The Part That Made Me Cry

One of the victims at Virginia Tech was Liviu Librescu: A holocaust survivor.

Liviu Librescu, 75, a senior researcher and lecturer in engineering, was a Holocaust survivor. He had immigrated to Israel from Romania with his wife Marlina, also a survivor, in 1978. He was an expert in aeronautics at Tel Aviv University and the Haifa Technion before moving to the United States in 1984.

…

According to media accounts quoting students, Mr. Librescu and the class heard shooting in a nearby room. The students said their professor blocked the door to prevent the gunman from entering while some students took cover underneath desks and others leaped out from windows.

זֵכֶר צַדִּיק לִבְרָכָה וְשֵׁם רְשָׁעִים יִרְקָֽב׃

I Got (Next To) Nothing

The local CA radio stations didn’t start reporting on the Virginia Tech massacre until after rush hour, so I didn’t find out about it until I got to work. Watching the death toll increase over the hours while trying to get work done was pretty sucktastic.

There’s really not much I can add to what’s already been said today, other than the observation that Chris Rock was right:

Gun control? We need bullet control! I think every bullet should cost 5,000 dollars.

Top 10 of Web 2.0

So I was checking out rev2.org’s list of the Top 10 Most Successful Web 2.0 Startups to Date this morning, and noticed something interesting: Not one of them has IPOed or announced plans to do so. All of them have either been acquired by Web 1.0 companies (several of whom did IPO) or are still privately held.

The other interesting thing is that there’s no mention on the list of whether any of the companies is profitable (or was before acquisition). Wikipedia, being a non-profit, is off the hook there, but what about the others?

You’d think that after all the craziness in the last go-round, this time, any real definition of success would include some amount of actual profitability, but maybe I expect too much.

UPDATE 4/15 In comments on his site, rev2’s Sid clarifies:

Since most Web 2.0 companies are private and don’t release any information at all on profitability and revenues (with the exception of perhaps YouTube which we have some data on) I decided to leave that out. While I realize that’s one of the important things in terms of ‘most successful,’ Web 2.0 is really more about ‘who can get acquired for the most money’ than ‘who can make the most money.’ That was Web 1.0, and those companies are now the ones who are buying these.

Having lived through Web 1.0, I seem to recall it was all about the “eyeballs” and about IPOing as fast as possible, not about profitability, but hey, maybe old age has clouded my memory.

Friday Cat Blogging

[Kitty in a Comforter]

From the archives — Tommy decided to make a nest for himself in a comforter that had been left out following a guest’s visit.

Rain, Rain, Don’t Go Away!

Because it’s looking like it’s going to be a long, dry summer around these parts. And that’s not good news:

More than 2 million Bay Area water users could face mandatory water restrictions this summer if they do not cut back on consumption now, the head of the San Francisco Public Utility Commission said Wednesday.

The Sierra snowpack — the major water source for people in San Francisco, parts of the Peninsula, the South Bay and southern Alameda County — is less than half of what it should be for this time of year. As of the beginning of the month, the snow pack was at 46 percent of normal.

[snip]

Officials will look at the measurements at the end of May and make a recommendation on mandatory restrictions for San Francisco’s 2.4 million users, said Susan Leal, general manager of the city’s Public Utilities Commission.

Mandatory restrictions could mean reducing consumption up to 20 percent. Customers who do not comply could face fines or have their water turned off.

False Positives

A month or so ago, I posted a blog entry noting that I was having a problem with comments vanishing when I posted to WordPress blogs. Thanks to the kind operator the Burbed blog, who listened to my complaints and took the time to do some testing, I finally have an answer to why my comments were vanishing into the aethir.

Apparently, my ‘handle’ of Fiat Lux is classed as ‘definitely spam’ by one of the common WordPress spam filters (presumably Akismet).

That’s moderately annoying, since I’m rather fond of that phrase.