brett's logjam

Dear Airlines,

In case you were wondering why I cut back on my flying, you might want to think about the following.

• False Authority Syndrome (via)
• Forge Your Own Boarding Pass
• The Virus That Ate DHS
• FBI Raids Fake Boarding Pass Creator’s Home

It’s not you: it’s them.

(P.S. You might want to do something about this.)

Presentation Zen: Boom!

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   “You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
North Central
The South
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Yeah, that’s true enough. You can take the boy out of the Midwest, but can’t take the Midwest out of the boy.

Ugh.

Anyone know a good traffic lawyer in Spotsylvania county, VA? I’ve got a traffic summons I need to fight.

(And I may have a turbo VW to sell shortly.)

Dooce: Monthly Newsletter: Month 33

jwz: Hacking Democracy.

Ugh. Spam. I hates it.

So I’d cranked my SpamAssassin preferences down, lowering the threshold to a 3.0 points a while back. All was good. No false positives, some false negatives. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Today I discovered someone was trying to get in touch with me all week, and her emails just kept getting caught in the spam trap.

Some days I don’t know about this email thing.

And, for your amusement, more reasons why I don’t read digg.

evan morris: tastes like surrender.

parenting hacks: tell strong-willed toddlers what to do.

iPod Playlist: 2006-11-12 Shuffle.

So.

• Two weeks ago Monday, Merrystar had a backup accident that erased 4 years of data. Poof.

• Last Monday, I was pulled over for violating certain state traffic laws.

• Today, I thought we’d escaped with nothing more than some bad days at work. Foolish me! Troubles come in threes!

• Tonight Merrystar hit a deer on the way home this evening on US Rt. 60. We are both okay, and very, very lucky.

My car? Well…

Let’s just say that YAH was carried off on the wrecker yelling “I got him!”

(Merrystar’s only comment was, “what will I tell Trip? I killed Bambi?”)

Thank you, Edouard Benedictus, for giving us safety glass.

So.

In the light of day, the damage isn’t as bad as we feared.

I mean, every body piece on the driver’s side will need to be either replaced or repainted, and the hood, windshield and roof too, but YAH is structurally just fine. State Farm has been good to deal with so far, and everything looks to be covered under Comprehensive.

Full picture sets are available on Flickr or Zooomr. The neat thing about these newfangled photo sites is that you can show where things happen.

Now, on to the important matter of the evening. I have to find a deer kill sticker for my car. Four more, and she’s an ace. Any ideas where I can get them?

I need to stop brooding over my car.

• Mileage log is updated. I’ll count these as spa days for now, even though they’re really not her fault. (Spa days are really a reliability indicator, not an accident one. Hmmm. Will have to consider a different metric next time.)

• Calamity has been discussed on the ‘tex.

• Pictures have been tagged, reviewed, and discussed, leaving me glad that both of us walked away.

However, I need to stop brooding over my car.

Dudes already know about chickens.

Like the man sayeth:

Instead of a quantum encyclopedia, with vandalism and falsehoods peppered throughout at various locations AND at various times, Wikipedia becomes a consistently RELIABLE encyclopedia that covers every topic in the universe, except chickens. We say it again: dudes already know about chickens.

• Boing Boing: Patriot act makes it harder to get real Sudafed.
• Slate: Meth madness at _Newsweek_.

LinuxWorld: Ballmer: Linux users owe Microsoft.

“Only customers that use SUSE have paid properly for intellectual property from Microsoft,” he said. “We are willing to do a deal with Red Hat and other Linux distributors.” The deal with SUSE Linux “is not exclusive,” Ballmer added.

This has pretty much guaranteed that I will be stripping SuSE Linux off of every machine I own. And that’s on top of no more money to Microsoft, ever!

Nicely done, Steve! Good job with that marketing.

(Via)

My mom pointed me toward the talented Leslie Riley’s blog today. Leslie taught a class (“Mixed Media Art”) in Houston that my mother attended and raved about.

My mom’s quilt (which she calls “in progress,” of course) is in the last row, far right. Her work never fails to impress me.

Evan Morris reminds me why Ballmer deserves his moniker.

Took the family down to the Farmer’s Market this morning.

I took some pictures.

OmniNerd: 2006 Leonid Meteor Shower.

Astronomy buffs in Europe and America’s East Coast will be treated to a particularly powerful meteor shower this year. Barring weather, at 11:30pm EST on November 18th, viewing conditions will be excellent due to the new moon. If skies are overcast, however, try “listening” to the radio signals generated by shower’s electrified trails. Practiced observers say that even more meteors can be detected via radio waves than can be seen with the naked eye. For more information on this annual event, check out the Top 10 Leonid facts.

So.

It’s Monday, which means, you know, Bad Karma Monday.

Went to work anyway.

Drove a lot. Worked a bit.

We saw one deer, in exactly the same place as last week. It was a big buck.

