My family loves the movie The Princess Bride. I'm not as big a fan as the rest of them, but I'll admit that I really enjoy some of the movie's funny moments. As a result, when I saw this t-shirt, I had to laugh.

When I saw this Sacramento Bee piece, it really caught me by surprise. As background, Governor Schwarzenegger announced the other day that he was going to reduce the pay of state workers to the Federal minimum wage until a state budget is finally signed. Now, State Controller John Chiang is claiming that it would take at least six months to implement this change in the state's payroll system and another nine or ten months to pay employees back.

If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to issue minimum-wage checks to 200,000 state workers in less than a month, he may want to rehire any semi-retired computer programmers he terminated last week.

The massive pay cut would exhaust the state's antiquated payroll system, which is built on a Vietnam-era computer language so outdated that many college students don't even bother to learn it anymore.

Democratic state Controller John Chiang said Monday it would take at least six months to reconfigure the state's payroll system to issue blanket checks at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour, though Schwarzenegger insists such a change should occur this month.

Experts say Chiang isn't joking when he describes the state's payroll system as a computing relic on par with vacuum tubes and floppy disks.

"It's an example of a number of computer systems in which the state made a large investment decades ago and has been keeping it going the last few years with duct tape," said Michael Cohen, director of state administration with the Legislative Analyst's Office.

This just doesn't ring true to me. Apparently, I'm not the only person who thinks this claim is suspect:

Fred Klass, chief operating officer for Schwarzenegger's Department of Finance, testifying Monday in a Senate hearing, challenged Chiang's description of his logistical hurdles.

"We have not been provided with the evidence that would show us that this is an impossibility, nor does it answer the question of why aren't we working on this for next time," Klass said.

"To some degree, it's not the point," he added. "The point is the law needs to be adhered to, and the governor is saying we need to follow the law. And if the controller is saying it's inconvenient, I think the controller needs to explain why inconvenience is a reason to ignore the law."

The state payroll system is based on the COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, programming language – a code first introduced in 1959 and popularized in the 1960s and 1970s.

"COBOL programmers are hard to come by these days," said Fred Forrer, the Sacramento-based CEO of MGT of America, a public-sector consulting firm. "It's certainly not a language that is taught. Oftentimes, you have to rely on retired annuitants to come back and help maintain the system until you're able to find a replacement."

Retired state employees who have returned to work part-time for the state were among thousands of workers laid off last week.

Forrer said the system has tens of thousands of lines of code, so it is time-consuming to find and replace salaries for each job classification on an individual basis.

Having done a little COBOL programming in school.... Yes, I'm THAT old... this just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You don't need to go through "lines of code" to change hourly wage rates.

COBOL applications like payroll are basically databases. In your database, you have a table (or file) with all the employees and another with all the wage and salary information. If they need to implement this change, they simply write a short COBOL program to go through the correct tables and change the hourly rate to $6.55 for the applicable employees. They can write another short program to keep track of how much they'll need to reimburse those employees when the budget is signed and even put that extra money in their next check and change the hourly rate back to normal.

Maybe I'm missing something, but none of this is rocket science. We're talking about functions that should take a week, not six months. I also find it hard to believe that all the COBOL programmers have just been laid off. If that were true, then the State Controller's office IT management should be fired. In any organization, one of your most basic functions is payroll. You don't run a payroll system for 200,000+ employees and not have staff on hand that know how to maintain it.

While I have great faith in the incompetence of my state government, I find John Chiang's claim that this software change can't be made in less than six months is just crap. It is an excuse. I don't believe that even our state government is this inept.

Here's probably the most interesting story I saw today:

Alien contact covered up, says Apollo veteran Edgar Mitchell

Former NASA astronaut and moonwalker Dr Edgar Mitchell - a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission - has stunningly claimed aliens do exist.

And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions - but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.

Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as 'little people who look strange to us.'

He said supposedly real-life ET's were similar to the traditional image of a small frame, large eyes and head.

Chillingly, he claimed our technology is "not nearly as sophisticated" as theirs and "had they been hostile", he warned "we would be been gone by now".

I also liked the quote from NASA:

In a statement, a spokesman said: "NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe.

'Dr Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinions on this issue.'

The timing couldn't be better considering the new X-Files movie is coming out tomorrow. It does make you wonder whether this is simply a publicity stunt for the movie. But then again, what if he's right.

[Play X-Files theme.]

This Associated Press story which appeared in the San Diego Union Tribune caught my attention. While cheating on tests isn't new, I thought what was interesting was how the kids were cheating.

The testing service began an investigation after school officials suspected some students cheated on the exam. The probe revealed some students cheated on their statistics and economics tests by swapping formulas over cell phone text messages, Fish said.

How in the heck could the people administering the test not see kids sending or reading text messages? Even if the kid had their phone in their lap, I can't imagine how the staff wouldn't see it, or the apparent sudden interest that students had in their lap? Even discounting the technology, might that not suggest a paper hidden in their lap? Weird.

7/8 Update: Friend of Dave Bob pointed out that his company has cell phone detectors that the school could have used to detect the presence of operating cell phones, even phones in stand by. Hopefully this school will now be in the market for some of these. From another article I read, it seems that the school had an insufficient ratio of proctors to test takers and they had the student's chairs too close together. Both of these issues led to the problem.

