I don’t have to use the product (yet) but its inferior vacation messaging is extremely annoying. Today I send a planned outage notice to our internal notice maillist and received two vacation emails from Exchange users that are out of the office — ARGH. Vacation mailers should not notify the sender when the on vacation person is not in the list of recipients. The University of Washington’s Email Delivery Manager (EDM) has had this feature for YEARS. In addition, EDM adds a unique header that signifies that the vacation notice was sent by the vacation program. And one more thing: Why the hell are the vacation notices sent as base64 encoded text/plain and text/html! How about saving everyone the trouble and just send the text without the encoding? Stupid bloated annoying crap. These are small trivial issues that should be able to be resolved with about 2 hours of development time — including unit tests and documentation.
From Military.com, news that the world’s most powerful railgun was delivered to the Navy:
Which is why the news that BAE Systems has delivered a functional, 32-megajoule Electro-Magnetic Laboratory Rail Gun (32-MJ LRG) to the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., is exciting. Installation of the laboratory launcher is currently under way, and according to BAE, this is the first step toward the Navy’s goal of developing a tactical 64-megajoule ship-mounted weapon.
The lab version doesn’t look particularly menacing — more like a long, belt-fed airport screening device than like a futuristic cannon — but the system will fire rounds at up to Mach 8, drawing on tremendous amounts of electricity to generate the current for each test shot. That, of course, is the problem with rail guns: Like lasers, they’re out of step with modern-day generators and capacitors. Eight and 9-megajoule rail guns have been fired before, but providing 3 million amps of power per shot has been a limitation. At 32 megajoules, this new system appears to be the most powerful rail gun ever built, and the Office of Naval Research is installing additional capacitors at the Dahlgren facility to support it. The planned 64-megajoule weapon, if it’s ever built, could require even more power — a staggering 6 million amps.
So cool….
I’ve watched the first two episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and while I have enjoyed parts of the show I just can’t justify watching it. I have two serious issues with the show:
Warning there are some spoilers for the first two episodes.
Time Travel: while the original “Terminator” started with time travel it was treated as a near unique event (only done twice — the Terminator and Kyle Reece). But in the series, there are six time travel incidents: Good Terminator, Bad Terminator, the scientist, the bank jump, the freedom fighters, and Bad Terminator 2. This strikes me as the worst kind of Rick Berman plot that culminated in the “Temporal Cold War” that was the initial plot of “Star Trek: Enterprise”. This is just a sign of desperate writers that don’t have a good plot and have to rely on attracting a sci-fi audience with gimics.
Inconsistency: The show doesn’t even follow the time travel rules faithfully — even at the same time the rules are quoted. Specifically, nothing artificial can travel through time (unless wrapped in organic mater). At the Bank Jump, just as the protagonists are about to make their time travel, Sarah fires plasma weapon (?) at Bad Terminator destroying its skin and blowing of its head. At first I nodded in approval thinking that this was how SkyNet gets its start — with the technology from this destroyed Bad Terminator — but no. The damaged bad Terminator is transported to the future with the protagonists — when it should have been eliminated just like the plasma weapon and the protagonists clothes.
I cannot forgive these failures because allowing them to continue just drags down the quality of future shows. Instapundit seems to enjoy the show — and I agree about Summer Glau’s acting skill and spookiness, but it isn’t enough for me.
A progress report on my second resolution:
2) Bring my lunch to work. I greatly prefer freshly cooked (i.e., hot) food, but it is quite expensive and not really that good for me. So my goal is to bring my lunch an average of two times per week. That may sound lame to some, but it is a big step for me.
So far for the year I am ahead by +1 days. The week of 1/14-1/18, I bought my lunch 4 times — the only day I didn’t was the day I went home at lunch time because my office was too bloody cold. So this past week I had to catch up. Monday was a holiday (which counts) and with the pork butt I made (for BBQ pulled pork), I only bought my lunch on Thursday. A good start….
If you have any positive associations with Ron Paul (or if you despise him and want greater justification) you should read The New Republics article on him: Angry White Man:
Martin Luther King Jr. earned special ire from Paul’s newsletters, which attacked the civil rights leader frequently, often to justify opposition to the federal holiday named after him. (”What an infamy Ronald Reagan approved it!” one newsletter complained in 1990. “We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.”) In the early 1990s, a newsletter attacked the “X-Rated Martin Luther King” as a “world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours,” “seduced underage girls and boys,” and “made a pass at” fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. One newsletter ridiculed black activists who wanted to rename New York City after King, suggesting that “Welfaria,” “Zooville,” “Rapetown,” “Dirtburg,” and “Lazyopolis” were better alternatives. The same year, King was described as “a comsymp, if not an actual party member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration.”
