Anne got a new job (details to follow), and to celebrate, she showed up in New Hampshire yesterday with a Canon 20D, the camera I've wanted since...well, since before I met her. What a great wife.
Now I can take photos like this, with actual control over the exposure, aperture, and focus:
TPM Muckraker reported today that the Dept. of Homeland Security has a new warning about radical animal-rights groups:
Such radical extremist groups may use several tactics—each devastating in its own way—including:
- "organizing protests"
- "flyer distribution"
- "inundating computers with e-mails"
- "tying up phone lines to prevent legitimate calls"
- "sending continuous faxes in order to drain the ink supply from company fax machines"
I particularly like the fourth item, since several Republicans have been convicted recently of doing just that in New Hampshire during the 2002 election.
The Chicago Tribune carried two Assoicated Press stories about religious fanatacism this morning. First, Christians were attacked at Mass in Egypt yesterday. When American Christians, who currently run the government, claim to be "persecuted," perhaps they should reflect on the Egyptian situation.
The second story, from Manila, Philippines, tells of Catholics voluntarily getting nailed to crosses to show their devotion. In a concession to the fact that we no longer live in ancient Roman times, the 10 cm (4 in.) nails pounded through their hands and feet—in one man's case, for the 20th time—were "soaked in alcohol to prevent infection."
Happy Easter!
My cousin sent this one to me ages ago:
This bloke's in bed with his missus when there's a rat-a-tat-tat on the door.
He rolls over and looks at his clock, and it's half three in the morning. Sod that for a game of soldiers, he thinks, and rolls over.
Then, a louder knock follows. "Aren't you going to answer that?" says his wife so he drags himself out of bed, and goes downstairs. He opens the door and this bloke is stood outside.
"Eh mate" says the stranger, "Can you give us a push?"
"No, piss off, it's half three. I was in bed," says the man and shuts the door.
He goes back up to bed and tells his wife what happened and she says "Dave, you are a bastard. Remember that night we broke down in the pouring rain on the way to pick the kids up from the babysitter and you had to knock on that man's house to get us started again? What would have happened if he'd told us to piss off?"
So he gets out of bed again, gets dressed, and goes downstairs. He opens the door, and not being able to see the stranger anywhere he shouts: "Eh mate, do you still want a push??" and he hears a voice cry out "Yeah please mate."
So, still being unable to see the stranger he shouts: "Where are you?" and he replies: "I'm over here on the swings."
Because Passover begins at sundown. Use the Weather Now sunrise calculator to figure out exactly when that is. (It's 7:25pm in Nashua, 7:29pm in Chicago, and 7:39pm in Monterey, Calif., for those keeping score at home.)
It's chilling, actually, but if you read Seymour Hersh's latest column in the New Yorker closely you get the impression that Bush is planning yet another disastrous war. Even Vizzini knew not to get involved in a land war in Asia; the President (1,014 days and 4 hours to go) is contemplating his third.
I had to stop myself from snapping up this USB GPS device:
This small GPS gadget can easily be placed in a car, boat, land speeder, or just about any moving object and will record its own time, date, location, speed, direction and altitude. The recorded information can then be downloaded to your computer through the USB port and optionally integrated with Google Earth or Mapquest. This feature allows you to "playback" the location points of the TrackStick and see a visual mapped history of its travels.
Containing 1MB of memory it can store up to 4000 records allowing for months of travel. When the TrackStick is not moving, memory is not used. The record interval is adjustable to anything between 1 and 15 minutes (this is used to save memory and will not extend the battery life). It’s so small you can hide it for covert applications. There are no special software applications to buy and the raw data can be exported in RTF, XLS, HTML, or Google Earth KML formats.
It's $250 from ThinkGeek. Maybe I'll get it for myself as a bonus if I beat my revenue projection this month.
Update, 6 June 2006 5:36p CT (22:36 UTC): Bruce Schneier has picked up on the security ramifications of this device.
My project manager sent around this link to Joel Spolsky's rules for software management:
I've come up with my own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team. The great part about it is that it takes about 3 minutes. The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. You don't have to figure out lines-of-code-per-day or average-bugs-per-inflection-point.
I totally agree with Spolsky's list. I have never been on a project that scored better than 7 until now (which scores 9, IMO, but we're moving toward 11), and only one, ever, has answered "yes" to #8 (quiet working conditions).
The latest campaign of the Christian right is to get colleges to grant them exceptions to their broad anti-harrassment policies. The L.A. Times reports on a suit against the Georgia Institute of Technology:
Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.
Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.
Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.
You have to read about two-thirds down the article to get to the crux (sorry) of the wing-nuts' objection:
[Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor] says he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different—a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait.
Two things: first, whether sexual orientation is biological or a "lifestyle choice" misses the point, because the policy protects against religious persecution as well, so invalidating the policy would open up the fundies to more discrimination on campus. Second, according to the L.A. Times, by saying that the evidence suggests more strongly than not that homosexuality is partially biological, I'm a "gay activist." No wonder I feel fabulous.
There's more. Malhotra apparently has a long history of not "getting it" regarding appropriate and inappropriate speech:
Malhotra said she had been reprimanded by college deans several times in the last few years for expressing conservative religious and political views. When she protested a campus production of "The Vagina Monologues" with a display condemning feminism, the administration asked her to paint over part of it.
She caused another stir with a letter to the gay activists who organized an event known as Coming Out Week in the fall of 2004. Malhotra sent the letter on behalf of the Georgia Tech College Republicans, which she chairs; she said several members of the executive board helped write it.
The letter referred to the campus gay rights group Pride Alliance as a "sex club...that can't even manage to be tasteful." It went on to say that it was "ludicrous" for Georgia Tech to help fund the Pride Alliance. "If gays want to be tolerated, they should knock off the political propaganda," the letter said.
Imagine, just for a second, that Malhorta received a letter saying her Bible-study was a "terrorist club...that can't even manage to be civil." Imagine if it included the sentiment, "If Christians want to be tolerated, they should knock off the martyr propaganda." Don't you suppose she'd sue over that, too? At least in that case, she'd have a defensible position.
It's opening day at Fenway Park today, and several of my cow-orkers are going. Fortunately, Anne gave me a perfect gift before I left for New Hampshire, so I fit right in:
This is proof, by the way, that a baseball cap can push any respectable nerd all the way into dorkdom.