We did not hit it.

We came home.

Going to sleep soon.

That’s it.

Sometimes, happy stories aren’t very interesting.

But they’re happy nonetheless.

Whoba!: Fog Bows.

I’m always impressed by how good XKCD is:

There really is no way to say that birdwatching is a manly activity.

More Wohba!, this time: Ski-gliding:

Don’t forget to claim your Federal Excise Tax Refund Credit next year. If, for some reason, you’ve kept your phone bills for the last 4 years or so, you might want to dig them out when doing your 2006 taxes.

Otherwise, there’s a standard deduction you can take.

Can Dr. Evil Save the World?

(Via jwz.)

(Also, if this plot doesn’t show up in a movie in the next year, I’ll be seriously disappointed.)

Via Wohba —

Why has no one pointed me to del.icio.us before?

Seriously!

Two weeks too late for me, but: How to Avoid a Moose or Deer Collision - WikiHow.

(Rule of thumb remains: Don’t Swerve.)

More from Wohba: The Sorting Algorithm Demo.

Watching a bubble sort is actually painful in comparison to the other algorithms. Very good visualization.

Doug serves us some compelling reasons to not see Borat in Match Frame: the problem with Borat.

There’s no question that BORAT is, more than occasionally, really damn funny. It’s also in my mind incredibly problematic. The difference between BORAT and the (even funnier) JACKASS 2 is that, after JACKASS 2 did something in public in front of unsuspecting people, they copped to who they were, and got release forms signed, and if you wouldn’t sign one, they’d pixelate your face or not use the footage. BORAT, by contrast, claimed to be a small production not intending to distribute in the States, and often not only set things up under entirely false pretenses but maintained those false pretenses well after the fact. […] This is a massive breach of filmmaking ettiquette (and, most likely, law); further, expect people who aren’t nearly as funny to duplicate the same kinds of stunts in the near future; further, as a result, expect any serious but seriously underfunded short-film or documentary filmmakers to have increasing amounts of trouble getting releases to film places.

It was 70 degrees at noon today in Williamsburg, VA.

Sometimes, lunch must be taken outside, even if you’re working at home.

Welcome to the club, Thomas Hawk!

(Pssst… Don’t forget to turn on Software Update. There’s a new patch out tonight.)

The MPAA continues to reach new heights, er, lows, and is Lobbying for Home Theater Regulations:

MPAA head Dan Glickman says this needs to be regulated before things start getting too far out of control, “We didn’t act early enough with the online sharing of our copyrighted content. This time we’re not making the same mistake. We have a right to know what’s showing in a theater.”

…

The MPAA defines a home theater as any home with a television larger than 29” with stereo sound and at least two comfortable chairs, couch, or futon. Anyone with a home theater would need to pay a $50 registration fee with the MPAA or face fines up to $500,000 per movie shown.

“Just because you buy a DVD to watch at home doesn’t give you the right to invite friends over to watch it too. That’s a violation of copyright and denies us the revenue that would be generated from DVD sales to your friends,” said Glickman. “Ideally we expect each viewer to have their own copy of the DVD, but we realize that isn’t always feasible. The registration fee is a fair compromise.

Merrystar and I are both relatively content Yahoo! partisans; Merrystar even more so than me, I think. Which makes this post that much harder to write.

Yahoo! really fucked up, and badly. They released a new version of their TV listings pages - one of the only pages I could be reliably counted upon to hit, night after night - that not only gives worse performance than the old version, it doesn’t work in Safari.

Or Firefox.

Whaaaa?

No, seriously. Let me show you. This is what it looks like in Safari:

tv.yahoo.com home page Hosted on Zooomr

tv.yahoo.com listings page (safari) Hosted on Zooomr

And this is Firefox:

tv.yahoo.com listings (firefox) Hosted on Zooomr

By the way, the performance in Firefox is absolutely terrible. In the time it’s taken to write this post, I still haven’t gotten the new page to load.

I rarely call a site redesign absolute shit, but I think this might qualify. This is absolute shit. Did they not test it? What the hell were their QA people thinking?

Yahoo!: If you are reading this, please bring back the old TV listing. Please, please, please. Call this a beta, give us a link to the old stuff that actually worked. Otherwise, we’re switching to Google. Or TV Guide. Or anyone else.

Thank you.

Cheers,
Brett

(Please feel free to give the Yahoo! TV team a piece of your mind. They say they’re listening.)

I feel better.

I just geotagged my screenshots of the tv.yahoo.com rant to Yahoo!’s corporate headquarters on both Flickr and Zooomr.

Petty? Perhaps. But it’s because they changed something I used that didn’t need to be changed. Sometimes, progress isn’t.

(And I would kill for users as passionate as the ones who use Yahoo!, by the way.)

By the way, I picked up my car from the body shop this evening. Will have to look her over in natural sunlight before I report fully, but she seems to be in good spirits.