Uh oh.
I guess I should light up instead of checking my e-mail so much…
Sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful, always a good time
Uh oh.
I guess I should light up instead of checking my e-mail so much…
And so it begins.
London Heathrow Airport is now asking airline passengers to be fingerprinted and iris-scanned in order to board flights.
Right now this is a voluntary thing, but you know it’s only a matter of time before it’s mandatory. Before you can get on your plane, you’ll need to hand over (get it?) biometric data that must match your electronic passport.
Coupled with last week’s news that Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport has installed a full-body x-ray machine that can essentially “see” through clothes and generate an image that essentially shows the passenger nude, it seems like we’ll have to surrender all personal dignity if we want to fly anywhere.
So the Iraq commission has spoken, and things don’t look pretty. It sounds like they’ve pretty much decided that Bush’s strategy in Iraq is an abysmal failure, things are going to get worse before they get better, and a military solution probably isn’t even possible.
Et cetera.
Now, I don’t think any of this really comes as a surprise to anyone. Bush, of course, continues to live in his own little world, and I wonder if he’s just being stubborn at this point by refusing to admit he’s been wrong all along, or if he’s really that stupid.
Either way, he made an interesting comment:
Now, regardless of how I feel about this whole situation, or Bush in general, I find myself wondering (not for the first time) why it seems like the entire Iraqi situation is in Bush’s hands. Why does the committee have to deliver a report to him? Why does he get to sit in his big chair and say he’ll consider what they say and then decide what to do?
Shouldn’t Congress be making that decision? The last time I checked, they were tasked with the responsibility of declaring war and managing the armed forces. Yes, yes, the President has authority under certain conditions and so forth, but I honestly don’t see how he can continue making the case that “I’m the Commander-in-Chief so what I say goes.”
We all know that Congress was a bunch of spineless yes-men for the past six years, and the Democrats often talked tough but never really stood up to the administration, but I would think (and hope) that with their majority they’d now step forward and tell Bush the way it’s really going to be. We have an independent, bipartisan commission spending months reviewing the situation in Iraq and delivering a report that says in every way possible that our policies are a failure, and even recommends possible avenues to pursue, but Bush still acts like he’s got some Secret Plan (*cough* Nixon) to turn this thing around.
When Congress reconvenes they’d better slap him around like a crying kid in a department store.
Oh, and one more item from the report:
Whee. I’m so glad we’re doing this.
It’s a sad fact that every now and then I have to boot my Windows XP system so I can test a web site in Internet Exploder and make sure things work properly. I saw a reference to a software package that makes Windows look like Mac OS X, so I thought I’d give it a shot and see what happened.
Wow. It looks exactly like OS X, down to buttons, window bars, drop shadows, and even the dockbar. Amazing.
Of course it may look nice, but it’s still Windows underneath the fancy graphics. At least I can enjoy the appearance when I fire up IE.
That’s cool.
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
— Isaac Asimov
One of my clients is considering the use of offshore programmers to develop their web application, mainly because they have a lot of work to be done and Indian programmers are far cheaper than mine.
I’m reviewing the marketing literature from this company, and it’s really quite humorous. The broken English notwithstanding, there are phrases scattered all over the place that make no sense:
“Domain wise script classification and management”
“Leverages test director based collaboration and workflow for test design, execution, and reporting”
“Quality matrices definition and measurement”
And perhaps the best of all:
“Software quality management is the ideal premise to define, discover, scale, and endorse ‘Total Application Behavior’ in the wider context of optimizing technology to business objectives.”
Umm, what? I have no idea what these things mean, and I’m a technical guru!
Anyway, it’ll be interesting.
It’s so much fun to get letters from the Domain Registry of America, which uses some sneaky tactics to convince people they need to send the DRA a check or they’ll lose their domain. I can’t count the number of web hosting clients I have who were fooled by the official-looking “invoice” from the DRA saying if they don’t pay their domain will expire. Luckily those clients call me and I can explain the shenanigans, so all is well.
Since I own around a dozen domains, I pretty much get a letter from the DRA monthly. This month’s was really funny because it’s for 1
Probably the part that made me laugh the most is the address portion, where it makes it sound like THOUGHT MONKEYS is some kind of official business. Whee!
By gum, I believe I may be presidential timber. I just saw this stirring and emotional photo of ol’ George:
And it reminded me of a self-portrait I took back in 1993:
For the life of me, I can’t remember why in the world I took a picture like that, but it’s still funny. And now I realize that I can use it for my presidential bid in 2008!
Whoa, the lighting outside just became really weird. Check out these clouds.