from gaaneden

Eating: Nothing.
Drinking: Nothing (but my empty water bottle is mocking me)
Wearing: Dark green pants, light green & gray striped shirt, deep blue opal triplet ring & earrings.
Hearing: Co-worker talking on the phone.
Reading: LJ
Planning: Finish catching up on work email / status, update the project schedule, get myself a cafe au lait....

number formatting & grouping

Raymond talks about some locale-specific notes on number formatting, including that China & Japan group in fours. So the US number 12,304,567.89 would be

1230 4567.89

in China or Japan.

I thought this was interesting. But then I have been told I have weird values for "interesting".

I also liked this comment:

Travel broadens the parochial mind you never knew you had, and makes you a better programmer/designer/techie.

As a bonus it also exposes you to better beer.

It's a gender-neutral society. Right.

Bill Gates, naturally, has a Wikipedia page. It notes some of his dad's accomplishments and links to his page. It describes his mother as "teacher Mary Maxwell Gates".

Which she was.

In the 50s.

She was also

• On the University of Washington Board of Regents...
  
• The first female president of King County’s United Way...
  
• The first woman to be a director of First Interstate Bank of Washington...
  
• The first woman to chair National United Way’s executive committee...
  
• Hell, there's even a (possibly apocryphal) story about an IBM VP / United Way board member mentioning he needed to find someone to write some software for IBM's first microcomputer to Mary, who introduced the VP to her son Bill...

I ground my teeth and started googling. Wiki now has a new page...and the Bill Gates page links to it.

Edit: I'd read Ms Gates was the first woman appointed to the UW Board of Regents. Turns out Ruth Karr McKee served from 1917-1926; Eva Anderson in 1942-1946; and Dorothy Bullitt in 1958-1965.