Mozilla 1.6 Released

Posted on January 16, 2004

Mozilla 1.6 was released yesterday. New features include NTLM authentication for non-Windows users, and a preference in Mail/News to place your signature above any quoted text (the way Outlook does it) rather than burying your signature at the bottom of the message. If you’re still using the Suite rather than Firebird and/or Thunderbird, what are you waiting for — Go get 1.6!

Kids These Days!

Posted on January 14, 2004

These are my kind of kids:

TROY, Mich. — Police believe one or two young men, possibly teenagers, are responsible for issuing obscenities and insults to customers at a Troy Burger King drive-through window.
“You don’t need a couple of Whoppers. You are too fat. Pull ahead,” Officer Gerry Scherlink said is an example of what the hackers are telling customers at the drive-through speaker.

End of an Era

Posted on January 13, 2004

This just in: Kodak to stop selling film cameras.

Of course, “stop selling” is a little bit deceiving — they’re going to continue selling disposable, one-time-use cameras that use film. But all their other cameras from here on out will be digital.

More Good Stuff From Dr. Record

Posted on January 13, 2004

John Robb has found another good article by Dr. Jeffrey Record in an Army War College publication — this one from the War College journal Parameters, on the subject of the “Bush Doctrine” of pre-emptive war.

Ghostzilla: The “Invisible Browser”

Posted on January 13, 2004

Here’s a neat use of Mozilla: Ghostzilla is a little app that creates a Mozilla window that looks exactly like whatever productivity app you happen to be using, so that surfing isn’t obvious to bosses who practice management-by-walking-around. It even comes on a little self-contained CD, so that you don’t leave incriminating evidence (cookies, favorites, etc.) behind on the PC. It doesn’t require any software installation, so it’s perfect for cubicle drones who don’t have the right to install software on their PCs. Neat hack!

A Critique From the Services

Posted on January 12, 2004

This probably sounds a lot like the critique of the Iraq war you’ve been hearing from me, doesn’t it?

Of particular concern has been the conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred
Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism), but rather a detour from it.
Additionally, most of the GWOT’s declared objectives, which include the destruction of al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorist organizations, the transformation of Iraq into a prosperous, stable democracy, the democratization of the rest of the autocratic Middle East, the eradication of terrorism as a means of irregular warfare, and the (forcible, if necessary) termination of WMD proliferation to real and potential enemies worldwide, are unrealistic and condemn the United States to a hopeless quest for absolute security. As
such, the GWOT’s goals are also politically, fiscally, and militarily unsustainable…
The GWOT as it has so far been defined and conducted is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate scarce U.S. military and other means over too many ends. It violates the fundamental strategic principles of discrimination and concentration.

Yep. Those darn liberals and their constant complaining!

Except this time the “liberals” are wearing Army green and Air Force blue. The passage above is from a report, “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism” (link goes to PDF copy of report), just released by the Army War College, the Army’s institution for the education of “future strategic leaders” (i.e. junior officers who have the potential to become two-, three-, and four-star generals). Its author, Dr. Jeffrey Record, is on the faculty of the Air Force’s Air War College, which serves a similar function for that branch. His CV includes stints as a defense advisor to Senators Sam Nunn and Lloyd Bentsen, two hawkish Democrats who were never, to my knowledge, seen wearing Birkenstocks or flowers in their hair.

All of which makes the paper that much more remarkable. It makes a persuasive case that the war on terrorism as currently constituted is a tar pit — a commitment without end to meet goals without definition. The only firm goal in the war seems to be the elimination of terrorism, and Dr. Record points out how insanely difficult that will be, given that nobody can even agree on what terrorism is; Record identifies a study that found 100 different definitions for the term, and that’s one study!

