Me either, so I've been thinking about picking up some of the Rosetta Stone software:

The Rosetta Stone Level I program offers a comprehensive course of study for beginning learners, leading to intermediate proficiency. The program contains over 3,500 real-life images and phrases in 92 lessons and more than 250 hours of mastery instruction in listening comprehension, reading, speaking, and writing. Systematic structure teaches vocabulary and grammar naturally, without lists and drills.

[ Rosetta Stone: Indonesian on Amazon.com ]

Anyone have any experience with any of their languages? $175.00 is a bit to spend on software without any decent feedback.

The USB Wireless Security lock is a simple yet effective means to ensure computer access is limited to an authorized user. Each kit is composed of a USB receiver dongle connected to the computer, and a battery-powered access transmitter, which is to be carried by the authorized user. When the user moves more than 2 meters away from the computer, the security dongle will disable access to the computer until the user carrying the transmitter has returned within the vicinity of the computer.

[ ThinkGeek :: USB Wireless Security Lock ]

Apparently the software kind of sucks, so an entrepreneurial (though not money making) fellow has rolled his own.

Props to Bull (who has no blog. sniff sniff)

Want to help?

1. Give a few bucks (or your choice)
2. Write your congressman or senator (for more US aid, of course)
3. Pray (Jewish, Christian, or Muslim)
4. Volunteer (I can't find any resources to assist with this one)

Truly the genius of a service like Rhapsody, for me, is the ability to find things that I wouldn't hear by my lack of listening to the radio and/or watching the music television (MTV and otherwise).

Jurassic 5 formed in 1993 as the union between two separate hip-hop groups, Rebels of Rhythm and Unity Committee, both frequent participants at The Good Life. The two groups came together to release a spontaneous, one-off single, "Unified Rebelution," which made a deep impression with true hip-hop heads everywhere. Its success emphasized the chemistry each of the artists had with one another and they decided to form Jurassic 5 as a singular musical unit.

[ bio content ]

Now we're talking. They're lyrical, nice flow, great influence, enunciate, clean enough lyrics (on their clean versions, though a bit too much of the N-bomb), and they are funky fresh. I've also been digging the Blackalicious, but not as much as J5. For those with Rhapsody, I've been all over the “Jazz Rap/Hip Hop” category which includes J5 and Blackalicious.

A bit more digging and I realize that this isn't truly a bug in IE, but in an ActiveX component that ships with IE.

I set all of my ActiveX, signed or not, approved or not, to prompt and this fixes that problem

[ davidkearns.com - Scary: my little slice of opinion and triviality ]

This means you simply need to disallow the use of that one component. If you have XP SP2, you're in luck, since ActiveX components are a type of add-on, and you can now disallow add-ons. Go to Tools/Manage Add-ons... Change the “Show:” to “Add-ons that have been used by Internet Explorer” and find the “DHTML Edit Control Safe for Scripting for IE5” and set it to “Disable”. This is bound to break something somewhere, but better that then having your financial info snagged or something.

Interesting thing to note, though. After the above jerry rigging my IE would no long fall for the test, however my SlimBrowser still happily runs the add-on. Perhaps a reboot or something is required due to some sort of caching of background process or something, but if not this exploit is still obvious due to the brand new IE window that SlimBrowser spawns via the test (and thus alerts me to the odd behavior, since SlimBrowser usually doesn't do that).

Update: After a reboot and an upgrade to SlimBrowser 4.03.007 it still falls for this exploit. One odd bit about the exploit is that although the wee little yellow lock appears, which should indicate that the page has been encrypted, double-clicking on the lock displays a dialog that indicates “This type of document does not have a security certificate” which certainly sounds like an error exists in IE as well.

Anyone know where one can score some Snakeskin Fruit in the US?

The salak, or snake fruit, comes attractively packaged in its own distinctively patterned, leathery hide. The dark-brown skin is tough, but surprisingly thin and easy to peel. Inside you'll find a light-tan fruit divided into three or more lobes, usually with a single seed in the largest section. Salaks are not juicy which makes them especially convenient to peel and eat.

