It could really suck to rent a house!

I never considered this before, but let's examine a simple scenario. You're renting a house. You pay your rent 100% on time, you are a perfect renter. The person who owns your house, to whom you are paying rent, gets into financial difficulty, something happening with increasing freqency these days, and the mortgage company forecloses.

And you are out on your ass. And it's possible that the only notice that you get is the justice of the peace nailing the notice on the door. Here's the sick part, as if this isn't sick enough: it's happening in big numbers to the families of U.S. military personnel.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080616/us_nm/usa_housing_renters_dc

Happy Birthday, Rollercoasters!

Sort of. It was 124 years ago that the first gravity roller coaster opened on Coney Island. The article has a little history and some interesting bits of tid about the Matterhorn at Disneyland.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/06/dayintech_0616

Tuesday an attempt is going to be made to establish a rather peculiar world record

and you can participate, regardless of where you are in the world.

Mozilla is going to be releasing Firefox 3.0, and they're going to try to set a world record for the most bytes downloaded for a single program in a single day. Myself, I'll download it, but I'll probably wait a couple of weeks to install it to give them time to discover any really big showstopper bugs that might have escaped the beta process.

You can pledge at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/, I'm actually going to download it twice, maybe three times: my Mac laptop, my PC at work, and perhaps my Thinkpad.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/