I thought this EnGadget post was pretty interesting. It describes the world's most evil alarm clock.

We've seen alarm clocks institute some fairly unorthodox methods of waking users up, but this is exceptionally high on the list of "oh, no they didn'ts." Alice Wang's Tyrant, which we can only assume is a concept, actually dials a random number in one's mobile contact list for every three minutes that the sleeper doesn't address the obnoxiously loud ringing. In other words, unless you pick yourself up out of bed within ten minutes of the alarm going off, you'll have three angry friends wondering why they're getting phone calls from you everyday at O-five-hundred hours. Brilliant. Pure, sadistic, barbarous brilliance.

Now that's an alarm clock!

In our house, when watching a television show or movie where we can clearly see that a character is about to get killed, we say, "Red Shirt", meaning that they're like the red shirted characters in the original Star Trek series whose primary purpose in being in the scene was to allow a death without an impact on a major character.

We've always thought that these "Red Shirts" had a high mortality rate, but now we know for sure. In this post Analytics According to Captain Kirk, Matt Bailey does a careful analysis of crew member deaths in relationship to other common Star Trek events such as Captain Kirk getting lucky, presence of Klingons, fights and beaming down to a planet.

The short version, Red Shirts made up 73% of the crew-member deaths on the show. Beaming down to the planet increased the chance of death for Red Shirts. Captain Kirk getting lucky, decreased that chance, but only if there wasn't a fight. The author found a clear solution for Red Shirt deaths:

We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included).

I'm glad he cleared that up.

Here is a sponsored post. I was asked to review Live Video U, a very interesting web site. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the name, but after visiting the site and spending time watching a number of the videos and playing with the various features of the site, I have to admit that I’m impressed.

The idea behind Live Video U is to allow prospective college students to learn more about the “college experience” at a wide variety of colleges and universities. This goes beyond the typical campus brochure by providing videos from students and apparently staff as well, although all of the videos I watched were from students. The videos cover a wide variety of topics including the nightlife, campus activities, athletics, academic departments and much more.

You can search for your specific college, or see colleges listed by state, size, region, major or rank. Additionally, you can search for your terms of interest, such as “nightlife” and see all of the videos that cover that topic.

Besides the videos, the site also provides the basic statistics that you see at other college sites, including estimated costs and ratings in a variety of topics, including academics, safety, dorms, facilities, etc.

By registering for the site, you also have the opportunity to participate in the “Student Union”, which allows you to create your own profile on the site complete with videos, pictures and audio clips. You can see pages from the other users and even form a study group. There is also a blogging feature that allows you to publish a blog for other site users or read the blogs of others. Like most community sites, there is no cost for registering.

Overall, I was quite impressed with the site. I would happily recommend it for those high school juniors or seniors who are trying to decide which college or university is right for them. It provides a nice opportunity to get a sense of not only the institution, but the student body as well.

I thought this was a great posting about ways to access sites that require you to sign up:

3 Ways to access ‘Must Sign Up to View’ Sites - This happens many times to me: I search on Google for a problem I’m having with my computer, click on a search result, reach the site (most of the time, it’s a forum), and boom! I have to register in order to view the solution on the page. Or worse, on some occasions, they want me to pay them to view the page. [Digg News]

I saw this item on Slashdot this morning. Now I know where the voices in my head are coming from.

The report explained several types of non-lethal laser applications, including microwave hearing, disrupted neural control, and microwave heating. For the first type, short pulses of RF energy (2450 MHz) [FOD note: Conspiracy theorists, can you say Wifi or 2.4 GHz cordless phones? That's the same frequency range.] can generate a pressure wave in solids and liquids. When exposed to pulsed RF energy, humans experience the immediate sensation of "microwave hearing" - sounds that may include buzzing, ticking, hissing, or knocking that originate within the head.

Studies with guinea pigs and cats suggest that the mechanism responsible for the phenomenon is thermoelastic expansion. Exposure to the RF pulses doesn´t cause any permanent effects, as all effects cease almost immediately after exposure ceases. As the report explains, tuning microwave hearing could enable communicating with individuals from a distance of up to several hundred meters.

"The phenomenon is tunable in that the characteristic sounds and intensities of those sounds depend on the characteristics of the RF energy as delivered," the report explains. "Because the frequency of the sound heard is dependent on the pulse characteristics of the RF energy, it seems possible that this technology could be developed to the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except that it could only be heard within a person´s head. In one experiment, communication of the words from one to ten using ´speech modulated´ microwave energy was successfully demonstrated. Microphones next to the person experiencing the voice could not pick up these sounds. Additional development of this would open up a wide range of possibilities."

The report predicts that communicating at longer distances would be possible with larger equipment, while shorter range signals could be generated with portable equipment. Putting voices in people´s heads could cause what the report calls "psychologically devastating" effects. The technology might even allow for communicating with an individual hostage surrounded by captors, although this would require "extreme directional specificity."

Now that I know how they're doing it, I can fight it. Oh, I guess not. The voice in my head told me that I can't. I have another idea. "Honey, where's that box of aluminum foil?"

This Engadget Mini How-To just cracked me up. After reading it, I had to look at my own system and verify it was true. Here's the picture.