Russ just announced Yahoo! Go, which looks mighty good. I haven't played with everything yet, but so far I'm genuinely impressed.

I guess it means that one of my predictions already came true.

Erik's Pulse has been published.

46 editions of The Pulse were published in 2005. Did you read them all? If not, here is your chance to quickly get caught up.

We did our weekly grocery shopping at Safeway yesterday. They had gold pineapples on special. Next to them was this Vacuvin Pineapple Slicer, which also caught my eye. I love pineapples, but I don't often buy them because they're such a pain to peel and slice.

I have to admit that I am a total sucker for kitchen gadgets, but this thing is totally amazing. Works just as advertised. The best $10 I've ever spent for a slicer.

I even took a picture of the aftermath…

If you're having problems accessing CVS servers over SSH using IDEA and are running on a Athlon 64 with a Nvidia nforce4 chipset, like I had. You need to disable Checksum Offload in the Nvidia NIC driver advanced options:

Apparently, it is a general hardware problem which manifests itself with various network applications.

Thanks to Serge Baranov for the tip.

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Yahoo! Contacts Back-up

Russ had me play with the new Yahoo! Contacts Back-up on my RAZR:

SyncML OTA for Contacts & Datebook. Very, very sleek. Yahoo! is definitely inching closer to my predictions.

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New Year's Eve Dinner

We've decided to have our New Year's Eve dinner at The Melting Pot in Bellevue, tonight.

It doesn't look like Everett is doing any kind of fireworks, so we might head to Seattle afterwards.

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JavaSchool Perils

Joel has written an interesting article titled The Perils of JavaSchools.

While I don't disagree that the state of computer science education has gone down the tube. I really don't think that being able to learn pointer arithmetic is any indicator of someone's ability to become a good programmer.

Vital (and often complex) programming concepts can be learned using any modern language. The problem is that they are simply no longer being taught. Some people may argue they no longer need to be. I think that is just another excuse to lower the standard of education.

I've interviewed literally hundreds of programmers over the years, and have never been impressed by a great formal education on a resumé. A great programmer must be, first and foremost, flexible; capable of choosing the right language and tools for the task at hand. You may learn the mechanics in school, the rest only comes from experience and hard work.

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What is Joel doing interviewing Java programmers? Isn't Fog Creek a Windows/Visual Basic-only shop?

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More interesting comments on the subject via TSS and Javalobby.