While bashing King, the newsletters had kind words for the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. In a passage titled “The Duke’s Victory,” a newsletter celebrated Duke’s 44 percent showing in the 1990 Louisiana Senate primary. “Duke lost the election,” it said, “but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment.” In 1991, a newsletter asked, “Is David Duke’s new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?” The conclusion was that “our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom.” Duke is now returning the favor, telling me that, while he will not formally endorse any candidate, he has made information about Ron Paul available on his website.
And there is more … much more.
While there is no evidence that Paul wrote these words they were published in newsletters that bore his name for more than a decade. So he either supports (or at least tolerates) these views, or he is so horrifically negligent that he shouldn’t be trusted with any responsibility (so a back bencher in the House of Representatives might be a great location for him). I will NEVER vote for Paul.
From Gizmo:
Everybody always talks about the booth babes at CES: models hired to draw nerds in with skimpy outfits and heads full of air. But who cares about them? If you want to see girls in skimpy outfits, there are plenty of places other than CES to find them. We’re more into the non-booth-babe babes of CES, the women who are here who actually know about technology and are here to, you know, work. They’re the beautiful women of PR and tech journalism who are a whole lot more than just a pretty face, and we’d take them over some bikini-clad airhead any day of the week. Videographer Richard Blakeley and noted letch Nick McGlynn went out and snapped some pics of some of the real babes of CES.
via instapundit
Wow. Eyeliner is really in fashion. Just walking along the Ave and 95+% of the college girls have noticeable eyeliner — and about half of them seem to have an entire pencil (bottle or whatever) of liner on (in addition to eyeshadow). Anyone know why raccoon eyes are back in style?
I’ve found my first RHS alumna: Lindean Barnett. I’m not surprised that she was pretty easy to find since she has a fairly unique name — all of the first page of Google results were for her. Senior year, she was kind of a big sister to me — she provided some good advise a couple times and I trusted her (one of very few people). So it isn’t a surprise that she is an associate pastor at Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church in Phoenix, AZ. And (of course) the pastors have a blog. After exchanging email it is great to hear that she is happily married and keeping busy, though with a family and flock how could you not be busy?
After connecting with Lindean, I resumed my search and may have found a goldmine in Facebook. They even have a feature to track down alumni of the same high school class. Looks like there are several people that I know. Very cool — and still free unlike the stupid Class/Reunion sites. Unfortunately, some of the people that I think will be hard to track down are not there…doh!
Today Former President Clinton spins:
I didn’t win a [primary] race [in 1992] until I got to Georgia.
Nice spin there Bill. The Iowa caucus was uncontested because Iowa Senator Tom Harkin was in the race and there was little chance he’d lose. And in New Hampshire, Paul Tsongas — a former Senator from neighboring Massachusetts — won handily. Bill got his “comeback kid” nickname by getting second place in this primary. So there wasn’t a race for Bill to win in the first two states, while Hillary has had a massive political machine and large leads in both states — including paying off the campaign debts of Tom Vilsack, the Democratic Governor, so that he would drop out of the race and endorse her. If Hillary loses in the first two states, it is because she is a horrible candidate who lost despite having every advantage that Bill didn’t have.
I really can’t agree more with the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen on the ridiculousness of the Democrat’s caucus in Iowa:
In “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” King Arthur and his knights come across Camelot, and at least initially, couldn’t be more pleased. After thinking it over, and considering exactly what goes on inside Camelot, Arthur concludes, “On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.”
I’ve come to think of the Iowa caucuses in the same light. Before the nominating process begins in earnest, Iowa has a certain Midwestern charm, filled with voters who appreciate their role in picking the next president. Like Camelot, it’s something to look forward to. But as we finally come upon Jan. 3, and get a look at what’s involved, it’s pretty obvious that the Iowa caucuses are much too silly….
Voting by absentee ballot is prohibited. There are no secret ballots, a bedrock democratic principle. The notion of “one-person, one-vote” does not really apply (the NYT noted that votes are weighted according to a precinct’s past level of participation)…
And just to add insult to injury, no one is allowed to know exactly how many Iowans actually voted for the different candidates — the Iowa Democratic Party gets the numbers, but keeps them private. (The results that designate the “winner” only reflect the share of state delegates each candidate has won.) As Greenfield noted, it means “a candidate who turned out more total supporters than anyone else, across the state, could wind up in second or third place — and no one will know.”
This process should not be tolerated. The Democrat’s caucus in Iowa violates every principle of modern democratic elections the DNC should decertify the process and everyone should ignore Iowa’s Democratic caucus until they institute reforms as the Republicans have.