He then goes on to demolish the Administration’s argument that it never said anything to tie together Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda:

As it approached war with Iraq, the administration insisted on co-conspiratorial links between the Saddam Hussein regime and al-Qaeda; repeatedly raised the specter of the dictator’s transfer of WMD to al-Qaeda; and encouraged the view that Saddam Hussein had a direct hand in the 9/11 attacks. At war’s end, it hailed the regime’s destruction as a victory in the war on terrorism.
In September 2002, President Bush declared, “You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terrorism. They’re both equally as bad, and equally as evil, and equally as destructive.” He added that “the danger is that al-Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam’s madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the
world.”
In a formal news conference on March 6, 2003, just days before he launched Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, the President linked the case for war against Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, implying that Saddam Hussein would replicate them once he got nuclear weapons. “Saddam is a threat. And we’re not going to wait until he does attack,” he declared. “Saddam Hussein and his weapons [of mass destruction] are a direct threat to this country,” he reiterated. “If the world fails to confront the threat posed by the Iraqi regime . . . free nations would assume immense and unacceptable risks. The attacks of September 11, 2001, showed what enemies of America did with four airplanes. We will not wait to see what . . . terrorist states could do with weapons of mass destruction.” Later on, he stated:
“Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation. September the 11th changed the–the strategic thinking, at least as far as I was concerned, for how to protect the country . . . . Used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror. September the 11th should say to the American people that we’re now a
battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home.”
When asked about the possible human and financial cost of a war with Iraq, President Bush answered, “The price of doing nothing exceeds the price of taking action… The price of the attacks on America . . . on September 11th [was] enormous… And I’m not willing to take that chance again… The lesson of September the 11th… is that we’re vulnerable to attack . . . and we must take threats which gather overseas very seriously.”

Again, this is from a publication from the Army’s premier academic institution.

Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks, in his story about the release of the report, contacted the director of the War College unit that published the report (the Strategic Studies Institute) to give him a chance to throw Record to the wolves if he wished to do so. He didn’t:

[Record’s] essay, published by the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, carries the standard disclaimer that its views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government.
But retired Army Col. Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., director of the Strategic Studies Institute, whose Web site carries Record’s 56-page monograph, hardly distanced himself from it. “I think that the substance that Jeff brings out in the article really, really needs to be considered,” he said.
Publication of the essay was approved by the Army War College’s commandant, Maj. Gen. David H. Huntoon Jr., Lovelace said. He said he and Huntoon expected the study to be controversial, but added, “He considers it to be under the umbrella of academic freedom.”

So it sounds like Lovelace and Huntoon knew what they were getting into, and decided to go ahead anyway. All we can hope is that somebody is listening.

More Fairfax E-Voting Fallout

Posted on January 11, 2004

The fallout from last year’s e-voting debacle in Fairfax County continues — this time, it’s the county GOP bashing the Electoral Board:

New touch-screen voting machines used in Fairfax County’s local elections in November were a “failure,” and county electoral officials were unprepared to deal with the equipment’s problems, according to a county GOP committee report released yesterday.
In their report, Republican officials urged the county to investigate the “poor performance” of the machines, and they recommended state regulations that would require localities with the new equipment to follow stringent procedures.
“Neither the Fairfax County Electoral Board, nor the new voting machines was ready for Election Day,” the report said. “The new touch screen machines were a technological and procedural failure.”

Well, that’s pretty hard to dispute, you would think. But Electoral Board Secretary (and galactic-scale bonehead) Margaret Luca gives it the old college try nonetheless:

Margaret K. Luca, secretary of the county Board of Elections, disputed the GOP committee’s report, calling it inaccurate.
“It was about as good as an Election Day as we’ve ever had,” Luca said. Her staff “bent over backwards” to prepare for the election and held numerous demonstrations and seminars for the public beforehand.
“I feel so hurt that anyone would say we were not prepared; I mean, we were so well prepared,” Luca said. She said that every technical problem cited in the report was fixed in the weeks after the election.
“We anticipate having a perfect election in February,” she said. The Virginia Democratic presidential primary will be held Feb. 10.

Just like you anticipated having a perfect election in November? Oh, this oughta be good.

