on all the poles, or whatever it is that they do up in the
cherry-picker with the fiber/coax junctions.

“Oh, some customers

might have gotten a notification in their bills,” the support line
peon said when asked why we hadn't heard anything about this.

After a full day down hard on Monday, this is not making me feel that

warm and fuzzy about Comcast.

Just gettin' by on gettin' by's my stock in trade
livin' it, day to day
picking up the pieces wherever they fall

Just lettin' it roll
lettin' the high times carry the load
Just living my life easy come, easy go.

Aristide was a hero of the downtrodden. He turned the military into
the downtrodden in the process of trying to turn Haiti into a civil
society. He sat out one term as president, and was re-elected to
another 5-year term. But he was never the darling of American
interests–just a symbol of how America would do “the right thing.”

Now, Aristide is out again — and the “rebels” who created this
uprising in Haiti are, surprise, the same people who overthrew him as
soldiers. And, another surprise, they want to reinstate the
army–most likely to prevent Aristide supporters from doing the same
thing to them in a few months when things don't get any better. Their
leader, the news media reports almost paranthetically, has been tied
to past human rights abuses.

Aristide is no saint. He used many of the tools his predecessors
used, wittingly or not, to maintain his authority. He was another
case of “meet the new boss, (substantially the) same as the old
boss.” But he sure didn't get any help from the Bush administration
in his attempts to create a rule of law. Those “national police”
that rolled over in front of the coup–they were trained by the US
military in policing, and included (surprise!) members of the former
military.

How are we supposed to foster democracy in Iraq when we can't even do
it in our own literal backyard? Bush said he's going to prevent the
flight of refugees from Haiti to the US (ignoring the UN convention on
refugees). And then there's this wrinkle:

“ href=http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/click/rss/0.91/public/-/1/hi/world/americas/3525947.stm>Haiti's
former president says the US forced him into exile – but the UN
appears to back Washington's strong denials.”[ href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/click/rss/0.91/public/-/1/hi/default.stm">BBC
News]

What are we supposed to think? Did George Bush steal another
presidency?

Maybe when we're done with him, he can go run things in Haiti, Baby
Doc style.

Well, I dragged my left foot across the metal strip that covers the
edge of the carpet, and caught a nail with the ball of it, ripping an
inch-long hole in my calloused sole. I said some unpleasant words,
and lifted up my foot to see where the crimson was starting to drip
from.

Paula bandaged my foot, half-sympathetic, half-cursing that I had
disturbed her morning quiet time with this annoyance. I hobbled
through the rest of the day. “I hope this doesn't interfere with
our plans for tomorrow,” she worried/threatened.

Our plans for Sunday–the National Zoo. Walking. Lots.

Well, Sunday comes, and with a fresh bandage I'm off with the family
to DC for a day on foot. Zo‘ announces she has a bathroom emergency,
so as we pull into the Zoo, I drop Paula and Zoe and Jonah off at a
restroom. Kevin stays with me as we drive down to park in one of the
lower lots.

Well, unfortunately, there won't be any of that. As it turns out, on
this first day of springlike weather (67 degrees F on Leap Day is a
glorious thing), every freaking person in the Washington DC Metro area
has had the same freaking idea as us, and there are cars backed up to
kingdom come waiting for early birds to leave so they can park. We
end up driving out the bottom of the zoo and up the Quarry Road hill
to 18th Street, about a good mile and a click from the bathrooms we
dropped everyone else off at.

By the end of the day, I can't feel the hole in the bottom of my foot
any more. In fact, I can't feel my feet.

This morning, I peel off the bandage and find that what was once a
bloody mess now looks like the ruptured center of a giant blister.
Mmmm. Hope you all ate already. Anyway, that sucker is sure letting
me know it's there now. It's a good thing I'm shackled to my
desk.

Okay, back to the salt mines.

It says something about the state of America's defense and intelligence institutions that no Katherine Gun surfaced here. And I wonder how we can persist as a country without actions like these, by people of conscience in those institutions.

“Some 30 of the IT jobs being cut will be outsourced to Tata Group, India's largest IT firm, Bodkin said. “Twenty of those jobs will be located in India and Hungary, and 10 will be in the U.S.,” he said.”

On the other,“Mr. Karzai said that the Taleban were now defeated.”

Now scientists have figured out why: old world monkeys have a built-in AIDS blocker: a protein that prevents HIV from shedding its shell and infecting cells with its DNA. Now researchers are focusing on ways to transfer this protein to AIDS patients through gene therapy, or modifying a similar protein already present in humans.[ from Scientific American]

Bush is creating two Americas. I'm sure he has only the best of intentions in his desire to preserve the sanctity of marriage — after all, the one thing seperating him from Clinton is that he's never cheated on Laura (that we know of). But in his ham-fisted approach to the “problem”, this one-time state's-rights advocate is screwing around with what should be by all accounts a local decision.

