Drivers, phones, little green windows and pseudo-cricket

For two days this week I drove into work through rain, which usually causes the dimwits who drive around here to start banging into each other and everything else on the road. For some reason I didn't see a single wreck either day and got to work in less than an hour. Yesterday there was heavy mist (it wasn't real fog. Real fog is what you get in England. Texans have never seen real fog) and yet I still got to work in about 45 minutes. Today the weather was dry, bright and clear and I-635 was clogged with idiots doing 45, changing lanes without signaling, tailgating and all the rest. It took me an hour and a quarter to get in. Go figure.

The cheap and junky headset for my cellphone fell to bits after three weeks of use when I got out of the car this morning, so it's going back to the shop. I never liked it anyway because it kept falling out and the only way I could get it to stay put was to mash it in so hard it wasn't comfortable. I much preferred the one I had on my old Nokia - it stayed where it was supposed to be and I could leave it there all day without discomfort - but of course you can't plug that into a Samsung phone because the Samsung uses a good old 2.5mm jack while the Nokia has a fancy thing with spring contacts. Haven't the people who design cellphones ever heard the word "standardization"?

UUID stands for Universally Unique IDentifier. UUIDs are 128-bit numbers generated using a technique that's guaranteed never to produce the same value twice. Basically it mashes up the computer's ethernet adapter address, the system clock time and some other junk. You can have a dozen machines churning out ten million UUIDs a second for a lifetime and you will never see the same UUID created twice. They're used as labels to identify all kinds of things, from bits of data passed between computers over the internet to the secure codes some computer games use for copy protection. When printed out they're usually represented as hexadecimal digits in groups of 8, 4, 4, 4 and 12, like this: "9f71abfe-83bc-4338-acae-6d0088d99c41". If you see a set of numbers like that printed on something, it's almost certainly a UUID. Microsoft calls them GUIDs instead, for Globally Unique IDentifiers. The reasoning is that while we can guarantee that the same number will never be generated twice here on Earth, we can't be so sure that out there in the depths of space there isn't another civilization that's generating UUIDs. Which means that someone in Microsoft thinks that there is a real chance that beyond the final frontier there is a civilization that has discovered not only fire, electricity and the wheel, but also computers fitted with standard ethernet adapters and the "uuidgen" program. I wonder if those computers run Alienix, or Little Green Windows? Does Microsoft know something the rest of us don't? I think we should be told...

I'm trying to work on some code refactoring, and suddenly something bumps into my cube wall. It's a tennis ball; two guys are playing pseudo-cricket in the aisle. After a couple more bumps the ball bounces off my filing cabinet and just misses my monitor. Who is responsible for this? The one holding the cricket bat is none other than Kumar, my manager's manager. This place gets stranger every day...

Val just told me Fry's have those 128mb pocket disk-drive things on sale for $20 right now, limit one per customer. I'm thinking about dropping into the Fry's in Irving on the way home to pick one up.