Before I mention this, I better knock on wood and cross my fingers so as not to jinx it, but I haven’t had any comment spam for several days. In fact, for the past month, the amount of comment spam on my blog has been greatly reduced. Is rel="nofollow" actually working despite the naysayers? Or have I become such a small fry, that I am not worth the extra CPU cycles and bandwidth to graffiti my site?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I wrote a really simple little class for converting State Codes to State Names and Vice Versa.

In ten minutes we’re getting on the train to go to the Narita airport. I always feel sad when leaving, but excited to get back to work and the exciting opportunities therein. The fact we are flying Singapore airlines is some consolation. They have a fantastic in-flight entertainment system. If only they had wi-fi.

And if so, is he angry? I wondered this after reading Is Object Oriented Programming The Problem? in which Don invokes the programmer archetype, “Mort” to make a point.

We here at “You’ve Been Haacked” (well, actually just me) bend over backwards (and sideways) looking to enhance your Haacked experience and deliver more bang for your buck (What!? You’re not paying for this content? You lousy cheapskates!). To that end, we are adding Job Postings to the litany of entertaining drivel posted on this site. At least, we are adding this one job posting and reserve the right to add others. Here is an opportunity to work closely with yours truly on a project or two. Please, only reply if you have the skills to pay the bills.

Since I have a free moment (and the internet connection is back up), I thought I’d write a short status update of my trip to Japan. But first, let me point out that I used the term “status update”. What am I? A project manager?

Yesterday we were given a tour of Asakusa from an old family friend who resides there. He is an “Edoko”, a 3rd generation Tokyo native. Apparently, it takes three generations before you get to carry the Tokyo native membership card. I’m not sure if it gets you into the hottest clubs or not, or even if it at least provides car insurance on rentals, but I am sure it is an honor nonetheless.

Kevin Marks says in the comments to my last post that my example of how a format designed for both machine and human readability might run into problems was a little contrived. My dear Mr. Marks how silly of you to say so. I must vehemently disagree with your lack of insight. That example was a lot contrived. I blame Jet Lag for the lack of a better example, but the point that I was trying to make (albeit unconvincingly), is that…

I had an email discussion with Dimitri about Microformats a little while back, trying to understand the purpose of Microformats and what they intend to solve.

You just have to love modern technology and its power to shrink the Earth. I had a meeting over Skype with Micah in San Francisco from here in Japan with no discernible lag at all and wonderful audio quality. Later, I had an MSN Messenger chat conference about RSS Bandit with Torsten in Germany and Dare in Nigeria. What a small world indeed!

For those of you who give a damn, we made it safely to Japan. The trip itself had quite an interesting start in the form of a cab ride to the airport with a, ahem, slightly odd-in-the-head fellow.

Tomorrow we head off to Tokyo, Japan for a memorial service to celebrate the life of my wife’s father. We’ve both been very busy with our respective work, plowing ahead head down. It finally feels good to lift our heads above the chaos and exclaim…

For as smart a guy as Joel Spolsky supposedly is, you’d think he’d keep his dumb ass remarks off his blog and between himself and his interns.

You get BoohBah!

My wife usually uses a cheap calling card to call her mother in Japan. Unfortunately, for the last month, every time she would try to call, there would be problems. Today for example, they were having problems routing calls and she kept waking up some man in god only knows what god forsaken country he was in.

When this whole “Software Development” fad dies out (and yes, I am using air quotes here with the two fingers), I know what my next calling will be: An IPod DJ!

Too bad these things aren’t out yet. With no moving parts, this thing sips power, less than 5% of the power consumption of current hard disk drives, while blazing at 150 percent of the performance of comparably sized drives.

Dave hits it on the nose here with sublime timing. The customer is always right. Get a clue, Toshiba.

I’m pretty bummed today as my Tablet PC went on a holiday and refuses to come back. I’m pretty sure it’s a problem with the hard drive as the last event viewer message I saw was a warning that the system detected an imminent hard drive failure. That’s when I started backing everything up.