The amendment won't pass, and Bush's people know it. It's an attempt to bottle up the homophobic response of the religious right into another campaign issue, a policy version of the Dean war-whoop to get the troops fired up for action. He's channeling hate into campaign contributions.

As of late, I've been trying to step back from the Bush demonization zeitgeist; after all, he's a human being, and most of what he's done can be explained by simple misperceptions, preconceptions and, well, incompetence.

But this latest move is just plain ayatollah-like, turning religious fervor into public policy. There's an evil genius behind his aw-shucks stupidity. It's like Bush is tryingto incite a civil war.

Clearly, some controlled substances played a role in the creation of this game. But, hey, the wiggling feet of embedded penguins make it all worth it.

Really.

That's not to say I avoid them completely. I have accounts on both Friendster and Tribe (and I'm a little miffed that I didn't get invited to join Orkut; there's something about an invitation-only”0social network” that's, well, antisocial ).

I've used Tribe more regularly than Friendster (which from my experience is as slow as molasses). Tribe is in some ways similar to craigslist, which started basically as a job-posting service but has turned into what I call “community-ware”–a place where people can trade information, find services, and generally do a lot of the things they used to do on Usenet before the bozo and spam level choked off any remaining usefulness.

But I digress. Tribe.net has features like event planning, classifieds (which you can filter based on how close your relationship to the poster is), discussion boards with their own URLs (which I've set up a few of), and a number of other interactive features that go beyond just trying to score a date.

To tell the truth, the killer feature that Tribe, Friendster and Orkut all lack is what LiveJournal has–permission-based sharing of stories.

LiveJournal is, on the surface, yet another blog hosting site. But it has one feature that other blogs don't–you can designate people as “friends”, and set the level of privacy on entries to allow only them to read them and/or post comments. You can also look on a page tied to your journal and see all the recent postings by your friends, and set up community journals.

My wife has a LiveJournal, and she finally succeeded in getting me to sign up for one. LiveJournal doesn't have the social networking aspect of “social software”, in that it doesn't automatically reveal to you who friends of your friends are. But it does have the effect of building tight communities of people quickly because it allows them to share things over the web with relative privacy–something that Tribe and Friendster don't have, really. I mean, sure, Tribe and Friendster restrict access to your identity info to a limited network of people (four degrees of separation for Tribe). But with 6 official “friends” on Tribe, I have a network of over 21,000 people who can read my details; and I can't mix friends-only and public commentary in a “tribe” discussion board.

So I finally succumbed and set up my own Livejournal account because of the privacy controls–I can write something there with certainty of who will be able to see it, and others can post knowing that I can read what they post (if they let me) without causing problems with work or family. If there were some way to combine some of the features of Tribe with the journaling capabilities of LiveJournal, well…that would be social software I could give a testimonial for…

Until it didn't, that is. After an uneventful installation, I
rebooted and awaited my familiar desktop. And it came up–and then
went away. And then came up. And went away.

For those of you conversant with Mac-ese, the Finder was crashing on
load, and restarting itself over and over (and over). While I could
get to anything that was on the happy bouncy Toolbar, I was pretty
much hosed as far as getting to any of my files.

I dialed up Apple Customer Care. While on hold, I went into the
system preferences panel and set up a new user, to see if this was
just
a problem with my default account or if it was global.

Mac OS X,

for those of you not following along in the technology trade rags, is

a multiuser operating system based on the BSD flavor of Unix. All this

nice and fuzzy stuff that most Apple users are content to play with on

a daily basis is just a silk dress on an Abrhams main battle tank. As

a grepper from way back, I was prepared to muck around from the
command line if I had to.

By the time I got to the head of the queue and actually got to speak
with a live support person, I had already established that, yes, it
was just a problem with my primary account. Apparently, something in
my preferences had bolloxed up Finder, and everything behaved fine
from another account. I turned the new account into an administrative

account, and was ready to go reset some bits.

But apparently, that isn't where the tech support guy wanted me to
go. He wanted me to reboot from the installation CD. And the Cube
didn't want to do that. After about a half-hour of attempting to boot

from CD, the support guy said, “Did you put any additional RAM into
this system?”

Yes, I had. “Well, we need to pull it out,” he said. “The RAM is

conflicting with the CD boot.”

It was around this point that he suggested that he could solve my
problem with a brand new G5. I graciously declined.

As we grew closer to the precipice of popping the Cube open, I started

to think we were going very far afield from what was a relatively
simple software configuration problem. Fortunately, my wife was at my

shoulder making noises about dinner–she was going out, and I needed
to feed the kids–so I had an excuse to bail on the scripted
sado-masochism session I suddenly found myself in and get an incident

number so that I could return, if I so wished, for more pain at a
later date.

A few hours later, (kids, don't try this at home) I went back, booted

from disk into my new account, and using the awsome powers of root
access, chown and chmod, regained access to my old files

and moved them into my new account. Then I deleted the old account.
After running chown -R * on a few directories, all of my problems were

history.

