Virtual Account Numbers

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

Citibank has launched a service that I’ve wanted for a long time. You can now create a unique credit card number for each and every transaction that can only be used once. Perfect for those sites that want to charge you $9.95 for the first month and then rebill you every month until the second coming.
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Kitten Season

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

Kittens are naturally popular and usually the first to be adopted at most animal shelters. At some times of year it can be hard to find one. However, I’ve just received word that the New York Center for Animal Care and Control currently has a surplus of kittens ready for adoption, so now’s a great time to add a friend.

Apparently the surplus is directly related to the time of year. Cats tend to time their pregancies to the Spring. Thus, if even if you’re not in New York, chances are very good your local animal shelter also has kittens looking for a home. Don’t wait. By the time summer rolls around, it will be too late.

Serenity on HD-DVD

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

Serenity is out on HD-DVD. That’s almost enough to convince me I want an HD-DVD player, though personally I suspect BlueRay is going to win in the end.

Speaking of Bird Banding

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

Early Sunday I travelled up to the Bronx with the Brooklyn Bird Club (despite an exhausting day on Saturday) for some bird banding along the Bronx River. Chad Seewagen and Eric Slayton are in the third year of a study on feeding habits of migrants passing through urban parks. They’re concerned that the same factors that make urban parks so great for birders may make bad sites for birds: many birds in a small area full of lots of invasive and ornamental plants.

Northern Parula trapped in a mist net at the Bronx Zoo
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Banded Goose Mystery

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

You may remember that at various times from January through march I spotted a Banded Goose H7H6 in Prospect Park. Originally I thought this goose was from Quebec. However, I’ve now received a different certificate for the same goose with the same band number that indicates it’s not from Canada at all but rather from Coming, Indiana.
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The Yugo of Operating Systems

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

Seems FreeBSD wants to reach feature parity with desktop Linux. Excuse me while I guffaw for a minute. That’s like saying you’re designing a car and want to reach feature parity with a Yugo. When FreeBSD starts aiming for feature parity with the Mac, then I might take them seriously.

Why, oh why, do so few developers of free software know or care about user interface design? Or reversing the question, why do so few developers who know how to design user interfaces have any interest in working on desktop Linux? What little effort there is, is simply applied to imitating Windows. For a couple of years I saw some hope at Eazel, but then the money spout got turned off and the developers who actually knew what they were doing lost interest and moved on to other things.