I installed the Googlebar into Mozilla yesterday. It seemed to have worked fine until this morning, when I realized all my bookmarks are now gone. Oops.

I think it had to do with my not being root when I installed it. Instead I sudo’d, which dorked up the paths when it upgraded, it seems.

Indiana Pacers president and basketball god Larry Bird sums up my feelings on what’s wrong with our Olympic basketball team (not that I’m a basketball team president or god or anything).

“Sometimes I think we go for names, and not players,” Bird said. “Every one of those guys is the go-to guy on their team. When you’re the go-to guy, you’re always doing something. But when you’re not, you’re just standing out there and don’t know what to do.”

Read the rest. Then email it to Larry Brown. Maybe there’s time to save our gold medal.

My buddy Steve linked to this insightful commentary on social behavior called The Monkeysphere.

(And you know I can’t resist linking to the domain pointlesswasteoftime.com).

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

– President Bush, August 5th, 2004
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It took a miraculous half-court buzzer-beater shot to lift the U.S. Olympic basketball team to an 80-77 exhibition-game win over Germany. Germany’s team is essentially a one-man team of Dirk Nowitzki, who scored 32 points in the game. The team failed to even qualify for the Athens games.

Some people are wondering if this U.S. team will be the first to lose at the Olympics. Looks to me like they’re on track to do just that.

I don’t know if shows how well other countries have adopted basketball or just how sucky the NBA has become. I’m guessing its the NBA.

Now that I’ve got the cool QEMU emulator running on my Linux box, I’ve been in the mood to experiment with different OSs. One of the first was Windows 95, which runs just fine inside QEMU.

I created a ~200MB disk image file for the Win95 install. After I confirmed it ran, I wanted to figure out how to reduce the size of that disk image. It was then that I remembered this very cool page telling how to whittle down Windows 95 to under 10 MB. I’ve followed the instructions to create a Windows 95 image just over 7 MB in size! Granted, it won’t run MFC apps nor do networking, but those pieces can be added in as needed.

One interesting hack I’ll try is copying my Win95 image over to my USB keychain drive. The combination of my USB drive and QEMU is like carrying a whole computer on my USB drive. I can take it to any host computer with QEMU installed (Windows, OS X, Linux) and boot it like it was its own machine.

I also discovered a Zaurus port of QEMU last night, but haven’t tried that yet. I can only imagine how glacial Windows would be running inside an i386 emulator on a PDA!

(Incidentally, if you wish to create your own “Micro95” disk image, you’ll need to ensure the msdos.sys file gets copied from the host installation to the micro installation. The creation script missed this file and my Micro 95 wouldn’t boot without it.)

The Italian national basketball team crushed the American team in a pre-Olympic exhibition game, 95-78. The Italians, using the foreign concept of “defense,” thoroughly stunned our team of NBA players.

No word on whether defense will be outlawed at the Summer Games to give the American team a fighting chance. However, Olympic committee officials are considering awarding a seperate medal for SportsCenter-worthy dunks.

My phone is ringing a LOT more often these days. Most of my new work is dealing with Asterisk and VoIP, with some UNIX sysadmin stuff thrown in. It’s getting to the point where I’m going to have to add staff. Maybe the economy is picking up after all!

To my geek friends still looking for work, drop me a line. I may have some for ya.

Interesting article about how some Republicans are switching sides because of their dissatisfaction with Bush. The NC Veterans for Kerry group has a number of Republicans who are saying the same things, and choosing Kerry.

Bush is his own worst enemy.