Needless to say, I have not called Apple back. Maybe someone should
introduce the Customer Care folks to “Unix for Dummies” or
something. [the dot-communist]

Listening to the uber-geeks at JPL as they wait 8 minutes for each
response back from Opportunity, and speculate about the cause of every
delay in response (“Maybe the HNA is taking precendence over the
AVR….or not.”), fluctuation in voltage, and recorded faults is
oddly entertaining and…comforting. I am awash in the soft
whisperings of speeds, temps, and feeds, and the dull hum of circuit
noise,

Now they're sending a command to clear Opportunity's memory of
yesterday's pictures. Meanwhile, Paula is ignoring Danny DeVito's
testimonial speech. I wish we could send a command to delete some of
his pictures.

But it is the perfect size for my 3 year old daughter to use for
pretend play. Since everyone else in the house practically has a
computer, it only seemed fair to give her one.

This morning, as I checked my e-mail from a desk in New York (I'm
here for LinuxWorld), I found this picture from my loving wife:

Another seal of the apocalypse is opened…

Riding a bike in the city in fair weather is an adventure, to be sure. But winter riding is a completely different frozen ball of mud. You've got less daylight, more clothes, more questionable road and trail and sidewalk conditions, and a whole lotta chaos not normally thrown into the mix of the summer pedal.

For one thing, drivers in winter are somehow even more oblivious to you than in summer. A cyclist in summer is almost expected; a cyclist in December, January or February is such an oddity that it is immediately rejected and ignored by many more cognitively-challenged drivers' minds.

Falling is always bad (especially in urban assault riding), but winter adds new dimensions to falling. Yes, it's possible for pavement to be harder. And grassy ground is stiff or frozen. However, you have more layers on, and if your're lucky there's a pile of leaves to fall into–and maybe there isn't a broken bottle or a sleeping drunk underneath them.

Of course, the leaves may have made you fall in the first place. Or the patch of ice under them.

Forget sunglasses. It's time to go out and buy a pair of clear ski goggles with good peripheral vision. And that summer helmet might do until Christmas, but start thinking about how you're going to wedge earmuffs or a watchcap under it and you'll realize it's time to start investigating either a ski helmet or some other multi-sport helmet that lets you protect your ears from the wind while still hearing the blare of the horn from the moron who decided today was his day to shoot that red light.

We might whine about headwinds during the summer, but wind don't mean nothin' till you've turned it into a compound word like “windchill”. And remember, flesh freezes on contact with the air at -40 F.

Snow and bikes do not mix. I don't care how knobby your freakin' tires are on your Cannondale, buddy; you're in 1WD, and that front wheel ain't a ski. I once rode my bike to school after a 4-inch snowfall, and did fine until I hit ice under the snow–then centrifugal force took over and I was making involuntary snow angels.

It may be possible to ride once snow has been cleared. But remember–the snow piles created by the plow increase your probability of becoming a hood ornament at any given intersection. And generally speaking, people out shovelling out cars don't appreciated being divebombed by some lunatic on a mountain bike looking to catch air off their stoop.

The most important difference between winter and summer riding, though, may be attitude. On a summer ride, it's all about having a little fun and some aerobic exercise, using your physical conditioning and skill to catch some air, explore the limits, yadda yadda yadda. In winter, you're already at the freaking limits, meathead–it's FREAKING WINTER, and most SANE people are inside drinking hot chocolate, or off doing something safe like skiing, snowboarding, luge, or skeleton. But, NO, you have something to PROVE, and you're going to ride that damned bike all freaking winter. So winter riding is about getting through the ride in one piece, completing something resembling a circuit, or getting from point A to point B and strapping your poor abused bike to the back of a four-wheel-drive vehicle and getting your ass home. No picnics, wine and cheese, pal.

And when you get off your bike, blowing snot out of your sinus cavities and wiggling your toes to check for circulation, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that all those other winter sports are for sissies.

The gravity of that didn't really hit me until after I got off the phone. It was the loss of a family member, and while it was certainly expected, I found myself caught unprepared.

Caesar came home as a kitten the summer before my sophomore year of college; he was, in some ways, my replacement at home. A flufy Persian, He came to rule the street my parents lived on, defending his turf from larger, less furry cats ferociously. Even just last summer, he persued an interloper into the street and tore into him.

Caesar came and went pretty much at will; my father would banish him from the house at night lest he awake my parents at 4 am to go out. He was alternatingly sweet and sadistic, climbing up on laps for petting and purring loudly when he recieved attention, but dispensing swats when his mood changed. He coexisted with two dogs over his lifetime, and made sure they knew their place in the pecking order–below him.

When I came home from college, or the Navy, or later in life with my family in tow, he always let me know that he recognized me, and lavished his royal attention on me. He set the bar for every other cat I have shared a home with.

My mom said the house felt strangely empty without him. It's no surprise; he had such a larger-than-life presence. He was housecat sized, but he had the bearing of a lion.

