I'm in MA this week.

Traffic going through NYC didn't disappoint. Missing a few turns didn't help either.

Basement sewer line was repaired and the wall will be sealed up this week, restoration of the basement will probably begin next week. If we are lucky, we can have things finished by Megan's First Communion in May.

I really don't like the DMCA.

Kittens don't like the DMCA either.

Damn. Basement flooded.
We knew we had a lot of rain.
We expected the sump pump to be working overtime, but we never expected the basement to flood.

This really, really sucks. Friday night I went downstairs to check the sump pump and I found water throughout the basement. It was an inch or so deep and the sump pump was cycling 6 times a minute to keep up. Barb and I moved most of the kids stuff on the floor upstairs. I didn't get to bed until 2AM Saturday.

I picked up the Playstation and water poured out of it. I also forgot it was plugged in and got an interesting tingling in my left arm when I picked it up!

Saturday morning the sump pump was running full time and just keeping up with the water flowing into the sump. I bought a 1.25 hp pump and pumped standing water out into the back yard. With ten foot of head pressure, its rated at 300 gallons per hour. It ran full time from ~10AM through 3PM, then I ran it off and on until we went to bed Saturday.

Interesting links

LSD
SPAM

Busy today, but I wanted to note these sites.

Interesting stats on from a guy named Raffi Kirkorian regarding the bogus claims from the RIAA and other groups that home users will pirate digital video. If anyone cares to do the math, they will realize that MPEG and DiVX video is painfully poor compared to HDTV and DVD quality video.

Another reason more people need to take math and science instead of basketweaving courses in high school and college.


http://www.bitwaste.com/wasted-bits/index.cgi/television/technology/hdtv/

Went for a walk with Flynn this evening. In the snow!
We had less than an inch of sleet and snow, mostly on the sidewalks and grass.
I really enjoy daylight savings time. Do you konw the origin of DST?

I took some photos today.
One of my Spring goals is to take at least one photo each day.
Today I took several photos of a family of ducks that come to our neighborhood each year. First it was a male Mallard, next a male and female, now its two males and a female (don't ask).

Thank God the Iraqis can�t aim.

This is my favorite article today. I had not thought about it, but all the guys I know from the South have been hunting since they were young. Our army is well trained, so the ones that didn't learn to shoot growing up learned in basic training.

How many Iraqi's learned to hunt from birth?
How many are trained?
Apparently not many...

http://www.msnbc.com/news/894936.asp

blogger and mozilla

I'm using Mozilla to edit my blog because blogger doesn't play well with AdSubtract.

I can't do highlighting and the interface is very different. I didn't expect this at all.

Aggressive Drivers tick me off.

I was driving from a client site back to my company's office. It was a Friday afternoon, so traffic was picking up. Some twit was in the left turn lane with her right turn signal on. I see this a lot, so I ignored it. Oddly enough, she attempts to go straight through the intersection into my lane. Lane change in an intersection, going straight in a left turn lane - so many violations, let me count the ways.

Anyhow, I am sending a FAX to the local police department (below with some of the license plate edited).

I am also amazed that young (not in this case) women drivers appear to be the most aggressive - flipping the bird for any real or perceived issues when driving. They also don't pay attention to the fact that they are 100 lbs and 12" smaller than me much less that I have right of way, control of a lane of traffic or other basic rules of the road apply...

Copy of FAX:

I wanted to report an incident at ~1:15PM this afternoon at the intersection of Kings Highway and Route 70.

I was at the light at Route 70 and Kings Highway headed North on Kings Highway. As the light changed, a woman in the left turn lane was driving with her right turn signal on. Given that she was in the left turn lane, and her signal had been on for for an undertermined length of time, I continued across Route 70. After crossing Route 70, I heard a car horn honk and looking in my rear view mirror, I saw the same woman in the Nissan honking and giving me the finger. She continued to do so repeatedly and emphatically. I slowed and pulled into the right lane. She pulled up beside me, lowered her window and proceeded to abuse me for not letting her into my lane in front of me. At this point I pointed out (screaming) that I had control of the lane, she was in the left turn lane and changing lanes in an intersection was illegal. This didn�t seem to impress her at all and she gave me the finger again. She sped up quite a bit and I caught up to her at the next light, noting her license plate number as well as the make and model of her car.

I am shocked at the increasing number of aggressive women drivers with poor driving skills, giving other drivers the finger as well as verbal abuse. I�m a tall, bald, and 47 year old with almost 1,000,000 miles of experience driving cars, motorcycles and trucks throughout North America and parts of Europe. In this time, I have not had any moving violations. However, I feel that if I react at all to an aggressive woman driver it just compounds the problem. First because its confrontational, but mostly because I will always be viewed as a bully, particularly when I�m 100 lbs and 12� taller than the other driver. With recent programs to raise public awareness about road rage and agressive drivers, the campaigns center on young, male drivers. This is not what I am seeing, in every case in the last 12-24 months it has been a young(er), female driver.

I wanted to document what happened today because I am certain that if this woman is local, you will meet her at some point, because she will be involved in an accident or driving related incident if she continues to drive like she did today. She was wrong, she doesn�t have a clue, and she is indiscriminately abusive to other drivers.

Late Model White Nissan Maxima GLE, white interior
NJ License: M**-44J
Driver � Caucasian woman, age 30, long dark hair, glasses

Another "College Aid Application" came in the mail from the Educational Assistance Council ...
* Their operation clearly depends heavily on making the application look as official as possible.
* The cover letter warns that late applications will not be processed.
* The envelope has numerous marks intended to suggest that this comes from an official government agency.
* The contents does not include the disclaimer by postal regulations.
* In spite of the fraudulent nature of this solicitation, the Better Business Bureau gives them a "satisfactory" rating.

Check out the Google hits for this operation.

April Fools!

Some of my faves from this year:

PayBack 1.0

RFC 3514 - The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header

From the BBC "At A Glance" site:

1100: Several people were wounded when a US warplane bombed two Iraqi buses carrying international volunteers, some of them American, who were operating as "human shields", Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf says. There is no confirmation of this.

OK, you want to be a human shield. Isn't this a lot like being a javalin catcher in the Olympics?

What is the function of a shield? Its a self-sacrificing device.

So, if your a human shield for the Iraqi Army, you will die before the Iraqi's.

So exactly why are we surprised that they were injured in a war zone??

Also, isn't this "offering aid and comfort to the enemy"? This is the definition of treason.

Walter Cronkite (yes he is still alive) has an editorial in the New York Times this morning (registration required) on Peter Arnett's interview with Iraq TV and subsequent firing.

I didn't remember that Arnett won a Pulitzer Prize. I did remember he was embedded in Iraq in the first war and was the only correspondent allowed to do so during the last war.

Cronkite points out Arnett was a bonehead for granting the interview, which we all knew, but he makes a good case that what he did was not treason, which is defined as "aid and comfort to the enemy" and that his credibility will undermine the rest of his otherwise very significant career.