A better question is, why the hell are you whining about feeling hurt by this report? Shouldn’t you just be happy that you still have your job, after the November screw-up? Oh, people pointing out your mistakes hurts your feelings. Boo frickin’ hoo. Fair and honest elections are more important than keeping you from feeling unappreciated, Ms. Luca. If I was in your shoes, I’d be so thankful that I hadn’t been run out of the county on a rail that the idea of griping that people weren’t being nice enough to me would be pretty low on my priority list.

That’s a Lot of Candles

Posted on January 9, 2004

Tintin turns 75 tomorrow. There’s even a new Euro coin to mark the occasion.

I clued into Tintin when I was a kid in Cairo. What a great discovery! It’s a shame most American children will never be exposed to his adventures, for reasons that are beyond my understanding.

Dean’s Secret Life, Revealed?

Posted on January 8, 2004

Have you ever wondered what about Howard Dean makes so many people think he’s cool — and by cool, I mean, totally sweet?

Some folks think they’ve found the answer: he’s a ninja.

Or at least, they think he played a cop in a 1984 ninja movie, “Ninja III: The Domination”. Dean denies it, of course, but then wouldn’t you?

All of which raises the question of whether Dean’s true purpose is to flip out and kill people. The world may never know…

Brighter Than a Thousand Suns

Posted on January 8, 2004

If you live where I do — in or near Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC — I guarantee that reading this article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will seriously make you contemplate moving.

Seriously.

To visualize the destructiveness of a nuclear bomb, imagine a powerful strategic nuclear weapon detonated above the Pentagon, a short distance from the center of Washington, D.C. Imagine it is a “near-surface” burst — about 1,500 feet above the ground — which is how a military planner might choose to wreak blast damage on a massive structure like the Pentagon. Let us say that it is an ordinary, clear day with visibility at 10 miles, and that the weapon’s explosive power is 300 kilotons — the approximate yield of most modern strategic nuclear weapons…
At Pentagon City, a shopping and office complex about seven-tenths of a mile from ground zero, light from the fireball would melt asphalt in the streets, burn paint off walls, and melt metal surfaces within a half second of the detonation. The interiors of vehicles and buildings in line of sight of the fireball would explode into flames…
Just beyond this range, about 1.6 miles from the Pentagon, aircraft at Reagan National Airport would be exposed to a light flash from the fireball more than 3,000 times brighter than a desert sun at noon. The thermal radiation would melt and warp aluminum surfaces on aircraft. Interior sections of the aircraft illuminated by the fireball would burst into flames. The tires of the aircraft would catch fire, as would the tires and fuel hoses of service vehicles near the aircraft…
The first indicator of a mass fire would be strangely shifting ground winds of growing intensity near ground zero. (Such winds are entirely different from and unrelated to the earlier blast-wave winds that exert “drag pressure” on structures.) These fire-winds are a physical consequence of the rise of heated air over large areas of ground surface, much like a gigantic bonfire.
The inrushing winds would drive the flames from combusting buildings horizontally toward the ground, filling city streets with hot flames and firebrands, breaking in doors and windows, and causing the fire to jump hundreds of feet to swallow anything that was not yet violently combusting. These extraordinary winds would transform the targeted area into a huge hurricane of fire.
Within tens of minutes, everything within approximately 3.5 to 4.6 miles of the Pentagon would be engulfed in a mass fire. The fire would extinguish all life and destroy almost everything else.

Gulp.

The point of the article is about how the U.S. government has never factored fire in its estimates for the damage caused by a thermonuclear weapon — they only look at damage caused by the initial blast, even though the fire that follows would be just as devastating. And, unlike blast, from firestorm there is no escape; you might survive the blast if you’re deep in a sub-basement somewhere, but the firestorm would turn your sub-basement into a brick oven. Author Lynn Eden cheerily summarizes that “[t]he firestorm would eliminate all life in the fire zone” — which, if ground zero were the Pentagon, would extend as far as Capitol Hill.