Around 11, Zoe and I went to the playground while Paula went to a hair appointment.
(Kevin and Jonah had makeup soccer games, which my ex, Amy, was taking them to).

Zoe and I wandered the two blocks to the park, spotting squirrels and dogs and such. Then once we got there, it was swing, swing, swing.

The phone wires were thick with pigeons catching their sun, and bushes swarmed with chattering starlings.
A family brought their dog out to play catch, and Zoe wanted to get to know the dog. She even threw the dog’s tennis ball for it to retrieve, before hiding behind me in shyness.

A week ago, Zoe told our neighbor Anna how she was going to get a dog someday, “after the cats die and we flush them down the toilet.” I guess the memory of her first goldfish’s death has stuck with her.

Well, she’s still on the puppy kick, rattling on about all the things she could do with a puppy. “But Desi and Lucy (our cats) would miss us if we got a dog,” she said matter-of-factly to me as we walked up the hill after the dog encounter. I assured her that we would keep the cats if we got a dog, which would only happen if we got a larger house. She agreed, and said it was time to see if mamma was done with her haircut.

We came back, and Paula had come back, her hair trimmed. She was on the phone, and in cleaning mode–she had decided, based on the gross-out factor of the dining room, that something Had To Be Done.

So I took Zoe out again, for a walk to the bank machine to deposit a check and a stop at McD’s for a Happy Meal lunch. Then we came back to the house to pick up mamma and head back to the playground.

Paula was willing and ready, so we left, this time with Zoe in the jogging stroller, and strolled once again to the park, where Zoe quickly pulled Paula over to the jungle gym/slide apparatus so she could go down slides with her. The slides being somewhat sticky and worn, there wasn’t a whole lot of sliding going on. A little girl named Seana showed up (“Daddy, she’s the same as you!” Zoe announced) and started climbing up slides, so Zoe had to do the same. Then she needed to slide down the firepole. And so on.

Finally, we packed it up, and hiked back up the hill past the house to the grocery store for some milk ‘n eggs.

Zoe saw momma putting on lipstick, and decided she needed to try that. The results (with supervision), above.

And here's the image, as it opened.

I haven't resized it or done any image correction it because I was afraid I'd lose the distortion in the image. It looks like some bytes got whacked, because at a certain point there's a strange pixilation, and the left boundary of the photo seems to be remapped in part on the right.

I can't figure this out. And I'm just a little bit creeped out by the whole thing right now. But it's probably just the result of radio frequency radiation from TV Hill or something (the broadcast towers for most of Baltimore's radio and television stations are parked atop towers on the next hill, which I pass on my way home).

But it makes my imagination race just a little. I mean, what if the dead could push electrons around?

Let me be clear–I don't buy this “Crossing Over” crap. I somehow doubt they whisper in John Edward's ear; I'm sure that his namesake probably has better connections to dead people (since the dead can vote, sometimes).

But what if there were some way for the dead to make their presence felt digitally?

Imagine having Edgar Allen Poe on your AIM buddy list.

As it turns out, this is the Rogers-Buchanan Burial Ground, a family plot that belonged to the family that once owned the park's grounds.

A 100-foot pine was blown across the grave of Edmund Law Rogers, a founder of the Kappa Sigma fraternity and a prominent actor of the late 1800's. It must have blown down during Hurricane Isabel, but the tree is certainly not the only affront to this mostly untended plot.

The Rogers family's roots run deep, so to speak, in Baltimore; the land that is now the park was bought by Nicholas Rogers (II) in 1710.

His grandson, Col. Nicholas Rogers was an officer of the Baltimore Militia that routed the invading British at what is now Patterson Park.

And he's still here, though not exactly lying in glory.

If there's one thing Baltimore has plenty of, it's dead people. But only a few, like Edgar Allen Poe, are remembered with regularity. We've let the history of this city fade.

When we forget the dead, we forget the past, and as George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”.

The dead are trying to tell us something. If we don't listen, we'll be joining them sooner than we'd like.

[update]

Maybe they're speaking a little louder than I thought.

Not that I'm superstitious or anything, but after I downloaded the photos of the Rogers-Buchanan Burial Ground to my Mac this morning, the system locked up. When I restarted it, the hard disk's startup information had been corrupted. It tool multiple attempts with a disk utility and some tech sleight-of-hand to get it restored to normal.

Translation: my Mac was possessed. Hopefully, I've exorsised any remaining software demons.

Once again, I'm invoking September 11th in a transparent play for your sympathies. I don't know why; you folks here don't matter a hoot, really. But I've got to do something about my slide in approval, and I figure if I can get some of you to kick in for the bill on this Iraq thing, it might help.

It's sad that that guy from Brazil who worked for the UN got blown up. I'll say his name to try to convince you I care about the UN, and show off my Texican pronounciation of a Portugese name.

And the security council said that Saddam whatshisface was a Bad Man. So I really don't understand how you all could be so pissed at me for trying to blow him up and killing a couple of Muslim-speaking foriegners in the process. I mean, what gives?

