The New York Times published this graph today:

At first, when I saw this headline, I thought someone was quoting from The Onion.

But then I realized that it wasn’t:

September 11 — what year? 30 percent of Americans don’t know – Yahoo! News
Some 30 percent of Americans cannot say in what year the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York’s World Trade Center and the
Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published in the Washington Post newspaper.
While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and shocked the world, 95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks, according to Wednesday’s edition of the newspaper.

But when asked what year, 30 percent could not give a correct answer.

Of that group, six percent gave an earlier year, eight percent gave a later year, and 16 percent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.

This memory black hole is essentially the problem of the older crowd: 48 percent of those who did not know were between the ages of 55 and 64, and 47 percent were older than 65, according to the poll.

The Post telephone survey was carried out July 21-24 among 1,002 randomly selected adults. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

Well, on the upside, I guess it’s good that 95% were able to remember what day and year it was.

So Money magazine published the TOp 100 places to live…

MONEY Magazine: Best places to live 2006: Top 100 1-25

1 Fort Collins, CO 128,000
2 Naperville, IL 141,600
3 Sugar Land, TX 75,800
4 Columbia/Ellicott City, MD 159,200
5 Cary, NC 106,400
6 Overland Park, KS 164,800
7 Scottsdale, AZ 226,000
8 Boise, ID 193,200
9 Fairfield, CT 57,800
10 Eden Prairie, MN 60,600

I haven’t been to any of these places (well, I think I’ve driven through Fairfield.) The closest would be Bellevue, WA coming in at 21. Congrats to all my blue/orange badge friends!

But wait… SF/SJ didn’t make a showing at all?

MONEY Magazine: Best places to live 2006: 10 Best Big Cities

Rank City Population
1 Colorado Springs, CO 369,800
2 Austin, TX 690,300
3 Mesa, AZ 442,800
4 Raleigh, NC 341,500
5 San Diego, CA 1,255,500
6 Virginia Beach, VA 438,400
7 Omaha, NE 414,500
8 Columbus, OH 730,700
9 Wichita, KS 354,900
10 New York, NY 8,143,200

Ack! SF/SJ didn’t make a showing here either? Youch!

Wait… I know where I can find it:

MONEY Magazine: Best places to live 2006: Top 25 Pricey homes

1 Newport Beach, CA $1,362,500
2 Greenwich, CT $1,129,000
3 Santa Barbara, CA $979,500
4 Palo Alto, CA $929,000
5 Cupertino, CA $880,000
6 Goleta, CA $870,000
7 San Clemente, CA $848,500
8 Bethesda, MD $790,000
9 Pleasanton, CA $785,000
10 Santa Monica, CA $784,000
11 Redondo Beach, CA $777,500
12 Redwood City, CA $767,500
13 San Francisco, CA $755,000
14 Yorba Linda, CA $750,000
15 San Rafael, CA $745,000

Heh!

I dropped by the
Market Place 2006
fair today, hosted at the Computer
History Museum by the Chamber of
Commerce Mountain View. Though I’ve worked in Mountain View for almost 6
years, and lived there for over 5, I’m always finding new businesses – so I
thought I’d drop by to see what was going on. Plus, it was within walking
distance of my office.

There, Minnie Ingersoll of Google was giving a talk about their Wifi
deployment in Mountain View. Neato!

Being a geek, and a network engineer in a past life, here are some of the notes I took:

• They are going to be offering 1 megabit access.
• Focus on outdoor areas (parks, businesses, libraries)
  versus homes.
• Will be promoting CPE’s (Customer Premise Equipment) so that you have
  better reception indoors.
• They have 350 Tropos units around Mountain View. (One of which is
  outside my office window!)
• They use a mesh network – the Tropos units talk to each other, so the
  only wiring they had to do was power.
• 1 in 7 (50) of the sites connect back to an Alvarion gateway.
• There are 3 of these Alvarion gateways: 1 at Googleplex, 1 at 444 Castro
  St in Downtown (it’s one of the tallest buildings around), and 1 at St.
  Greg’s High School’s Football Field lights.
• Rolling release: June-Small, July-Large, August-Really large.
• People who connect will immediate see a login page. They will need to
  login with their Google Account to use the wifi.
• After logging in, people will then see a portal page, with a map, a
  search box, and a few "modules" on the sides for things like weather, mail,
  and etc.
• A FAQ can be found here:
  
  http://wifi.google.com/city/mv/faq.html 

Here’s a picture of a tower that I took:

I also got some free chicken sausage samples from the Tied House – so much for the calories spent during the walk. In any case, I’m curious to see how this will work out when this service goes live and I’m in
Downtown! I’m pretty sure that MetroFi (the free wifi in Sunnyvale) doesn’t require a login. But they do something else… (my apartment only gets reception on certain days during certain weather.)