Now, when you live in the nation’s capital, you know that you’re living in a target zone. But you know it in a kind of abstract way. You certainly don’t think about it in the horribly specific terms this article lays out. Go ahead, read it and see if you don’t get a cold chill too.

I’m Sure It Sounded Better In The Original German

Posted on January 7, 2004

You may have already seen the recent op-ed piece that Ralph Peters wrote for the New York Post on Howard Dean. If you haven’t, go read it; it’s an excellent case study in overheated rhetoric, shoddy logic, and poor argumentation. I used to have some respect for Ralph Peters, but this essay managed to put a halt to that situation pretty quickly.

I don’t mean to imply that it’s impossible to write an op-ed opposing Dean that I could respect. But I find it hard to believe that anyone could read this particular op-ed and come away from it with one’s opinion of the author enhanced.

Take, for instance, this little pearl of wisdom:

One secular gospel of the left preaches that the Patriot Act has drastically curtailed American freedom. Free speech, the teacup Trotskys claim, is a thing of the past.
Whenever one of my forlorn leftie pals raises the issue, I ask him or her to cite a single example of how the Patriot Act has limited their personal liberty. They never can. Instead, they rail about what-ifs and slippery slopes.

Ooh, I guess he’s got us! Since we can’t prove the Feds aren’t abusing their powers, we should just shut the hell up about laws that open the possibility that they could. Interesting.

On that theory, let’s take that same passage and put it in the Wayback Machine to 1933 Germany, swap in the hot legal issue of that time, and see how well the logic works:

One secular gospel of the left preaches that the Enabling Act has drastically curtailed German freedom. Political freedom, the teacup Trotskys claim, is a thing of the past.
Whenever one of my forlorn leftie pals raises the issue, I ask him or her to cite a single example of how the Enabling Act has limited their personal liberty. They never can. Instead, they rail about what-ifs and slippery slopes.

See? Nothing to worry about, citizen, move along! Never mind that the Enabling Act gave the Reichschancellor (a fellow named Hitler — you may have heard of him) the power to rule by decree, bypassing the legislature. Never mind that he used that power to push through laws abolishing all non-Nazi political parties, stripping Jews of their civil and human rights, dissolving local governments into the control of the central government, and legalizing the murder by the state of anyone deemed an enemy of the regime — all within two years of the passage of the Enabling Act, and all completely legally under German law, thanks to the Enabling Act.

Other than Hitler, who in 1933 could have pointed to the Enabling Act and known what was to come? If Herr Peters had been around to ask them, who could have opposed the Enabling Act with any arguments other than “what-ifs” and “slippery slopes”? And yet, those slopes turned out to be quite slippery indeed.

This has been the genius of the American people — they have understood that the key to holding on to freedom is not waiting for the secret police to show up at your door. You have to stand up for your liberties early on, precisely at the stage when most of the dangers are in the realm of the theoretical, because if you wait too long — if you wait, as Peters would have us do, for the day when every American is able to recite a list of which of their rights their government has trampled on — you have quite simply waited too long.

Yes, Ralph, Americans are upset about the PATRIOT Act. Mostly for real reasons, like its expansion of “sneak-and-peek” search warrants, or the way it lets immigrants be detained essentially forever without a hearing, or its expansion of Federal wiretap authority and limitation on judicial oversight, or the way it gives the FBI sweeping authority to pry into citizens’ privacy for any search they claim is related to “intelligence”; but also, yes, because we are determined not to slide down the slippery slope. We’re not going to wait to find out that someone has seized our records, or tapped our phones, or is coming to send us to Guantanamo Bay; since 1776, Americans have known the value of defending their liberty early and vigorously, rather than trusting the government to take care of it for them. It’s a shame that Ralph Peters is so blinded by his desire to find some issue, any issue, to take a swipe at Howard Dean with that he can’t seem to remember that.