I mean, you all asked “how high?” when I asked you to jump all over Afghanistan. And we've got some of your Kraut and Frog-speaking guys getting shot at in Kabul. So I really don't get why you aren't all over this Iraq thing. And, remember, I've carried the whole bill for those mercenaries from DynCorp to keep Karzai's ass from getting riddled with bullets.

Now I'm spending a shitload of money to pay Haliburton and Bechtel to build a new Iraq so we can get some of the oil we have coming to us after September 11 (I somehow overlooked the fact that Afghanistan doesn't have any). And I'm going to give you guys a chance to get in on the ground floor on this deal. All you have to do is give me some troops who speak something other than American, to make this thing look legit to the people who keep whining about how I did this without international consensus, whatever that means, and I promise I won't invade any of your countries for supporting terrorism.

I'll say a few things about some bones that I've instructed Congress to throw you, like AIDS research and relief funding that I still haven't spent, and that slavery law, er, anti-slavery law we passed to tax countries that still sell people. Really, I'm a good guy, and I'm looking out for you.

But God says I'm right, and I'll invade anybody who says otherwise.

May God bless America, er, y'all.

…surprised, that is, that anybody bothered to notice. Either Powell is hopelessly naive or an inept conspirator…

“AP reports that the owner of the Dewey Decimal Classification System has sued the Library Hotel (a hotel overlooking New York's Public Library) over its use of the Dewey Decimal System to number its hotel rooms (for example Room 700.003 has books on the performing arts), arguing that the use of the system falsely suggests that the hotel is connected with the owners of the system.”

If you ever have to stay in Boston for a day or two, and your corporate travel caps prevent you from staying anywhere actually decent, I can now provisionally endorse the Days Inn at 1234 Soldiers Field Road, on the banks of the Charles near Watertown. It didn't suck that bad.

I do suggest, however, that you avoid American Eagle's regional jet service if your're over 5'6″ and 125 pounds. It may only take an hour and 20 minutes to get from Baltimore to Logan International (and the same back) that way, but you may develop curvature of the spine and deep vein thrombosis in the process. It's like getting shoved into a pneumatic tube cartridge from a comfort stanpoint–sure, you get there, but you're left wondering if the trip was really necessary.

Dave Winer never responded to my hail, so I ended up lunching with a friend in PR (on my dime) at the Panera in the Arsenal office park (which is apparently on land owned by Harvard). Then I spent an hour or two talking with the president of a midmarket CRM consutlancy nearby, and had dinner with some other friends at Jasper White's Summer Shack in Cambridge. Dave, this is the kind of place you shoud do a blogger dinner at–unless you have a shellfish allergy.

Then I got up at 4 am. You know, the Mass Pike and Ted Williams Tunnel are a cakewalk at 5 am. I got on a plane at 6:50 and was back in Baltimore in time for breakfast.

Talk about heartburn.

Looks like the president of Yum's international operations, Peter Bassi, dumped shares equal to what he got this year in stock options a few days ago, to profit on the difference between the stock value and his option excersise price. Not that there's anything wrong with that…when the stock is at a high since it split last year, and litigation is pending.

IBM would have the right to subpeona SCO's source code in an affirmative defense, and would be allowed to have expert witnesses — i.e. the entire Open Source community–review the evidence line by line. And the source code would be entered permanently into the public record once the case went to trial.

The only way to have such evidence sealed (correct me if I'm wrong here, lawyers in the audience) would be to file a motion with the judge in the case, or as a term of a pre-trial settlement with IBM.

No wonder SCO sought a 2005 trial date.

It's also no wonder that Linus Torvalds batted back an offer in SCO CEO Darl McBride's open letter to the Linux community to negotiate, or to review SCO's code after signing a non-disclosure agreement. As Torvalds points out in the InfoWorld article, signing an NDA would be something of a poison pill for future open source work. But there's no need to sign an NDA when the evidence will be public record in two years…if the suit actually makes it to trial.

Additionally, I've heard from more people that customers are considering filing RICO and mail fraud charges against SCO for sending them letters extorting, er, offering licensing agreements to prevent legal action. So SCO could get dragged into court before its IBM trial date and be forced to reveal its hand as part of its defense.

Unfortunately, the SEC didn't like that. So AIG has to cough up $10 million for its sleight-of-hand. Hope they had SEC insurance.

Yet
it is a day cluttered with the remnants of another day two years ago.
And somehow, taking joy in the gift of this day seems like snatching
candy from the bowl while your parents' backs are turned.

But
why? The sorrow is there, clearly, but can we not feel joy and sorrow
at the same time? Can we not learn new lessons from this day rather
than rehash that which has past?

Today is a day that should
remind us to live our lives, rather than relive them. In looking
backward, we should look forward. How can we change the world for the
better from this moment forward? How can we accept what we cannot
change and make the best of it?

We mark a loss today, a
punctuation mark in our personal histories. But it is a comma, not a
period. We remake the world every day; let's remember how those we've
lost would want the world to be as we move to remake it better.

