★ Not to make light of a serious issue, but XKCD must have been watching the Twitter stream get hit hard by trending #swineflu just like me. Because this is exactly what I saw.

So if Twitter is the “Pulse of the Internets”, then XKCD must be the pulse of Twitter…? I don’t know. But it’s funny because it’s true.

If you want to follow the outbreak globally in realtime, this google maps mashup is the best place.

We’ve been trying to have a baby for six months…

★ This was just too funny to not post. Enjoy.

★ Ashlee Vance, reporting for the NYT:

The Oracle Corporation, the technology information company, announced Monday that it would acquire a rival, Sun Microsystems, for $9.50 a share, or about $7.4 billion. […]

The deal immediately disrupts the traditional relationships formed between some of the technology industry’s largest players and thrusts Oracle into the hardware business. Oracle, for example, has long-standing partnerships with Sun’s rivals, including Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

Since just about every project I work on uses MySQL in someway, this is slightly disturbing news. Nobody nows exactly what Oracles plans for MySQL are, but I’m hoping that they don’t neglect it in favor of Oracle’s own DB. We can only wait and see.