[ Four Seasons Bali Fruit Book ]

They're Yaty's fav, and so far everywhere I can think of (the Korean grocery, Harry & David, Dean & Deluca, Amazon, Yahoo) have come up with nothing.

Big Boi will likely be fine, just have an extra buttery brisket.

pat

an individual serving of butter. In the U.S. food industry, restaurant servings of butter are usually packaged at 48 pats per pound, making each pat 1/3 ounce (about 9.45 grams). In recipes, a pat of butter is typically 2 teaspoons (1/3 fluid ounce, or about 10 milliliters).

[ Units P ]

And if you haven't a clue what I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky. (Though Wayne Newton is correct, and Snoop's laundry should come out fine.)

I'm confused, I see 4 pros for c# followed by 3 cons against VB:

The differences between C# and Visual Basic .NET are mostly to suit different programmer's backgrounds. Unfortunately, there are some other differences. The following is a list (other than those that were mentioned when I discussed Microsoft's "going back") of some examples of the differences between C# and Visual Basic .NET:

• C# warns you if a function is missing a return statement—This catches a few bugs automatically.

• C# requires XML-tagged documentation to be written in the code—Seems to be a good idea to drag out the comments from the code and use it for different scenarios.

• C# can switch to Unmanaged mode—This can easily be achieved in Visual Basic .NET by just calling a C# class that takes care of it. Still, I find it nice to have the same possibilities in both environments.

• You can use Using() in C# to tell that an object should be automatically Dispose()ed when going out of scope—That is very handy, for example, for connection and file objects that you don't want to wait for being garbage collected.

To be fair, Visual Basic .NET has some advantages over C# too:

• Visual Basic .NET differs Inherits from Implements—In C#, it's written in both cases with a colon.

• The event syntax is simple in Visual Basic .NET—It's as clean and intuitive as in VB6. In C#, you have to take care of more by hand.

• Visual Basic .NET is not case sensitive—This is a matter of taste, but I prefer non–case sensitive. Otherwise, there is always somebody that will have two methods in a single class named something like getData() and GetData().

[ Introduction to COM and .NET ]

Inherits and implements are so similar concepts, why not use :, yet when doing events the extra code is deemed a pain? When it gives more flexibility? And case sensitivity is a plus, not a minus, doesn't everyone know that yet?

So far far away:

Distance between Washington, District of Columbia, United States and Ujung Pandang, Indonesia [ed: now known as Makassar], as the crow flies: 9883 miles (15905 km) (8588 nautical miles) Initial heading from Washington to Ujung Pandang: north-northwest (332.1 degrees) Initial heading from Ujung Pandang to Washington: north-northeast (21.5 degrees)

[ How Far is It ]

Which is just a bit farther than from DC to San Jose, CA, and back — twice.

Electronic Arts is to buy 20 percent of French publisher Ubisoft, the Wall Street Journal has confirmed this morning, at a reported cost of between $85 million and $100 million.

[ GamesIndustry.biz - EA to buy 20 per cent share in Ubisoft ]

I'm not a real big fan of Electronic Arts. Even ignoring their dubious employment policies, they don't promote the type of games that I like, and put tons into their sports titles. They have had, over the years, a few games that I've liked, but many seem to fade never to return.

I am a big fan of Ubi, especially their Montreal office, and I'm even willing to forgive them for rushing Pop:Warrior Within knowing that they have more goodies coming, hopefully some of which are a complete surprise to everyone.

I just don't see EA and Ubi working, and it scares me to think of EA destroying such a great studio as Ubisoft.

I hope they fix this one soon.

Paul has reported a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct sophisticated cross-site scripting attacks against any web site. Please see the test below for an example of how this vulnerability can be exploited.

[ Secunia - Internet Explorer Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability Test ]

I set all of my ActiveX, signed or not, approved or not, to prompt and this fixes that problem, however it then breaks my gmail. (Of course I then just “trusted” gmail, hope they don't abuse that trust...)

Nintendo DS games are already available on GameFly! I'm not sure what type of installed base is required before GameFly makes a decision like that, but that's a great sign...