Say Hi to Ann, Everybody

Posted on January 7, 2004

My friend Ann Kent has started blogging, and she promises regular updates, so tune in to whosemom.com for all the details. Welcome to blogspace, Ann!

Charlie Hustle Comes Clean. Sort Of

Posted on January 6, 2004

Well, Pete Rose finally confessed to betting on baseball.

And about time. He’s spent 14 years giving unconvincing denials, pleading that his only crime was being a bad judge of friends while never denying that he was a gambler in general — only that he bet on the game. Now, though, time is running out for old Charlie Hustle — he needs to get reinstated to baseball by December 2005 for his name to be eligible for inclusion on the writers’ ballot for induction into the Hall of Fame — so he’s decided that, since bluff has failed, it’s time for a different strategy.

Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that strategy has anything to do with actually regretting what he did. From Rose’s new book, My Prison Without Bars:

I bet the Reds to win every time. I bet the Phillies, my other former team, to win even when they were huge underdogs and on a losing streak.
For me, it wasn’t about the odds.
I was rooting for my teams – no, believing in my teams. It wasn’t the smart way to bet. … I never – ever – bet against my teams…
I’m sure that I’m supposed to act all sorry or sad or guilty now that I’ve accepted that I’ve done something wrong. But you see, I’m just not built that way.
… So let’s leave it like this: I’m sorry it happened, and I’m sorry for all the people, fans and family that it hurt. Let’s move on.

Ah, yes. He’s not sorry he did it, he’s sorry it happened (note the passive voice, so reminiscent of the Nixonian “mistakes were made”) and that anyone was hurt. If only someone could have done something about it! Someone like… um… Pete.

What a load of moral cowardice. This is a “confession” in name only. He’s still not taking responsibility for his actions, for what he did — which is all the more amazing when you consider he’s had fourteen years to come to terms with it. He’s not even taking responsibility for all the times he’s accused other people of being liars over those fourteen years for saying things that he’s now admitting are true. This is the sort of apology you expect from a child, not a man.

There’s really two issues to be dealt with when it comes to Pete Rose — the Hall of Fame issue, and the reinstatement-to-baseball issue. My feeling after seeing this sniveling performance from Rose is that the two should be decoupled. Give Pete his plaque in Cooperstown. Just put a big asterisk on it — hey, they defaced Roger Maris’ record for decades with just such a caveat, and for far less reason. Put an asterisk on it and a brief note that says that Pete Rose was banned from baseball in 1989 for betting on the game, and that he lied about it for fourteen years afterward before coming clean.

The other question, the reinstatement-to-baseball question — allowing Rose to come back as a manager, or in any other role that affects the game — that one is easy: don’t. Give Pete his plaque, and his asterisk, but make the price that he stop inflicting himself on baseball. Tell him in no uncertain terms that fourteen years is enough.

I think the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Paul Daugherty gets it pretty much right:

So, yes, Pete Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame. It’s a museum. It has a front door, not pearly gates. Nobody got more base hits than Peter Edward. Probably, no one ever will. Put him in the Hall. Give him a super-sized plaque, big enough for a detailed explanation as to why he told one story for 14 years and another in January 2004. Keep him away from any job that even remotely sniffs the ballpark grass. And be done with him.
That’s an amazing thing to say, isn’t it? Dear Pete: Go away.

My thoughts exactly.

Happy New Year, Kids

Posted on December 31, 2003

Well, this is gonna be my last post for 2003. It’s been a heck of a year, that’s for sure, and 2004 promises to be even more eventful. Here’s hoping that those events are joyous and inspirational, and that you reach whatever goals you set for yourself.

And with that, I close the year here at Just Well Mixed. Thanks for reading, and let me know what I can do to make 2004 an even better year for you as a reader! (Except send you money. I’m not gonna do that.)

Tallying the True Cost of War

Posted on December 30, 2003

Quick — how many American casualties have been taken during the war in Iraq? 500? 1,000?

