Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• Pertinent to my entry for November 25, 2006: A US district court has ordered the Treasury Dept. to modify American paper currency to make the denominations distinguishable by the blind. They do this in Europe and a lot of other countries, and although making bank notes different sizes sounds a little dicey to me, there are many other things that could be done. And this would be a great excuse to retire the dollar bill and create a diameter-distinct dollar coin that people might even use.
• Rather than spin off their developer tools division to a group of investors, Borland is creating a wholly owned subsidiary called CodeGear to sell their compiler tools and manage their future evolution. The FAQ on the move is interesting more for what it doesn't say than for what it does: Borland needs their compilers, probably more than their compilers need Borland. I'm hoping for the best, and having just received review copies of the "big" Turbo Delphi and C# products, I think some hope is warranted.
• Google Answers is shutting down after four years of charging people $2.50 to ask questions of experts. The basic idea is sound, but I wanted more confidence in the expertise of Google's experts-and in truth, the questions that puzzle me are not things that experts can generally answer.
• The Dell Optiplex SX270 (See my entry for December 1, 2006) has something I didn't notice at first: An external drive bay designed for a "poppable" module, and there's a button on the front panel that when pushed, pops the module (generally an optical drive) right into your hands. There is a lock lever inside the case to keep passers-by from popping and walking off with your drive, for the cube-farm market. The two units we have here include CD-R drives, but DVD and DVD-R drives are available (as well as a floppy drive and a conve tional hard drive) and it would be interesting to find a five-way memory card/stick reader in that module format. The more I use this item, the more I like it. Heat (as warned by some online reviews) has not yet seemed to be a problem.
• This morning's Wall Street Journal reported that Jones Sodas is dumping high-fructose corn syrup and going back to cane sugar. (Here's a link to an online piece in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) Dare we hope that this will become a trend?
• I got a slightly indignant note from one of my readers (and he may or may not have been pulling my leg; it's hard to tell with some guys) informing me that "Texas Elegance" is not a porn star, but rather a nude model. (See my entry for November 28, 2006.) Furthermore, she is only 48. She works for a porn site called Southern Charms. And she's "hot." Just FYI.