e-hadj's New Writeups

Mr. Softee (thing)

2004-11-20T21:03:36Z

"Mister Softee" is the officially accepted nickname for shares of Microsoft (symbol: MSFT) on the NASDAQ. An investor or equity trader can phone their broker and say:

"Sell 1000 Mister Softee at 30!" Click.

and it's a legally binding contract.

Source

"Memo From Marketing", The Wall Street Journal staff, Nov. 12, 2004, Page C4.

This is a nodeshell rescue, which as Bones points out, makes it a Red Herring. Yum.

November 16, 2004 (thing)

2004-11-16T00:45:48Z

re MSN Search, as of server time Tuesday, November 16, 2004 at 0:43:56, STILL getting:

This site is temporarily unavailable, please check back soon.

Tried 2 times in a 5 min span, site unavailable both times. I'm beginning to wonder if I will ever complete a complete browsing session with the MSN Search Beta.

MSN Search (thing)

2004-11-11T09:36:31Z

MSN Search Beta

The Microsoft Unavailability Server⁰

Today, Microsoft announced the Beta for its new MSN Search service. This time it's their own crawler, their own search engine, running on their own sheet metal. No more pass-thru to Google, no more outsourcing to Yahoo!. They brag of 4.5 billion pages in their index, plus a Google-like cache, natural language query capability, a new "search near me" technology, and free access to some of the subscriber-only MSN Encarta content.

Google has already surged their usual 4+ billion page index to a staggering 8 billion pages, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The address for the Beta is http://beta.search.msn.com/, but I wouldn't bother going there just now.

You see, the search form comes up fine, (and is as uncluttered as Google's), but no matter what you search for, as of…

July 24, 2004 (idea)

2004-07-24T09:40:04Z

This is an American Mosque?

I am not a Muslim, but I am an American who understands the incredibly promising and exciting future that is possible for American Muslims. Many of my fellow Americans probably consider the mosque like the one in this story to be an aberration or throwback in American Islam. Based on the reading I've managed to do¹, it is far more typical than not. These mosques consider themselves to be firmly in the mainstream of American Islam; notables from mosques like these have been invited by President Bush to the White House. They are American Islam's fastest growing segment. Mosques like these consider themselves moderate compared to the rest of Islam, apparently because they've condescended to use the pulpit or the ballot box, rather than the sword, to spread these practices in America. Quite simply, they have no problem with the Constitution, provided it is ammeded to conform to Islam.

Excommunication From the

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CLS (thing)

2004-06-18T19:53:40Z

An abbreviation for Critical Legal Studies. Adherents to this theory are sometimes referred to as "(the) Crits". CLS is a school of legal theory that draws from many influences, the most important of which is "Critical Theory" ideas of the Frankfurt School during 1930 - c. 1970. Perhaps ironically, key members of the Frankfurt School judged that refuge (or exile) in the practical, materialistic United States was their best prospect for continued development of their ideas during the two wars. Yet, they had virtually no influence on US legal theory during that period.

Starting in 1977, CLS began to gain recognition and support in North America. An academic conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that year proved to be the watershed event. CLS gained influence and mindshare during the 1980's especially at Harvard Law School, but in the 1990's its influence began to fall, despite the efforts of tenured faculty at prestigious law schools.

Two significant schools of…

Howard Dean (idea)

2004-02-04T07:30:51Z

The Howard Dean / John Dean Meme

A meme is a self replicating piece of information or in this case, unintentional mis-information. The Howard Dean / John Dean meme refers to the many, unexplained instances in which political commentators refer to 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean as "John Dean". In all cases so far, this appears to be an completely unintended reference to the embittered former Whitehouse Counsel to President Nixon of Watergate fame.

No, I'm not kidding, and no, it's not an isolated slip of the tougue. The meme is becoming fairly widespread, at least in the memepool¹ of politics. Consider:

"Sen. Harkin didn't seem especially close to the Vermont governor. At the 2002 Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner here, he twice called the Democrat John Dean (as Martin Sheen did in a speech here last week)." -- 'Myth needed', by Maureen Dowd, The Rutland (Vermont)Herald, January 18, 2004, http://rutlandherald.c

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