06/21/2006

Straight from the Associated Press comes this article about a thief who wanted to participate in this year’s Darwin Awards:

Officials in Reading PA say a man was electrocuted on Tuesday, apparently while trying to steal what he probably thought was copper wire from atop a 50-foot utility pole.

Fire Chief William Rehr says employee found the victim, 33-year-old Samuel Ortiz-Valle, about 15 feet from the base of the Met-Ed pole at Cambridge Lee Industries Incorporated. Police Captain Francis Drexler says a pair of wire cutters was found next to the body, leading investigators to believe that Ortiz-Valle intended to cut down the wires to resell as scrap metal.

Note to self: don’t steal copper if it’s fifty feet above the ground.

06/21/2006

From Unclaimed Territory, talking about Iraq:

Virtually every prediction the President and his followers made about this war has proven to be false, while virtually every prediction made by war opponents has proven to be true. The President and his followers controlled every part of this war with an iron fist, ignoring anything which their political opponents said and insisting on the right to exert full-scale, undiluted control over it. And now it has failed, and it’s everyone’s fault except theirs.

06/20/2006

Apparently this is the month for stupid amendments. After the defeat of the Marriage Protection Amendment (thank goodness) we’re now faced with the frighteningly real prospect that the Flag Desecration Amendment will be approved by the Senate– it’s currently only a single vote shy of passage– and sent to the states to be ratified.

In one pundit’s words, this is “the dumbest law ever”. It boggles the mind that people want an amendment to the Constitution that specifically takes away one of the rights protected under the First Amendment. Burning a flag is, at its core, free speech. Sure, it makes some people angry. Voltaire once said, “I may not agree with your opinion, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to have it.” Apparently his words fall on deaf ears these days, because politicians seem more intent on taking away freedoms than protecting them.

I think it’s more “un-American” to prohibit flag burning than it is to actually perform the act. And if this atrocity comes to pass, I may very well burn a flag to protest it.

06/18/2006

Today, apparently, is Father’s Day. This evening we returned from our nine-day jaunt through the Southwest, and the kids quickly went to work making Father’s Day gifts for me. After dinner we had a grand party while I opened them.

Alex gave me a couple of his most prized rocks from his rock collection.

Kyra made a bird feeder from half of a two-liter bottle and some construction paper, and even included the birdseed.

Zack boxed up a few things and presented them to me. In the box were:

  • a red plastic comb
  • a marble
  • a Koosh ball
  • a fingernail clipper
  • one half-liter of bottled water

    • When I commented about how exciting these items were, he proudly told me that he gave them to me so I could have “my very own”.

    Ahh, kids. They’re such a riot.

06/09/2006

Direct from the New York Times:

Fed up with the inability of two lawyers to agree on a trivial issue in an insurance lawsuit, a federal judge in Florida this week ordered them to “convene at a neutral site and engage in one (1) game of ‘rock, paper, scissors'” to settle the matter.

Our legal system in action. Woo hoo!

06/09/2006

Roger Duronio has recently gained fame as the IT guy you shouldn’t annoy.

It seems he works (err, worked) for a bank called UBS Paine Webber, making a nice comfortable salary of $125,000 a year. He expected a hefty bonus of $50,000, but was sorely disappointed with a mere $32,000 bonus.

Unhappy with this, he decided to take a bit of revenge on his company… so he created a malicious piece of software that deleted all files on the bank’s central server, and then moved to all branch servers and did the dirty work there as well. The program worked nicely, erasing files from every server in every branch. A total of 2,000 servers went down in flames.

In what can only be described as a classic IT situation, backup files didn’t work. Everything Duronio’s little program erased is gone. The bank called in 200 IBM support engineers for what was probably the largest IT firefight of the year, and the director of IT for the bank said the disaster rated “a ten-plus” on a scale of one to ten.

Wow. Never, never make the IT guy mad.

06/08/2006

From an Associated Press article:

The governor of Texas wants to turn all the world into a virtual posse. Rick Perry has announced a $5 million plan to install hundreds of night-vision cameras on private land along the Mexican border and put the live video on the Internet, so that anyone with a computer who spots illegal immigrants trying to slip across can report it on a toll-free hot line.

I’m not sure whether to categorize this as “scary” because it’s our government asking us to spy on one another (again), or “staggeringly stupid” because they think people are going to sit in front of their computers watching a web cam of the Texas desert, waiting for a fuzzy ten-pixel blob to pop out of the sagebrush and make a move for the border.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe the kind people running this place.