You can be forgiven if that’s what you thought. The Administration has done an admirable job of spin control with the meaning of the word “casualty”. A “casualty” used to be a soldier who was killed, missing, or wounded severely enough to need evacuation from the battle area — essentially, anybody who could no longer stand and fight. However, for this little war, the Pentagon’s PR machine has insisted on including in their “casualty” reports only soldiers who are killed — the severely wounded aren’t casualties, no matter how bad their injuries are.

That’s why you may get a bit of a shock when you read Col. David Hackworth’s latest column at Soldiers for the Truth:

Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the U.S. military’s Transportation Command told me that as of Dec. 23, his outfit had evacuated 3,255 battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries…
Following are the major categories of the non-battle evacuations:
Orthopedic surgery — 3,907
General surgery — 1,995
Internal medicine — 1,291
Psychiatric — 1,167
Neurology — 1,002
Gynecological — 491

Don’t think a wounded soldier counts as a casualty? Tell that to Sergeant Jeremy Feldbusch, who went to Iraq an Army Ranger and came home a blind man:

On April 3, Sergeant Feldbusch, a 6-foot-2-inch, thickly built mortar man, heard the shriek. He and his platoon of Rangers were guarding the Haditha Dam, a strategic point northwest of Baghdad along the Euphrates River, when a shell burst 100 feet away and a piece of red hot shrapnel hit him in the face. The last thing he remembers was eating a pouch of chicken teriyaki.
The inchlong piece of steel, part of the artillery shell’s casing, sliced through his right eye, tumbled through his sinuses and lodged in the left side of his brain, severely damaging the optic nerve of his left eye and spraying bone splinters throughout his brain.
Two weeks later, at the Brooke Army Medical Center, doctors removed the shrapnel and reconstructed his face with titanium mesh and a lump of fat from his stomach in place of his missing eye, so the hole would not cave in.
For five weeks, Sergeant Feldbusch remained in a coma. When he came out, it was still black…
Two weeks after he came out of the coma, his parents broke the news. He was being awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. But there was very little chance he would see again.
“I thought there’s no way this is happening to me, there’s no way I’m going to go through life as a blind man,” Sergeant Feldbusch said.
One day, as he lay in bed with tubes and wires and needles sticking out of him like he was some sort of science project, his father looked at him and said, “Maybe God thought you had seen enough killing.”

So remember the next time that you hear that there have been “only” a few hundred “casualties” among our soldiers in Iraq, that for each one of those fallen men and women there are scores more in Army hospitals, hidden from the limelight, carrying scars that may never heal. And ask yourself if the cost of war is as low as it seems then as it does when you’re watching Fox News.

The US Airways Lost Baggage Experience™

Posted on December 30, 2003

Hey kids — would you like to be able to have all the fun of dealing with US Airways’ lost-baggage claim service, without actually having to lose your bags?

Sure! Who wouldn’t??? Well, now you bring the US Airways Lost Baggage Experience™ into your very own home just by following these simple steps.

1. Get a blank audio tape, a tape recorder, and a cheesy “smooth jazz” CD. Kenny G will do nicely.
2. Put the tape in the recorder and record yourself saying “Thank you for calling US Airways Baggage Claims Service. Your call is important to us. All our operators are currently assisting other customers. Please wait for one of our operators to assist you.”
3. Record 30 minutes of random tunes from the “smooth jazz” CD. Be sure to break in every ten minutes and record yourself saying “If you would prefer to file your claim by mail, please send it to US Airways, System Baggage Services, Pittsburgh International Airport, PO Box 12346, Pittsburgh, PA 15321.” Because Lord knows that if you’ve lost your luggage you probably want to wait to get an answer by mail.
4. After the 30 minutes, stop the music and record yourself saying “Thank you for calling US Airways Baggage Claim Services. Your reference number?”
5. Leave enough “dead air” on the tape for you to read off six random letters. (Yes, the “reference number” is made up entirely of letters. Don’t ask.)
6. Record yourself saying “Thank you [sir | madam], please wait while I contact [insert name of random airport here] to check the status of your claim.”
7. Record thirty more minutes of “smooth jazz.”
8. Stop the music again. Record yourself saying “Thank you for your patience, [sir | madam]. I have checked with [insert name of random airport from previous step], and they have told me that they have just received 100 bags from Philadelphia, and they have not had time to begin going through them yet. They believe your bag is among these. Once they have time to go through the bags from Philadelphia and confirm this, they will call you.”
9. Leave enough “dead air” for you to say “That’s the same thing you told me the last [insert number of times you’ve played the tape] times I’ve talked to you people! How long are those 100 bags going to sit there before someone gets around to going through them?”
10. Record yourself saying “I’m sorry [sir | madam], I know it’s frustrating but there’s nothing we can do, it’s all up to the staff on the ground at [insert name of random airport from previous steps]. Thank you for flying US Airways!”

