The kitchen hasn't been this clean...

... since it was installed. We're in the process of having the kitchen and living room professionally cleaned -- the cleaners are the parents of one of super_star_girl's new friends from school. The results are impressive -- they even knew what paint to use to touch up the drip pan around the large burner that always gets hot enough to crack the enamel on a KitchenAid cooktop. They'll be finishing up the living room today, and will be coming in twice a month.

I've often suspected that the reason Mom kept her house so neat was she didn't want the housekeeper to see how messy it had become since her last visit. In our case, I didn't want them wasting their time merely tidying up.

Meanwhile, the kids are working on their rooms, with various kinds of assistance. To be honest, I don't really want to know what deals they've made, with which entities, or what they dipped the pen in to sign the contracts.

The ultimate in mobile computing?

Sun's Project Blackbox -- datacenter in a container - Engadget

We're typically not of the ilk to bust out a post on a Sun datacenter solution or yet another clustered supercomputer, but technically Sun's Project Blackbox is portable -- if you consider a shipping container portable. We wouldn't believe it if it were anyone else, but the gimmick here is Project Blackbox is a shock mounted transportable datacenter capable of accommodating up to 250 Sun Fire T1000s or x64 servers, with up to 7 terabytes of memory and as many as 1.5 petabytes of disk or 2 petabytes of tape storage -- just supply water and power, and the thing will run on its own.

Old-timers may recall the ancient quip about the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes...