Well, hope you had a happy Thanksgiving, at least! I did, enough so that I am a day late wishing you one too.
Most disturbing headline I've seen lately dept.:
Air Force turns to Microsoft for network security
The irreplacable Jim Schutze explains why, in Dallas, Texas, you are much better off stealing a car than having a car stolen.
Here is a scary item, about just how the FCC does business:
Here's a great post on what's actually happening in Iraq (as opposed to what the weasels in the MainStreamMedia would like you to believe):
2Slick's Forum: Roach Motels and the Big Picture
Spyware charge levelled at Lexmark - silicon.com
Lexmark is apparently teaching their printers to spy on their owners.
Don't these guys get it? Nobody wants this crap. Their denials just make the situation worse, causing them to be seen as unethical liars, instead of just unethical vendors.
West Bank fun:
An Egyptian helicopter flew Arafat's coffin from Egypt, where a funeral service was held, to his Muqata headquarters in Ramallah. The aircraft was quickly engulfed by a surging crowd of thousands chanting Arafat's name.
Firing into the air, Palestinian security men struggled to remove the coffin from the aircraft and then held on to it tight as they placed it on a vehicle that plied its way through a dense throng of weeping mourners.
At least nine Palestinians were wounded by shots fired by the security forces or gunmen. Medics said hundreds were treated after fainting or for minor injuries during the crush.
Arafat's body had been due to lie in state ahead of burial, but a Palestinian official said it was taken directly to the tree-shaded tomb instead.
"He was buried ahead of time because of the emotion of the crowd. We had no choice," one official told Reuters.
Emphasis mine. What a fun place that must be to live.
I used to have a Handspring Visor Deluxe. Due to an act of incredibly stupid carelessness (by me) it was lost. All the data is completely backed up in a Palm Desktop on my PC, so there was no actual information lost, but the loss of the device is extremely annoying and inconvenient. I encounter 3 or 4 things per day that I need my PDA for, and not having it handy is frustrating.
So I'm off to the store to buy a new PDA. My main ground rules are:
it has to cost less than $200
it has to be at least as capable as the lost Visor.
That narrows the field considerably. All the PocketPC devices are eliminated, which I don't mind in the least. My office co-workers went through a frenzy of buying iPaqs last year, and I have enjoyed a year of watching them break down one by one while my little Visor just kept working. Of the Palm family, only the Tungsten E and the two lesser Zires make the cut. So they are the field of choices. Due to the price, I am favoring the Zire 31.
Best Buy: doesn't stock the 31, only the 72. The Zire 72 in the store has severe wear on the case from handling, not a good sign. I notice the calculator in the $249.99 Zire 72 is a simple 4-function with memory, nowhere near as nice as the multi-function scientific calculator that the Visor has. Not A Good Sign.
Off to CompUSA. They have a 31 available to look at. Same 4-function calculator. Did the inclusion of the mp3 player use up all the memory that used to hold the calculator? Does anybody even want a PDA that plays music? I have a 20GB Archos that outclasses anything a PDA could do, so the mp3 player is not a buying decision item. I also notice the case on the 31 is kind of cheesy soft plastic, nothing like the Visor's hard case. Not A Good Sign. I briefly look at a Zire 21 and discover it to be a Toys'R'Us conception of a PDA. The screen contrast is so poor it isn't readable in the bright store light. In sum, a piece of crap. The 31 is a slightly nicer piece of crap. The 72 is an overpriced, over accessorized piece of crap, but I'm not looking at it anyway.
That leaves the Tungten E. At $199.95, it just makes the price cut. I turn it on to check out the ROM based apps.
No calculator. None. Not even the pathetic 4 banger that the Zires have. And the E is a cut down version of the T series, without all the whizbang stuff that makes the Ts worth having (SDIO, BlueTooth, etc). The case is definitely styling, but the guts are stripped to nothing. 32mb of memory to support 12 ROM based apps. Just how stupid does Palm think we are?
I return home, depressed. The PDAs I would really like to have are the Tungsten T3 or the Clie PEG-J33 with Wi-Fi, but at over $300, it ain't happening.
Hmm. eBay has a Visor, like new, with stylus and cradle, for buy-it-now $44.99. Problem solved. Email receipt says it wll ship within 48 hours. To Palm may I just say, "Screw You!"
CBS just announced that Yassir Arafat is dead.
Have a nice stay in hell, you bastard.
Suppose there was a bunch of pathetic losers who were so stupid they couldn't find their asses with both hands?
Suppose they felt so really, really bad they were such pathetic losers that they felt they should apologize to the rest of us for their pathetic loserness?
There is, and they have.
Oh, yes, I almost forgot in all the excitement -- Hey Dixie Chicks! Eat me!
Cingular is starting to seriously piss me off. I used to have three phones on the "family plan" but it turns out it's more like "family bankruptcy plan" so I moved one phone to T-Mobile (highly recommended, by the way).
So with only two phones, the monthly bill should go down, right? Right? Wrong. Overage charges are killing me.
And, to top everything off, the Cingular web site is all but inaccessible, most of the time. If you can get the portal, you can't get to the account site.
I expect T-Mobile (did I mention that I highly recommend them?) is going to get even more business from me, soon.
Pssst... Lefties! All that stuff you heard was true. They're building huge concentration camps out on the Texas - New Mexico border. They're going to start rounding you up any day now. Get out of the country while you are still able to travel. Go tonight. Pack light. Travel by night.
God speed.
Various sources are reporting that Arafat has died, or, as News24 is reporting, is "brain dead".
Of course, in the latter case the question is, how can you tell?
Either way, imagining his greeting in hell is an interesting thought experiment.
Update 11-09-04: that old asshole is still hanging on. They probably have him wired up to the French power grid to make sure he doesn't die on them and then the Palis will go all jihad on their French asses.
My country has come through again. Sweet. I heard that Michael Moore's head exploded at 5 AM, but it's probably not true.
It looks like Cynthia "I am not insane" McKinney has been elected to the house from Georgia. Get ready for more trademarked McKinney loonieness.
November 1, 2004 - the Feast of All Saints.
If you haven't voted yet, think long and hard about what you are about to do. A vote for John Kerry, at this point in history, would be an act of unimaginable stupidity and moral cowardice.