Day: January 12, 2004

Thanks to George for this tip:

On the random side of things… Jeff Bezos turns 40 today. Curious? Search Amazon.com for old fart. (Only works on 1/12/04)… [The Chang Journal]

Since the item is going to disappear after midnight, I’ve taken the liberty of reposting the image and text:

Happy 40th Birthday, Jeff Bezos
January 12, 1964

Much better than most of the Easter eggs I’ve ever put in software. Most, but not all…

There was a hidden Easter egg in an old version of the procurement software I worked on that invoked a picture of our development manager, Mike Stopper, head back, snoring, exhausted after an all night coding binge in Saudi Arabia. (Which is another story.) What can I say? It was before we won our contract. The Easter egg was subsequently, unceremoniously, stripped out. But it was probably the best one I ever did, with the exception of the one that I nixed partway through, which would have translated every error message in the system to Pig Latin. Er, Ig-pay Atin-lay.

When both BoingBoing and Slashdot have breathless writing about the future of a small Pacific island nation, you know something’s up. In this case, the island is Niue. You know, as in .nu, the top level domain of the hip. Well, at least of one hip person, Moxie.

The island leaders, in the aftermath of a cyclone that caused more than $50 million (NZ) in damage, are calling for the island nation to return to New Zealand governance and predicting that the island will eventually be deserted. While this might not seem such a big deal—after all, as the original snarky article in the New Zealand Star Times points out, Niue only has the population of a large secondary school—the island was a favorite of geeks for creating the first national wi-fi grid and for selling their TLD to all comers.

The question is, what happens to all those .nu sites?