. A little research on the net and I’m smarter about hyperthreading.

I’m normally annoyed by faked things like this and I’m very skeptical of intel’s claims of improved performance in their CPUs, but this time they may be on to something. The new server is a 2.8GHz P4 and is easily twice as fast (running Apache, that is) as another 2.4GHz P4 that lacks hyperthreading, although it should only be ~30% faster due to its faster CPU, faster RAM and faster FSB. I’m impressed.

More stories about The Onion‘s stories being taken as fact and used as sources in real newspapers. People are amazingly gullible.

We are trying to get our yard in shape (esp. as it will be the site of our big summer party, a.k.a. our wedding, later this summer). We spent most of the weekend in various suburban pursuits: pressure washing, weed-pulling, tree-pruning, boring plant removal, spraying to prevent the dreaded tent moths, etc.. The place is really shaping up, and we are working an arborist friend to pick plants and rearrange things. Plant suggestions welcome — I *think* we live in zone 6.
We did manage a much-needed break yesterday with friends Mike & Kiernan to spoil our dogs with a trip to the beach. BTW, when did this Easter holiday become such a big deal? Vashon doesn’t have much of a downtown as it is, but what little we do have was closed yesterday, making our plan for beach-take-out-lunch a bit difficult. Mike’s Jewish, so I can’t blame him, but I was raised Catholic and I didn’t realize how big it has gotten. I suppose if we had kids instead of dogs we’d hunt eggs too, but do all the restaurants have to close as well….