A few months ago, I flew onto an aircraft carrier and announced that the war in Iraq was over–and that we had won.

Well, I was wrong.

Also, as it turns out, I was wrong about the threat that Iraq posed to the US through weapons of mass destruction. Turns out, they didn't have any left. They either got rid of them or hid them so well that, well, not even they could find them.

And, while I may have unintentionally misled all of you about Iraq's ties to terrorism, there are certainly terrorists in Iraq now. All I can say is, “whoops.”

So, since (with the advise of my military and security advisers, some of whom had been itching to shoot something for over a decade), I got us involved in this mess, I now have to ask for enough money to get us out of it. Meanwhile, I have to convince the UN that they really want to help us straighten things out without totally admiting that I screwed up. After all, it's about national honor now, and having the president of the United States called a liar by the rest of the world is an insult to you, the American people. After all. roughly 20% of you, with the help of a few electoral irregularities, wouldn't have elected me into office if I was a liar, would you have?

So we'll need roughly 86 billion more dollars this year to pacify Iraq. Pacify is a high-falutin' way of saying “kill all the people that disagree with us, and pay off anybody sitting on the fence to join our side.” Bullets, bribes, and body bags cost a lot of money, so I'm going to get Congress to hold their nose and rubber-stamp this emergency funds request, so we can have peace with honor and all that.

The good news is, you won't have to pay anything for this in extra taxes. We're borrowing it all. Of course, this may lead to inflation and higher interst rates, which in turn may hose the economy even more than it's already hosed, and then I'll look like Gerald Ford in a bad wig–trying to fight stagflation in an election year.

But I'm hoping that you'll forget all about that by November 2004–and if you don't, I have some friends who'll bully you into thinking otherwise. Because dissent is bad for me, and what's bad for me is bad for America. So I'm sure you'll all do the patriotic thing and shut up, pay your reduced income taxes, and not worry while the rest of the national infrastructure goes to hell in a handbasket. Or else.

Thank you, and God Bless America.

BMW may well be within its rights, as deliniated by the DMCA at least. And commercial publications that use the name of a trademarked product in their name (like Visual Studio Magazine, Nintendo Power, Playstation Magazine) typically have to negotiate a license in order to do so.

But MCO does have some legs to stand on here. Other “independent” online publications have been able to use brand names in their titles, since they have established themselves as independent . Take Microsoft Watch, Mary Jo Foley's newsletter and weblog that covers Microsoft's maneuverings. It runs a legal disclaimer: “Microsoft Watch is an independent publication, not affiliated with or authorized by Microsoft Corporation.
”

BMW's legal team also seems to be muddying the waters as far as what they really hope to achieve, by dictating what domain names Ferguson can use, and then retracting those names in the next breath.

And they may just be shooting themselves in the foot in the process. The move just may piss off loyal owners and reduce BMW's sell-through of parts, and leave a bad taste in the mouths of many who would have been otherwise part of a grassroots marketing machine.

It's ironic, because BMW has been trying to engineer a deliberate grassroots approach to marketing the Mini from the beginning, focusing on “street teams” and other forms of nontraditional marketing to build early demand. Now, they've let loose the legal hounds to prevent anyone else from driving that demand and profiting from it. But trademark protection is growing weaker daily, and BMW might just completely hose the Mini brand in the process of bullying alleged infringers.

After all, the term “mini” has been widely used generically. Maybe if enough people start calling smaller versions of their products “Mini”, the value of the brand name will be diluted and the trademark will be placed on questionable ground. Maybe BMW will find itself in the same position as Fox News, with its trademark in danger of being snatched away from it by the court.

Well, here are those numbers, thanks to School of Social Science at UC Irvine's Peace Monitor program.

And guess what? The US still sucks when it comes to violence. You're less likely to get whacked in Uruguay than here.

Americans are more than twice as likely (at 7.9 violent deaths per 100,000 people) to be killed in an act of violence as, say, Canadians (who get offed violently at a rate of 2.7 per 100k), and are still way ahead of Japan (2.0) and England and Wales (which, at 4.2, is even more dangerous than Northern Ireland which rates a 3.4). Even Cuba, with 7.6 offings per 100k, is marginally safer.

But there's a place where violence is ten times as bad as it is here–where 77.4 people per 100k come to a bloody end. And that place is…the Russian Federation. Running a distant second is the Phillipines, which has a violent death rate of 58.1 per 100k. (Israel, by comparison, ranks at 8.3 per 100k–placing it just ahead of Poland and the US).

Wanna live someplace safe? Try Norway, with 1.2 violent deaths per 100k population.

Now, it's concievable that there are places that are even worse than Russia–these numbers are based on data from the World Health Organization mortality database, which only covers 66 countries thoroughly.

But somehow, having just a tenth of the violence of Russia–which has a civil war going on with Chechnya–strikes me as faint praise for American civility.
The only European countries with higher violent death rates than the US are Poland, Portugal (with 15.6/100k! Yikes!), the Republic of Moldova and the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia).

