I was futzing around today with Google Maps, and decided to check if I could find my old ship with the satellite imaging feature. And, two minutes later, there it was, the USS Iowa, near Benicia, California in the ghost fleet.

The Iowa Veterans Association is trying to get it transferred to San Francisco as a museum, but some politician snuck a rider into the DOD budget that moves it to Stockton, California instead. I guess it was some economic development thing, but considering how much work has been done already to move her to SF, this seems like another piece of partisan bullshit (SF being Democrat country and all).

I’m doing some hardware testing today, looking at Sun’s Sun Ray 170 and one of Sun’s Linux servers in what we like to call in the biz a “solution review”. Basically, I’m running Sun JavaDesktop on a terminal–a 17″ LCD color terminal with all the trick-outs of most low-end desktop PCs.

So far, it’s been dirt-simple (once I actually got everything set up) to use. JavaDesktop is a lot like Windows, and if you spend your day in office apps, the browser, and email, it’s a pretty cost-effective way to run a small office.