Weblog Archives: April 2008

April Fools' Day

I love to see how the geek community handles April 1 each year. These are my favorite tricks so far:

Firstly, Georgia Tech's wireless network, LAWN, has announced that it will be shutting down on a rotating basis to conserve the water used to cool the wireless access points. I was especially impressed by the last column of the table on that page, which reveals that running 802.11n requires 1 whole squirrel per user, per hour. I guess it's not such a big deal, however, because squirrels are an abundant, renewable resource at Tech.

I discovered today that two of my favorite web comics, xkcd and Questionable Content are in cahoots. Apparently Dinosaur Comics is in on it as well. You should check them out today.

My usual news outlets and blogs are also peppered with fake articles, making it rather stressful to try divining any actual news from them! Slashdot, the Consumerist (now known as the Conglomerist), and the Daily WTF (now known as the Daily What-the-Heck) have gone bonkers. ThinkGeek also has a whole slew of new products available today only, including the terribly useful $29.99 Betamax to HD-DVD Converter - make sure to check out the informational video.

Let me know if you've discovered any further 4/1 awesomeness out there.

Georgia v. California ... FIGHT!

I spent last week in San Francisco, visiting Jen and Alan, Amanda, June, Fiyin, and Kyle. Jen, Alan, and Amanda were each amazing hosts, and they kept me busy during the entire trip, covering a good chunk of the Bay area. I enjoyed seeing the campuses of so many high-tech companies, both big and small: Google, Facebook, Intel, Marvell, Microsoft, Oracle, Azureus, Meebo, etc. etc.

I spotted plenty of differences between San Francisco and Atlanta, as well. Here's a bullet-point list:

• People in the Bay area drive the speed limit. It's easy in ATL to drive 15-20 over without feeling like a speed demon, but driving 10 over in SF would leave you passing most people on the freeways. On the other hand, posted speed limits in ATL are usually too low to begin with.
• Downtown SF has some crazy traffic rules, but they seem to work very well. Traffic can be dense, but it generally keeps moving. Good luck figuring out how to drive to a particular place in Golden Gate park, though.
• Hard liquor in grocery stores, even on Sundays! What a novel concept!
• ATL's Publix and Kroger are supplanted by Safeway, Lucky, and Trader Joe's (though we're now getting the latter in ATL)
• Valero and Standard gas stations
• Where do I get cash from my Wachovia account?!
• I was able to get Mexican and Italian Coca-Cola in restaurants in the Mission district and Haight+Ashbury, respectively.
• A Chemistry.com ad on TV showed two guys getting to know each other romantically. Yay, equal-opportunity advertising.
• SF seems to have about 23 different public TV and radio stations.