By the way, in 2000, my home town of Baltimore had a murder rate of 40.3 per 100,000, which would place it in the #4 position on the world chart if taken separately from the rest of the US–right behind Venezuela.

Now, just because I'm pointing this out doesn't mean I'm for gun control (well, not in the conventional sense, at least). I think the problem is rooted elsewhere… but that's another post.

Paula panicked a bit afterward thinking about all that, after having faced the hard-sell of the mortgage broker who did a pre-approval for us (which we had asked for just to make sure we could get a mortgage if we needed one). She felt like the press was on her. I was irritable to begin with on Monday, and her vibes made me even more so. And it didn't help that we only saw one house that remotely fit into our criteria.

So, now we're just sort of waiting for the right listing to come to the surface. We've set the end of the school year again as our target move date, subject to change if the right house suddenly pops up and we have to scramble to get it. Of course, the big question is where interest rates will be by then, and what the state of the housing market will be.

And a minute later, the sun was back, and the snow was gone

Mark Bentley, the product marketing manager for Lincoln's Town Car, said he and other executives who were pushing the project encountered numerous skeptics until the terror attacks. “Suddenly they said, 'We understand the need for this vehicle,'” Bentley said.

Yeah, I know who'll be buying this in Baltimore. Of course, when GM comes out with the Escalade version (with the optional gun ports and liquor cabinet), it'll be a lot more popular…

I've been looking to consolidate my domains on a single host in any case; this helps me down my decision path. Anybody got any reccomendations for a decent, low-cost hosting company that respects free speech and can distinguish between news and porn?

The door on Dmitri's features a portrait of the Falls Road goodwill ambassador himself, hanging from a street sign in an effort to triangulate his location and greet any oncoming traffic with his customary style and flair.

What to do with the rest of my life? Social worker, family studies, mass communication, cosmetologist? Not to mention, how to pay for this. What would I be doing if I did not need an income? What would make me happy and grateful to go to work everyday? (read more…)

It would also help if I didn't have Jimi Hendrix music playing.

Zoe turned two on Febuary 5. (more in gallagheria)

However, ComputerWorld's been on deathwatch forever–and Pat McGovern, the owner of CW's parent, IDG–has a well-established fondness for the tabloid that defies logic. And he can afford to be irrational. He has lots of cash, no debt, and no real reason to cut off CW's life support now; it took him nearly a decade of red ink to sell off Federal Computer Week to 101 Communications, and that paper was something he started out of spite over Ziff's joint venture with Cahners at GCN (my alma mater, now owned by Post-Newsweek).

So, don't look for Pat to fold CW anytime soon; he's more likely to slash InfoWorld (and that's mighty unlikely as well).

Then Tuesday, I came down with a fever. I think it might have been West Nile, but it could have just been a 24-hour flu. Anyway, I was out of commission.

Wednesday, I was still recovering, and had deadlines to meet.

Thursday, I was back in Detriot again.

Today, I got a ride in, a hill-climbing mountain biking run up the back edge of the Disc Golf Course and along the Baltimore Zoo's perimeter fence, then back down mountain bike slalom style, using disc golf “holes” and tees as waypoints and launchpads. It was a good upper/lower body workout, and fun; any time a 280-pound guy can get airborne on a bike, there's fun to be had.

Hey, Howie, how's about we make remembering songs illegal, too, and let the RIAA administer forced lobotomies to consumers so they can sell them the SAME CRAP OVER AND OVER EVERY DAY without them realizing it? Maybe if we were all like goldfish, then you life-sucking monopolists would be happy then, am I right?

Apparently, this is part of some wider EU thing, with the goal of pooling IT resources across EU administrations and promoting use of Open Source, or at least obtaining full rights to code.

In the wilderness of Redmond, a cry echoes…

Sure, Microsoft Exchange is a known carcinogen. It's the most efficient mail worm delivery system devised by man. But if the alternative is using a relational database disguised as an e-mail server, along with some never-before-tested calendaring and other messaging and collaboration tasks, I have one word for you: PINE.

And Oracle handling my voicemail? Do I really want the guy who advocates national ID cards handling my voicemail?

Not that not doing hands-on tech stuff these days is necessarily a bad thing. That's why this particular rat swam away from his last job–the tech market is, as I've pointed out before, not exactly a booming publishing segment (see “Pressure Drop”). Maybe clearing room for some other, more high-revenue-potential journalistic specialty (like covering extreme sports, or fashion, or porn) would be a good thing.

I can identify the moment I started losing my tech muscle with extreme clarity–it was when I threw my PC off my desk and replaced it with a Mac–a G4 Cube. I try to keep the blood circulating through that portion of my brain where all tech lore is stored by droppping into a command-line Terminal session every now and then, but it's just not the same–it requires a substantially smaller number of brain cells to use Mac OS X than it does to use Windows 2000 on a daily basis.

