Welcome to My World

With my friend safely home from her trip to Atlanta, Georgia to participate in the 2008 International Science & Engineering Fair (congratulations to her for winning her seat there, btw! More on that in a subsequent post this weekend ), I am free to rant about the bat-shit insane idiots working for the Transportation Security Administration. Like the “You can’t take pictures here!” crowd demonstrating that sanity has left the security industry behind in public spaces, I am more convinced than ever before that the entire concept of the TSA is fundamentally broken, flawed, and unworkable.

My friend’s luggage, you see, was flagged by the TSA on her flight to Atlanta, and her luggage was detained, screened, and thoroughly searched. She made it to Atlanta. Her luggage didn’t meet her there. It went on to New York (the plane’s next stop) for a thorough examination, then came back to Atlanta where it was eventually delivered to her late that night. So while some unnamed yokels at the TSA in Atlanta and/or New York rummaged through her bags, flipped through her clothes and underwear and all her other possessions that came along on the trip, she spent her first day in Atlanta wearing stuff that didn’t fit her (donated to her by the airline, her friends, and by ISEF sponsors), worrying about whether she’d actually get her bag back (which contained a contact lens case, prescription medication, and other “important” stuff).

What caused them to flag it as “suspicious” you ask? A plastic carrying case designed for, and carrying, eight rechargeable AA batteries. They looked “suspicious” on an X-ray scan, and this was enough for some TSA dickwad to flag the luggage as suspicious, requiring additional screening. How did they accomplish this screening? They put it on the fucking airplane anyway to fly to Atlanta, then put it back in the air again to fly to New York to be examined. Then, having ruled it “safe,” they flew it back to Georgia.

I’m officially sick of people lording artificial power just because they can. I’m tired of people who aren’t causing harm or even inconvenience being harassed for taking pictures of a public place. Lest a language lawyer pounce on me by pointing out “but, but, but Union Station isn’t a public place, it’s privately owned and operated!” I will explain that when I use the term “public place” in this rant, I refer to the concept of a place wherein random persons can freely enter, mill about, and exit unmolested under most circumstances. This includes places like bus stations, train stations, airport lobbies (the bits where you don’t have to go through security to reach), even 24-hour Wal-Marts. I refer to it as any place where you can walk in without paying an admission fee, goof around harmlessly for awhile, then leave.

Heh. I haven’t poked fun at Bill O’Reilly for awhile, so let’s fix that with a quick “point-n-laugh” session at an early recording of his calm, gentle demeanor and complete professionalism as a teleprompter fails during a taping of a host segment for Inside Edition.

I guess he didn’t just turn into an angry old fart — he’s just always been an asshole. Bet he fits right in there at Fox I think I’ve figured out why anybody bothers to go on his show at all, knowing he’s a huge fan of the hit piece, the “cut off their microphone” trick, and the “shut up!” maneuver — a person goes on his show in the hopes of pissing him off enough to get an explosion like this one. I suspect that feels even better than winning the lottery

If I just sighed and shook my head in disbelief, you wouldn’t be too surprised, since this kind of thing always provokes that kind of reaction out of me. Still, let’s all point and laugh at “blessed” water in a 16.9 ounce bottle, yours for just $2 (not available in stores). The folks over at FARK are giving this the once-over, too, and are probably doing a better job of it than I am, but I thought this scam needed just a bit more limelight cast upon it.

Maybe to enlist more people? Maybe to scare up support for an expensive war in Iraq that, by many accounts, we’re losing (lives, money, and goals).

A recent advertisement by the US Air Force suggests that all your cell phone, GPS, and television viewing joy can be killed by a single missile. Fortunately for those of us living on Earth, that’s not actually true. Thanks, Wired, for pointing out the many, many flaws with this latest scare-mongering nonsense.

It is 2008. The Salem witch trials are long behind us. But apparently, in Florida (the state that does its best every single day to earn its FARK, a simple magic trick is enough to make a school administrator fire a teacher for practicing “wizardry”. Additional coverage here.

The article even quotes the school district:

The Pasco County School District says there were several other performance issues, but none compared to his “wizardry.”

So, the district actually says the biggest problem with his performance was his “wizardry.”

Ugh. This is stupid beyond words. We’re too stupid to survive as a species. We’re doomed.

This may sound like a lame excuse, but the only real reason I bother putting Google AdSense ads on my site is for the interesting reporting and analytical tools I get out of it for free. They haven’t actually paid me anything since 2006, where the site unexpectedly earned a $100 kickback for actually convincing a new advertiser to sign up. Oh, there have been earnings since then, but in nearly 2 full years it hasn’t even come close to that magic $100 mark where they’ll actually send the money to me.

Much more interesting than the non-existent revenue I get from the site are the statistics and information Google gives me. My webhost’s log analyzer gives me other important information (I check once or twice a month now for sites that hit mine with lots of requests or pull tons of data, and blacklist them if they’re not a search engine (a “real” one … sorry, startups) or my own workstation), but Google’s analytics are very fun to study.

It seems we (as in, Americans) are taught this lesson the hard way over and over again, yet we continue to refuse to actually learn it. It turns out, yet again, as it always has, that if all you ever teach your kids about sex is “not to do it,” they’ll end up thinking they can prevent HIV with bleach and avoid pregnancy with Mountain Dew.

Die-hard abstinence proponents absolutely hate hearing shit like this, because this is the strongest evidence you can ever present to them that their preferred sex education curriculum doesn’t work.

It took them a year or so longer than they wanted it to take, but Microsoft have finally gotten their wish — they actually succeeded in rigging the vote to approve Office Open XML as an ISO standard. They’ve also just destroyed what was once a well-respected international standards body, but I doubt they care. This is just another avenue they can now “leverage” to rake in yet more money.

Everything about this process stinks, and I’m pissed that they got away with it. They even tried this exact same crap before, and were shot down (as they should have been). Deliberately named to be remarkably similar to OpenOffice, a competing (and free/open source) office productivity suite, the Office Open XML format is Microsoft’s faux bid to appear transparent and open to the world. Now that it’s an “official” standard ratified by the ISO, they can even waddle into government offices and gun for lucrative government contracts: “see? We’re even an ISO standard now! How much more open can you be?”

Among the many feeds I have piled into Google Reader for my amusements is PFBlogs, the “Ad-Free Personal Finance Blogs Aggegator,” which culls various personal financing blogs and smashes them all together. In turn, they provide a single feed suitable for digestion by Google Reader.

The decreasingly useful content that trickles through this thing gave me a particularly strange site to skim through this evening. I was wondering, as I scrolled through the “All Items” pile of Google Reader this evening, why the hell is “Verse of the Day” an item on my list (complete with a fucking scripture quote)? I looked below that headline for the feed responsible, and was surprised to see it coming from PFBlogs. Loading the actual “article” led to a remarkably content-free quoting of the good ol’ bible — on the all-time fiction best seller’s list (though I was pleased to hear the Ikea catalog surpassed the bible in total copies published … that’s one of the few instances I’m happy to see consumerism beat out an ideology ).