Then, any time you want to live the true US Airways Lost Baggage Experience™, you can just play back the tape and let it wash over you. I’ve had this same conversation three times now over the last 24 hours, so I can only assume that the folks at US Airways are working off a tape themselves. So why shouldn’t we cut out the middleman?

Other stories of my experiences with US Airways before swearing them off altogether:

• Happy Fun Time Holiday Weekend Roundup
• True Tales of Holiday Travel Horror

War as Spectator Sport

Posted on December 30, 2003

Wise words today from John Robb:

Today, war is a spectator sport by people that would never involve themselves or their children. War is our modern coliseum.

Steel Panthers: World at War 8.0

Posted on December 29, 2003

Matrix Games have given strategy gamers everywhere a great holiday gift — a new version of their great free World War 2 wargame, Steel Panthers: World at War. Version 8.0 tightens up the code substantially, resulting in a much more stable-playing game on modern versions of Windows (2000 & XP), and it includes more than twice as many scenarios as the previous version did, so there’s a whole lot of free gaming goodness to be had. If you’re at all interested in strategy gaming, you owe it to yourself to check this one out. It’s a large download (435MB!) but it’s worth every byte.

In conjunction with the release of 8.0, Matrix has released a new add-on Mega Campaign for SP:WAW as well. Mega Campaigns are the way Matrix makes money off the game — they are long, intricate campaigns that tie together many interconnected battles, challenging you not just to be a good battlefield commander but also a wise logistics manager as well. They’re reasonably priced ($25) and add a lot of play value to the game. The newest Mega Campaign is Screaming Eagles ’44-’45, and it covers the battles of the American 101st Airborne Division as it fought its way across Fortress Europe from D-Day to the final collapse of Nazi Germany. (Easy Company, made famous in the book and HBO movie Band of Brothers, was a part of the 101st.) Given that it covers some of the most hard-fought battles of the war, this one is looking like a must-buy for any Steel Panthers fan.

True Tales of Holiday Travel Horror

Posted on December 29, 2003

… courtesy of US Airways.

(more…)

Maybe For Next Year

Posted on December 28, 2003

Already thinking about what holiday presents to buy for next year? Looks like the toys-for-conservatives outfit TalkingPresidents.com (home of the ever-popular George W. Bush Top Gun Action Figure, which commemorates the now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” landing on the carrier Abraham Lincoln) have a new addition to their lineup.

A three-word review of the new figure: “Bride of Chucky“.

Lenny Bruce Pardoned, 40 Years Late

Posted on December 23, 2003

A nice present for the holidays from Gov. George Pataki — he has granted comedian Lenny Bruce a posthumous pardon for an obscenity conviction he was unfairly stuck with in New York state in 1964.

The campaign to win a pardon for Bruce was supported by his ex-wife and daughter, more than two dozen First Amendment lawyers and entertainers including Robin Williams, the Smothers Brothers and Penn and Teller…
During a November 1964 performance at Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, Bruce used more than 100 “obscene” words. Undercover police detectives attended the show, and later testified against Bruce. The charge was Giving an Obscene Performance.
He was convicted following a six-month trial. Bruce mishandled his own appeal, and, beset by legal and financial problems, died of a drug overdose in 1966 with the conviction still on the books. He was 37.

