Misc.

• Driving home today on a major highway on Monday, I found myself in an area of almost zero visibility, caused by fine debris being blown about by the wind. Scary stuff. Also lots of power failures, but despite much thunder and lightning I haven't seen a major downpour yet.


• A popular financial services company is discussing its employees' personal lives, specifically their hobbies, in its advertising campaign. I don't see the relevance of their personal lives to whether they are capable of doing their jobs.
  
  Besides, I was at a weekend sporting match earlier this year, and a large group of people wearing clothing items branded with the company's name (I, and others, assumed they were employees) got drunk and one assaulted a female spectator. The police confronted them. Not a good advertisement for the company if it believes that I should base my assessment of its products on the after-hours conduct of its employees.


• An interesting analysis of South Africa's floor crossing sham. [Via Fodder]
  

Odds and ends

I just fixed my modem (I had to rely on a laptop with power problems to connect, so I could rarely stay online for more than a few minutes).

Hopefully I will be able to stay connected long enough to be able to post some stuff.

I'm currently checking out Ruby on Rails for web application development, and working with VMware Workstation.

While my experiences with VMware Workstation, a program that lets one run multiple virtual machines on your computer, have been overwhelmingly positive, I haven't been able to get Rails to install yet because of the Internet connectivity problems I have been experiencing.

I'm mainly testing Rails because I want to see what the hype is about, but VMware has already proved to be enormously useful for maintaining multiple development environment configurations.