Last Mile update from May 2003

Top 11 Reasons Al Gore joined the board of Apple Computer

11) He wants to make Apple computers easier to use than a Florida ballot

10) He's courting the Apple vote--that's, what, 30 or 35 votes right there!

9) As everyone knows, Apple has a problem with being way too hip, dynamic and creative

8) Sun was already looking at Joe Lieberman7) He wants every Apple computer to run on environmentally friendly soybean oil by 2006

6) For the free rainbow'd Apple logo t-shirts, of course

5) Apple agreed to remove the "W" keys from all future Mac keyboards

4) The "Former VP Care Package" wasn't as generous as he had anticipated

3) He's actually a prototype of the Lisa II android that Woz was working on in the late '80s2) To solve the dangling chad problem

1) Didn't he invent the Mac?

For the complete, uncut, chad-free version of the Top 11 list, please tune your browser here.

Thanks to Ron Bunal, Herb Hamilton, Mark Jass, Gene Martin, Harald Mond, Dennis Moore, Shane O'Donnell, Brad Steele, Darryl St. Pierre and Eric Vaughen for their submissions.<

'W' is for windows and worms

Browsing for all entries beginning with the letter "W" within Microsoft's Security & Privacy glossary reveals an interesting synchronicity:

Windows Update (n.)
1. A Microsoft Web site maintained by the Microsoft Windows product group for the purpose of providing updates for core Windows components.

2. An application in Windows that enables a user to download files from the Internet that are necessary to keep a computer up-to-date.

worm (n.)
A stand-alone, self-replicating program that usually consumes memory, thus causing a computer to stop responding. Compare virus.

Unfortunately, Microsoft's glossary is missing an entry for the word irony.

User from hell

Network Computing reader Megan Rainwater writes:

Recently a user from another state paged me out of a meeting. He was frantic. He had logged into our Citrix machine (mind you, he has been doing this for at least three years), and something he didn't recognize appeared on the screen. I tried to get him to calm down and tell me what it was. "It's blue, green, red and yellow, and it appeared after I clicked on a message in Outlook ..." Now I'm thinking: a virus, a picture, the world ending. As I'm logging into my Citrix session so I can shadow him, I am thinking the very worst, but then I hear him explain that it looks kind of like a puzzle piece. Once I see the screen, I realize that the Outlook Assistant has opened on his screen and is waiting to "help" him with something.

Apparently we have witnessed the birth of a new and highly virulent strain of the blue screen of death--the "blue, green, red and yellow screen of help."

Find more Last Mile items and submit your entries for upcoming issues at www.nwc.com/go/lmile.html.