It’s forty years later than it should be, but it’s good to see New York see the error of its ways nonetheless.

They Get Everything First

Posted on December 23, 2003

Joi Ito describes a trendy game people play in Japan — address book Russian roulette:

There are three people: two players and a judge. The two players pick someone from their address books and reveal them to each other simultaneously. The judge decides which one is more famous or important. The loser has to shred the business card or in the case of mobile phones, delete that entry from the address book. It’s quite funny because you try to play important people to beat the other person, but if you lose, you lose a valuable phone number.

He calls it “address book poker”, but it sounds a lot more like Russian roulette to me. I wonder how long it will take for this to hit the States…

Kerry Fading in Latest Poll

Posted on December 22, 2003

Ouch!

The latest Harris Poll, released today, shows Howard Dean in the lead as the preferred candidate of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, with 21% of them expressing support for him.

That’s not surprising. What is surprising is how Sen. John Kerry, once the presumptive front-runner, is doing. Kerry pulled in a miserable 4% — putting him behind such well-known political powerhouses as Dick Gephardt (7%), Rev. Al Sharpton (6%), and Carol Moseley-Braun (6%).

Worse than Al Sharpton? Worse than Carol Moseley-Braun? Like I said, ouch.

Movable Type 2.65 Released

Posted on December 22, 2003

Attention Movable Type users: Six Apart has released version 2.65 of the popular blog software, with included fixes to two security issues, the long-known “send to friend” spam vulnerability and a recently discovered hole in MT’s XML-RPC server. The update is free and all users are encouraged to update their installations to ensure these holes are patched.

They’ve also posted some information on the long-delayed Movable Type 3.0, which is nice for those of us who didn’t move to TypePad. Glad they’re still working on improving and extending MT!

Call of Duty

Posted on December 22, 2003

I finished the single-player campaign in Call Of Duty today. (Well, technically, yesterday, since it’s just after midnight when I’m posting this.) Having made my way through the whole thing, I can say without reservation that this is probably the best WW2 action game ever made.

Call of Duty is made by the same people who made Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and it shows. A lot of the gameplay mechanics are the same, and the “feel” of the two games is similar. However, Call of Duty improves on Medal of Honor in a lot of ways, fixing just about everything that was annoying about the earlier title. The biggest change is the shift from Medal of Honor’s Rambo-style world, in which you could blast through whole levels without ever seeing another Allied soldier, to a more collaborative world where you work as part of an AI-driven team. This makes the ensuing battles feel much, much more real than Medal of Honor’s ever did.

But the best part of Call of Duty — the thing that makes it truly amazing — is its Russian campaign. The single-player game is split into three campaigns: an American campaign where you play a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne at Normandy, a British campaign where you join the 6th Airborne in the defense of Pegasus Bridge, and a Russian campaign that drops you into the hell of Stalingrad. The first two campaigns are well executed (though the British one is a little short), but the Russian one is amazing. The developers borrow heavily from the movie Enemy at the Gates for atmospherics (in much the same way as their D-Day landing scene in Medal of Honor felt like it dropped you into Saving Private Ryan), but it’s still chilling to be dropped right into the middle of the carnage as wave after wave of Russian conscripts charge the German positions, with half of them carrying rifles and the other half carrying only a spare cartridge and being told to pick up a rifle when the man in front of them falls. For whatever reason, Americans don’t seem to have a good understanding of the scope of the sacrifice the Russians made to win World War II — a sacrifice orders of magnitude greater than ours was — so if this stuff was compelling for me, I imagine it would be even more so for someone who had no idea what Stalingrad was like.

Anyway, Call of Duty sets the new standard for first-person shooters. If you have any interest in this sort of thing at all, it’s a must-play.