Mark and his colleagues at Plaxo are having a Party 2.0…. uh… Party!

This after a successful and fun Lunch 2.0 that happened on Wednesday here at Microsoft.

(My apologies to SVC Reception 1 for having 20 people show up suddenly to register as visitors!)

I’m probably the last person to blog about Boot Camp, but oh well.

For a few weeks I’ve been thinking about buying a new PC for my home. The perf on my Dell from Summer 2002 isn’t that bad – it’s just that I maxed it out at 1 gig of memory, and now it thrashes a lot when I have Outlook and Photoshop open. Quite annoying.

I’ve also been thinking about getting a Mac to replace my G4 500 from early 2000.

Now, with Boot Camp, I can just buy 1 Mac and get both.

All I’m waiting for now is the 2nd generation of the upcoming Intel Mac Tower.

Why second generation? Well, I hope you remember how the first generation of G5 towers were.

Workaholics struggle to say ‘No’ to work – Yahoo! News

) – Sam used to sneak into his office before dawn so no one would know how many extra hours he worked. Charles goes on all-night work binges to meet deadlines, and Susan can’t say no to volunteer projects, social clubs, bridge games, choral singing, lectures and classes.
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Each one is a member of Workaholics Anonymous, a 12-step recovery program for compulsive workers based upon the structure of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each one opted to keep their identity secret.

“It’s been called the addiction that society applauds,” said Mike, a physician and member of the group known as WA.

“People brag about it and say, ‘I’m a workaholic,”‘ he said. “But workaholics burn out and then you’ve lost them or they become very dysfunctional and bitter and cynical in the organization and corrosive.”

I’d go, but I’m too busy with work. [rimshot]

Oh wait.

The weekly meeting in New York draws an average of a half dozen people in a city that might be considered a hotbed of workaholism. Such meager attendance invites the predictable joke that most workaholics are too busy to attend meetings, a quip that organizer Charles has heard a million times.

“People think it’s funny,” he said. “It’s amusing until you hear the stories. There have been many people who have come, and work is destroying their lives.”

Unlike alcoholics, who can measure recovery by their days of sobriety, workaholics have no quantifiable gauge of their problem, or their recovery.

“In my case, my boss was telling me I had to get my work hours down to 40 a week, and I couldn’t do it,” said Sam, a former senior project engineer in California’s Silicon Valley.

I guess this is a serious problem after all.

Actually it looks like I’m on track to work 55 hours this week – and that includes taking Friday off (but going in for an hour anyway) due to the fact that I’ve reached the maximum number of vacation hours accrued.

Hong Kong pollution leaves tourists choking – Yahoo! News

- Green activists said that Hong Kong’s multi-billion dollar tourism industry was at risk after a survey found half the visitors to the city had complained of the worsening air pollution.

Friends of the Earth Hong Kong said the poll of tour guides also found that one in ten tourists suffered pollution-linked health problems while visiting the semi-autonomous southern Chinese territory.

The poll of more than 150 tour guides and agents who accompanied overseas and mainland Chinese tourists in Hong Kong also found that 40 percent of visitors were aware of the city’s pollution problems before arriving.

[snip]

The government has said most of the pollution rolls in from mainland China’s heavily industrialised Pearl River delta region, which has seen huge economic growth in the past decade.

However, Friends of the Earth Hong Kong and local campaigners Clear the Air say local power producers are also major culprits.

“The pollution is not ‘coming down from China’,” said Annelise Connell, chairperson of Clear The Air, in a statement.

That’s something I certainly do recall from my trip to Hong Kong late 2004. Having seen all those famous postcards of clear blue sky and mountain ranges, and then seeing nothing but yellow smog was pretty disappointing.

That said, I do think that most of the pollution is from the China side – after all, Macau was also incredibly smoggy.