For Kathy of Gadsden, Alabama, yes, that’s perfectly acceptable.

Pop quiz: in
a) your office culture
b) your country’s office culture
is it acceptable for a co-worker to tell everyone he was going commando (i.e. wasn’t wearing underwear) the previous day?
I’ve been out of Australia so long I don’t know if it’d be acceptable there, and working in Amsterdam was my most recent experience out of the UK.

I never knew that Audrey Hepburn spoke Dutch, but her mother was Dutch and Audrey had an uncredited appearance in Nederlands in 7 lessen. Suddenly Dutch seems a much sexier language.

Do not play this at work

Bomb not targeted at Aussies: suspect
“Amrozi told police “they were not very happy because Australians were killed”, instead of Americans.”

Grace Hopper on her compiler (operational in 1952): “Nobody believed that,” she said. “I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.”
I knew she discovered the first computer bug, but I didn’t actually realise she invented the compiler.
Another article goes into more detail:
“She did this, she said, because she was lazy and hoped that “the programmer may return to being a mathematician.” Her work embodied or foreshadowed enormous numbers of developments that are now the bones of digital computing: subroutines, formula translation, relative addressing, the linking loader, code optimization, and even symbolic manipulation of the kind embodied in Mathematica and Maple. ”
(While I’m at it, this is an ok article on Ada Lovelace though it doesn’t mention that her ‘Notes’ were three times the length of the article she was translating, or her idea for the first computer program.)

BBC article on the lack of chicks in IT mentions in passing that a woman invented Kevlar.

BBC: UK mobile firm snubs Microsoft
“Sendo chief executive Hugh Brogan said one reason for the switch was that Sendo could get access to the source codes for Nokia software, and therefore customise products.”
Microsoft losing business because they’re closed-source? Cool!

I’m installing cygwin until I can repartition my laptop at work and install Linux.

Linux! I Didn’t Know You Could Do That