While I’m certainly appreciative that I grew up in a time of Transformers, Voltron, Robotech, etc … I’ve started looking at the toys that are available to my son. You know what, we were gipped.

Exhibit A, the Dinosaur Easter Basket pictured above. I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up all we ever got was the gender neutral ones made out of twigs and straw.

Exhibit B, Lego Star Wars Death Star, Imperial Star Destroyer, and Millenium Falcon. Girl Plankton doesn’t buy my excuse that purchasing them would be an investment. I’ve tried convincing her that they would be an investment in our children’s geek credentials. That didn’t go over as well as I had hoped. Subsequently, I tried convincing her that they would be collectors items which could be exchanged for large sums of money upon acceptance of our children into Ivy League institutions. To her credit she pointed out that I wouldn’t be allowed to remove them from the packaging if that was the case.

Exhibit C, Toys R Us has a Robots Category on their website. Completely glossing over the fact that when I was young the only two options for shopping at Toys R Us were waiting for the catalog to come with the Sunday paper, or go to the store with the folks. Nowadays all you have to do is bookmark the Robots Category on their website. How effing cool is that?

I think it’s painfully clear to everybody how badly we were screwed. We had Easter Baskets, but not fuzzy dinosaur ones. We had Legos, but the most you could hope to create was a tower or a bridge. Sometimes you had most of the necessary pieces to put together a helicopter or an airplane. Nobody had gone to the trouble of putting together a kit to build a Death Star with them. We had plenty of robot toys, but we didn’t have such convenient methods of shopping for them. Our only option was to beg our parents to drive us to the store. Even then we were at the mercy of the clerks who stocked the shelves. Maybe they had Roy Focker’s VF-1 that you saved for months to buy. Chances were that you were going to have to settle for that Zentraedia Battle Pod because it was the last one on the shelf. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Of course, it could have been worse. All our father’s had had to play with when they were kids was fire and the wheel.

Scott Adams on copyright:

Let’s say your neighbor sneaks into your house while you are gone and borrows your underpants. After wearing your underpants all day, the neighbor launders them, folds them neatly, and returns them to your house in perfect condition, all while you are gone. He tells himself that he will say good things to people about your business – whatever business that is – so this arrangement is good publicity for you.

… their hearts are aflutter because their patron saint Steve Jobs took the time today to announce that one music label is willing to release their music DRM-free.  Of course, DRM-free music comes at a higher cost.  But hey, not everybody is so happy with the announcement.  DVD Jon felt it was important to point out that while Jobs has no problem with DRM-free music, movies are another matter.

Our daughter’s birthday counter incremented this weekend. Celebrations started with an early soccer game on Saturday. If AYSO was in the score keeping business, then this would have been recorded as a victory for the Purple Butterflies. Following the game I had to rush her to the Treehouse Museum where Girl Plankton was already busy setting up the Pirate Party. Note the absence of Ninjas.

The family stuff started this morning. We had a really good breakfast and waited until 11:13 A.M. to let her begin opening presents. She got a new bike from us, and horseback riding lessons from her grandparents. Afterwards we took a drive to the local farm where the lessons will take place this summer. Then we went to her favorite restaurant and they sang that obnoxious birthday cadence they do there and she got this huge ice cream dessert.

Now we’re just sitting around at home wishing that the wind would blow a little bit so that we could go fly her new kite.

Here’s Urgo’s list of Internet April Fool’s Day pranks for this year. My favorites thus far:

• Thinkgeek 8-bit tie. I would so buy this.
• NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is celebrating U.S. victory over the Russians in the first space quidditch match.
• Google is offerering a “free in-home wireless broadband service,” called TISP. The catch? You have to flush a fiber optic cable which will then travel to Google through the sewers.
• RIM has announced that they are selling Blackberry to Palm. All Blackberry users need to call to exchange for their new Treo.
• A Postgres storage engine for MySQL.

For as little as $50 a month, Net-tie.com has applied the Netflix business model to the tie rental industry. I expect thousands of neighborhood tie rental stores will begin shuttering their doors any day now.

All snark aside … I like the fact that they have women modeling some of the ties. Especially Mimi.

From Poncelet:

Yet copyright holders want to stifle this process in order to protect their opportunity for maximum profit.

So is making good art at odds with making profit?

When faced with a question like this, I like to go back to the classics. For instance Article I, Section 8, U.S. Constitution:

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

Did you know that’s the only clause which grants powers to Congress but also states the purpose for granting that power? The Founding Fathers understood the need for an incentive to invent, create works of art, and further the discovery of knowledge. They decided that the best way to provide that incentive was to grant a limited monopoly to whomever took the risk necessary to invent, create, or discover.

Back to your question. Is making good art at odds with making profit? No. However, making profit is a possible incentive for making good art.

You have to get to the last minute of this clip from The View to see the part where Rosie insinuates that WTC 7 was blown up by the U.S. government on Sept. 11.

But that’s not the funny part.

The funny part isn’t that Rosie keeps claiming that they need to bring in physicists from Harvard or Yale and that they will back her up on this. The funny part isn’t even when Joy says, “Wait a second. Bush went to Yale. How good could they be?”

The funny part is that Harvard is where Bush got his MBA from.

This game should be banned. It’s too addictive. You get to kill Zombies. With a shotgun. Beware the game.

Important rule, MySQL only supports using one index per join.

If a multiple-column index exists on col1 and col2, the appropriate rows can be fetched directly. If separate single-column indexes exist on col1 and col2, the optimizer tries to find the most restrictive index by deciding which index finds fewer rows and using that index to fetch the rows.

To demonstrate this I went and got some historical stock price data from this site. After that, I created a test table and added some indexes in order to test some concepts.
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