Worth every second you spend reading it: Sean Riley’s review of “Secret Video Game Tricks, Codes & Strategies”. I wasn’t going to point to this until I found myself unable to breathe I was laughing so hard. A few choice quotes:

• “The whole damn thing is like letting a friend play your Nintendo badly with their feet. Only they don’t talk, you hate them, and they’re dressed like an insane housepainter.”
• “I don’t know why they did it. Were they trying to make children cry, or did they just want to make it very clear that he wasn’t enjoying himself? A football player running aimlessly in circles, a close up of a half dead mutant kid staring at a game he hates… it’s like East German surrealistic filmmaking meets the production values of a local used car commercial.”

Molly Ivins on Dubya: “I am a Texan…. I know what kind of governor this guy has been — if you expect him to do for the nation what he has for Texas, we need to talk.”

The Washington Post proclaims that Win2K isn’t for home users, but there’s a strong part of my brain that firmly believes that it’s an excellent choice for people who have home machines hooked up to always-on Internet connections, like cable modems or DSL lines. The main reason I feel this way is that the security model is pretty damn tight, and for a group of users that generally has not had to worry about security concerns before on their home machines, maybe something like Win2K would help.

It appears that DirecTV is engaging in a little of the ol’ bait and switch tactics when selling sports packages. In addition, though, the author documents the sad state of most customer service phone calls quite well:

I ask why these rules aren’t mentioned on their Web site in the description of the package. He says they are. I happen to have the site open during our conversation and ask where I should look on the page to see a mention of this “in-market” restriction. I even read it to him, but as I do, he keeps interjecting the phrase “in-market” at the end of every sentence, even though it’s not actually written there — like we just ate Chinese food and he’s adding “in bed” to the end of every fortune.

Stories like this underscore the fact that you put your trust completely in the pilot when you get onto a plane. The story, though, has a great explanation of what goes into figuring out how high a commercial plane can fly, and weight limits, and other mystical principles of physics that keep planes in the air (or make it tough for them to stay there).

There are just some criminals that aren’t quite smart enough to pull it off.

Cool new Windows 2000 feature of the day: Secondary Logon (also known as Run As). This lets you run applications as another user — so I can log in as a normal non-administrator level user, and occasionally run an admin tool as the domain administrator. Very very cool that Windows has finally gotten this feature. There’s a list of other Win2K tips, too.

Oh, and a gem of a find is that Microsoft has started to collect all the frequently-asked Windows 2000 questions on a single knowledge base page.