Things are heating up again in the anti-trust trial. Microsoft is going to call a hostile witness, AOL’s David Colburn (no relation to me), who has already testified and performed well. Could be a reach …

Outraged! Daily Edition is kind of boring. I know that you, my loyal readers, will be upset to hear that, but don’t flame Leslie too harshly. After all, all press is good press.

Those of us who have worked in or with the chemical industry have encountered the MSDS — Material Safety Data Sheet. Companies are required to keep these documents on hand so that they can be used as a reference in case of an emergency. The MSDS for water shows that even good things can be taken too far.

As people rush off to blame the Internet, popular music, and violent games for incidents at Columbine High, perhaps they should take a look at the list of side effects of Luvox, the drug Eric Harris was taking. To save you the trouble of reading the impressively long list, here are the highlights: manic reaction, psychoses, delirium, delusion, depersonalization, euphoria, hallucinations, hostility, hysteria, paranoia, sleep disorders, and suicide attempts.

Joyce Millman honors Livia Soprano in preparation for Mother’s Day. I missed most of the first season of The Sopranos working on the infernal SQL book; fortunately, reruns start on June 9.

How many companies in the computer industry have problems like this?

Buy.com and Amazon.com are called “sales portals” by people who have nothing better to do than make up idiotic jargon for this misbegotten industry. It is to laugh.

The Taiwanese virus writer responsible for the dreaded Chernobyl virus has been released because nobody has stepped forward to file charges against him in his home country. Most of the complaints are from overseas. In the meantime, the writer of the Melissa virus faces a sentence of up to 40 years for his dreadful crime. It’s good to see that our system has such a fine sense of proportionality that the writer of an annoying but generally harmless computer virus could face more jail time than most of the rapists, child molesters, and car thieves that you find in the bowels of the criminal justice system.

A Risks Digest article on software bloat that explains how a Microsoft application that should consume 45k manages to use up 1 meg of disk space.

One of my goals for 1999 is to replace UltraEdit as my editor of choice with GNU Emacs. I bought the O’Reilly book Learning GNU Emacs today, and I’m gradually going to try to phase in Emacs as I learn the commands. For what it’s worth, my main motivation for doing this is to take advantage of the powerful macro writing features in Emacs.