It also doesn't help that I have yet to load any Java (or any other) IDE on either my Cube or my Ti Powerbook. The only code slinging I've done in the last six months has been in UserTalk.

But I digress.

Rumor has it that my employer is looking to expand into the extreme sports magazine business. Maybe what I need to do to ensure my continued professional growth is spend more time on my bike.

Mental note to self–some shin guards might be in order. Thrashing through the uncut grass of the alleged athletic field behind the school (which is surrounded by a nice 35-degree grass slope to barrel down and crank back up), a hidden stick sung up and whacked me in the leg near where I got bit by a fallen limb on my first outing (resulting in a wound that looks like a vampire squirrel attacked me).

I have never seen a CNN breaking news alert about Palestinians being killed by Israelis. Does that mean it doesn't happen? If we based our world view on what we see on CNN, it does.

In twenty years, when we look back and ask,”At what point did Major League Baseball really die?”, we'll be able to answer with some reliable certainty that the All-Star Game Tie was at least a forewarning, if not a death rattle. Bud Selig, owner/commissioner/lord high team executioner, has proven that it's really all about money, and not about the fans. It's just a matter of time before he buys Ted Williams' DNA and starts manufacturing players.

If there's a player's strike, that will be the end. But the All-Star Game was the warm-up.

Update: Dave Winer correctly points out the designated hitter rule and interleague play as milestones in baseball's decline. The last baseball strike didn't help, either. And yes, the All-Star game is a bullshit exhibition game, with no meaning other than to promote the sport. But when they can't even get the bullshit promotion right…

It's a grey day here in Baltimore, and the dreaded Playgroup Creeping Crud virus has cycled from my 17-month old daughter through my wife and to me. The malaise is stifling; I can't seem to get enough caffiene in me to get motivated to get anything done. I'm plowing through rewrites with all the enthusiasm of the undead.

It doesn't help any that I just came back from vacation; my circadian rhythms are not in alignment with the work day again yet. Part of me wants to haul out that brand new Gary Fisher bike I bought last Monday and pedal as far from my desk as I can. Then again, there's that creeping crud.

The sun peeks through the now smoke-free sky. My third iced coffee of the day is trying to kick in. Maybe there's hope.

But, alas, it's almost 4:00 PM. And the inertia's still there.

“It's the Wal-Marting of the restaurant industry,” says Bill Guilfoyle, a professor in hospitality management at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.

CNet just posted a column written by Kan just over a week before he died:

The philosopher George Santayana famously quipped that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but he said nothing of those who can. We repeatedly prove that even careful students of past mistakes optimistically rush to be first to repeat them.

Yaroslav Faybishenko, who worked with Gene on InfraSearch until it was bought by Sun, remembers Gene on his site, and links to Gene's blog, This Place Sucks.

Rest in peace, Gene.

Now, I didn't get everything directly from the source who found himself in trouble. One word: Google. And nothing we had discussed was “off the record”. But the guy didn't have a PR person with him during the interview, and he may have said more than he should have.

No matter; I would have gotten a good piece of what got him in trouble (some information about a corporate gaffe) without it coming up in the interview.

We obviously didn't pull the story off the Web. I did what I promised: I told my boss they had asked for that. But the genie was out of the bottle.

As it turns out, things have (apparently) calmed down a bit for the guy at Toyota–. And he's learned, as he put it to the PR person, some “hard, fast lessons” about what his company's policies on talking to the press are.

By monetizing email, these big services create the friction that's currently missing from spam. Without friction, it spirals out of control. With friction, on the other hand, mass mailers make intelligent decisions about what's worth sending and what's not.

Oooh, that Haigspeak word, monetizing. Thisis just the most recent screed I've seen that has brought up the idea of charging for e-mail as a way to counter spam.

I'm against it. For one thing, it's impractical technically–how do you chargeback a spammer who hides behind a spoofed e-mail address? No, that would work is to have e-mail address authentication at the SMTP server–if the source address can't be verified as a legitimate source mailbox, then the message gets pitched into the bit bucket. And that would require a reworking of the whole e-mail system.

Secondly, it's draconian. If you can charge back for an e-mail to someone, that means you have to have a record of that e-mail. And that's an invasion of the privacy of every legitimate e-mail user; the potential for abuse is too high, especially if you put that kind of power in the hands of someone like Yahoo, who could go and sell your e-mail habits in a minute with a simple stealth change of its privacy policy and terms of use (like they just did with their own spam systems).

And I've got to say one feature of Mozilla pushed it over the top for me: the tabs. That, and the popup window blocking.

The mail client is okay; I'm now using it for one of my many mailboxes. While it certainly surpasses the Netscape mail client in many ways, I'm not quite sure I'm ready to dump my standalone mail client quite yet.

Still, I don't think I can be as ebullient as eWeek about a web browser. Okay, I get it guys, you like open source, you hate Microsoft. For your own sake, get over it.

BTW, Sacco previously did a graphic-journal on Palestine–also a great piece of journalism.