This is just unbelievable!

A local cemetery received a phone bill last week for David Towles at his correct address Hillside Cemetery, Evergreen Section, Auburn, Mass. 01501.

Towles was buried there in December 1997. He died at age 60.

Beurocracies are a beautiful thing!

Microsoft says that the new versions of Office will use an XML file format.

“…it does look as though XP XML has been so seriously crippled as to be useless to anyone but the big content management and collaboration system providers.” Apparently, all formatting and presentation information is removed from the XML.

In other words, it’s a standards based way to enforce proprietary file formats, which defeats the whole purpose.

Interesting how few times we’ve asked the UN before.

Since the founding of the UN, the United States has participated in 53 military actions. In only three:

* Korea
* The Gulf War (part I)
* Panama

did the US ask for and receive UN support. In all other cases, we acted alone. The world did not ostracize us then, and it won’t now.

Wouldn’t that be a great thing!

My grandfather is the president of a well-known undergraduate-only college of about 7,000 students. He tells me that an alumnus has agreed to donate $2.4 million initially (and up to $800,000 each succeeding year for 10 years) to the school for computer equipment and staff if the school agrees not to renew any contract and to buy no products or services (either directly or through an intermediary like Gateway) from Microsoft.

I wonder who the alumnus is?