Feline James Bond

Today’s story is about a 12-year old cat Sgt Podge that is almost the feline version of James Bond.

Sgt Podge, a Norwegian Forest Cat, disappears every night and surfaces at the same location every morning waiting for its owner to pick it up. Its owner doesn’t know where it goes, but has a hunch that Sgt KPodge walks every night across the golf course to meet with a woman who feeds him sardines. He then goes to the pavement 1.5 miles away every morning between 8am and 8:15am to wait for his owner who picks him up. This has become a routine for Sgt Podge and he does it on weekends and holidays as well. There could be more to this and I think he’s just another James Bond, though an intra-species one!

Read more here.

Microsoft CIO Stuart Scott given the boot!

Microsoft terminated its CIO Stuart Scott for violation of company policies after 2 years of working there.

No reason was given for this abrupt firing and Microsoft refuses to give any more information about this, but there are many possibilities. Until MS comes out with an official reason, here are my guesses:

1. He must have been watching porn at work.
2. He must have been using his iPhone at work (or home).
3. He was using his MacBook during presentations.
4. His second laptop ran Ubuntu Linux.
5. He just bought a copy of Mac OS X Leopard.
6. His documents were in the PDF format instead of Microsoft’s DOC format.
7. He was using slashes instead of backward slashes as a delimiter on the command line, er, DOS prompt.
8. He was wearing a Ubuntu Linux t-shirt.
9. They thought he was running some of the Microsoft Sucks websites.
10. All his seven children were nicknamed after various flavours of Linux.

Add your own possible reason here.

Microsoft offers “free website registration and hosting”

Microsoft apparently offers free domain registration and website hosting at its Office Live Basics section.

I decided to register for a domain there, so I went to this URL and clicked on the green Get it for FREE button.

First turn off – it said, “In order to use Microsoft Office Live, you will need to have Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later running on Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Microsoft Windows Server 2003. You can download the latest version of Internet Explorer from the Internet Explorer downloads page.” Interesting.

Well, I decided to anyway check it out. So I revisited that URL using Internet Explorer 7.

I decided on a domain name and somewhere down the line, saw this – “Enter credit card information“. I clicked on the link that said “Why is this needed?” and read this:

When you sign up for a Microsoft Office Live account, Microsoft performs a $1 authorization check on your credit card to verify that the card information you are using is valid and up to date. A temporary $1 charge may appear on your online credit card statement for a short period, but will not appear on your final billing statement for that period.

Why should I pay for this when its supposedly free? And you can’t use any browser other than Internet Explorer? And it runs only ASP/ASP.NET apps anyway. Its probably better to just pay $6.95 and get the domain name registered with Godaddy or Namecheap. And spend a few more bucks when you want hosting space with a very reliable Linux webhosting company like Bluehost.

$200 Ubuntu Linux PC in stores

Wal-Mart is selling the first mass-produced $200 desktop PC running Ubuntu Linux. This PC comes with a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive and is nicknamed gPC. It has a DVD burner and runs the Enlightenment desktop.

Here’s what the gPC looks like:

Here’s a screenshot of the Enlightment desktop on the gPC:

According to the article,

By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE), the makers say it’s more responsive than Vista is, even on more powerful computers.

Its available in 650 Wal-Mart stores around the US. Read more here.

Update: Apparently, Wal-Mart encased this actually small sized motherboard in a large box because it was targeted for the really average users who believe size matters! Thanks to David Douthitt for pointing out this part.