Avast ye! Will the scallywags at Google soon be feedin' the fish?

A post on the Freakonomics blog yesterday discussed Google's new consideration to anchor supercomputers on barges at sea to lessen taxes and harness wave power. The question posed in the article focused on the obvious: Blimey! WHAT ABOUT PIRATES?!?!

Aye, it is feared that sea-faring, hornswaggling lads-o-doubloons will heave ho and pillage what private information they can from the massive amounts of data on board the supercomputer barges.

The scene this forms in my fanstastical and childish mind looks something like Jack Sparrow-esque characters running around stabbing servers with swords and shouting things like "Yaaaarrrrrr!!! Bring 'er alongside and find ye the terabytes! Ye need t' hack it, steal the booty, sell it t' China and scuttle th' barge! Gar, whar's me bottle o'rum?"

... But then that's just me.

In case this whole thing sounds a bit proposterous to you, below is the IMB Piracy Attack map for 2008. Good luck, Google -- and be wary the jolly roger.

(Click on the map to go to the actual webpage)

My Yearbook of Me

And you can have a yearbook of you, too! Sites like this are what keep me on my computer into the wee hours of the morning.

www.yearbookyourself.com



*Note: The year 1980 is not shown above because it was a bad, bad, BAD year for hair.

Houston, we have a Debbie.

I'm not going to make any "Debbie Does Dallas" reference jokes here because it's so old hat and inappropriate. Also because I've already used it here. And on my Facebook status. And in my head, all the time.

What I'm getting at is that I'll be moving to Houston for the next few months to start a new project (through my job, which, yes, I still have and has been paying me for some time now to do nothing. I could write a whole book on that alone but you'd all be so disquieted by the chapter called "Today I Watched a Saved By the Bell Marathon" that I'll save you the pangs of jealousy).

The project is with one of the big wig oil brutes and will involve lots of unnecessary SUV-driving and general gas consumption so as to at least quadruple the size of my carbon footprint, because, you know, everything is bigger in Texas and that's just the way it's gotta be.

Really what I'll be doing is top secret, and of course, super cool (as super cool as SAP databases can get). Honestly, I really am excited to do this and get back into global consulting via conference calls to India. I miss that curry.

I just typed "import antigravity"

As someone who was pretty brand-spankin' new to programming not too long ago, I was only *slightly* intimidated when I was placed in the mainframes training stream at my job. That sh!% is ancient.

Now that I'm self-teaching Python, my sentiments are some what in line with the flying-man's below. Enjoy!

clipped from xkcd.com