Month: June 2005

So the other day, the Supreme Court ruled that the government can allow one private party to obtain land from another private party by claiming “eminent domain” if it can be shown that the tax revenue from the pre-empting party would exceed that generated by the existing one. This has all sorts of implications, and is of course just another nod to big nasty corporations who want to bulldoze neighborhoods to make way for factories or whatever.

In a stroke of genius, and what can only be called poetic irony, a hotel developer named Logan Clements filed paperwork with the city of Weare, New Hampshire to allow him to bulldoze the house of Justice David Souter and build a hotel in its place. The hotel would be called The Lost Liberty Hotel and would include the Just Desserts Cafe and a small museum with exhibits about the loss of freedoms in America. All guests would receive a complimentary copy of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged.

I love it!

Of course Clements had no problem demonstrating that the tax revenue from a hotel would greatly exceed Justice Souter’s annual property tax, and therefore it’s perfectly within the jurisprudence of the new ruling. If three of the five members of the town council vote in favor of it, I guess Justice Souter will be shopping for a new home…

I’ve got 200GB of storage on my main office server, and it’s just about full. Out of curiosity I checked to see what the heck was taking so much room (I mean, come on, who needs that much space?) and discovered that my music collection has grown to about 85GB. Wow, that’s a lot of music.

Another 90GB is hundreds of thousands of backup files for clients, and the remainder includes everything from my digital photo album to ten years of e-mail messages to general documents and files.

Time to get one of those new-fangled 400GB drives, I guess…

Tonight marked the start of the summer ultimate league season, and we played a wicked fun game. The wind was pretty stiff, making for some interesting plays. We also battled for what must have been the longest point in my fifteen years of playing– a solid fifteen minutes of back-and-forth until we finally took it to the end zone on a (no kidding) diving layout by yours truly.

Of course, in so doing I ripped the scab clear off my knee. For the past two months I’ve repeatedly done this– I make a diving catch and tear my knee open, and just when it seems to be healing I do it all again. I figure at this rate it’ll be Christmas before it heals.

I can only hope that I instill a sense of fear in the opposing team when they see me running around with blood streaming down my leg throughout the game…

Ahh, the life of a consultant…

Now here’s a panhandler with some creativity…

I had a lot of e-mail this morning…

“Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.”

— Jef Raskin

I’m making flight arrangements for a trip to WA and it’s reassuring to know that Frontier Airlines is, indeed, operated by Frontier Airlines…

Prepare yourself for a man who can summon UFO’s with the power of his superhuman mind. Yes, you’ve probably heard of Prophet Yahweh (who hasn’t?) and now you can visit his own super-cool web site:

prophetyahweh.com/video/Summons_In_Back_Yard1.wmv:video clip

Personally, I wonder if Prophet Yahweh is really some kind of rap star wanna-be, and this “summoning” stuff is only a lead-in for the launch of his new album.

But hey, he lives in Las Vegas… anything is possible!

Yahoo News reports that the legislative body of Saudi Arabia has been presented with a proposal that would give permission for women over 35 years of age to actually drive a car. They would be allowed to do so unsupervised on local streets, but would (of course!) need a male chaperone for any freeway driving.

I think Munir al-Shahrani sums up the views of the Saudi population quite handily with his statement:

“Driving by women leads to evil.”

Lest any of us have doubts that women drivers are evil, consider his follow-up statement:

“Can you imagine what it would be like if her car broke down? She would have to seek help from men.”

Oh, the horror! It’s fantastic that the radical Islamic cabbageheads in charge over there are keeping women off the roads. Let’s not even go into how women would have to unveil their faces while driving, inevitably leading to horrible exposure to other drivers who are not their husbands.

While I have respect and tolerance for other religions and beliefs, I really struggle with the way the Saudis demean half of their population. It’s truly a shame, and just one of many reasons why I rate them right up there with North Korea and China on the Most Sucky Loser Governments list.