yes, i was distracted by all the world cup hoopla...that said, there's a great piece here about the state of the district's new state-of-the-art dmv computer system; after reading the testimony it sounds like things are moving in a positive direction, but it's a case where the principal question (why we purchased a horrific system from nevada) is never really answered; instead, the merits of the now-functional system are compared as they stand...check it out! oh, and check out our second brave soul who decided, sans-bear suit, to link up to us; tell him it's 'quiet' over here...

enough said; let's get ready for mexico monday morning!

2 things: first, korea finally managed to score against a depleted portugal team with only 9 players...which means we could go even if we lose; second, we need to do something about jeff agoos; he's stinkin' up the pitch!

yes, i know we're down two goals...we'll get it back; possibly on this corner kick now!

in fifteen minutes, we face off against poland in a match that will determine if we make it to the second round; here's the lowdown on possible routes through group d. as long as we win or tie, we're in, but it would be nice to win the group.

after checking the morning toles, i ran across this article detailing the death of the estate tax. thank god. you'd think that a progressive tax on inheritances wouldn't be difficult to sustain. after all, our country was built upon the idea of hard work, perseverance and lifting yourself up by your bootstraps, not the divine right of kings. Yet the estate tax was described as hurting "family farms" by those who would keep it alive. hurting families is always in bad taste, especially when you owe child support. at the moment, Roscoe Grant Jr. makes a shade under three figures. maybe we could get it back when he dies, assuming he owns a multi-million dollar estate by then. being a hypocrite, i feel it is my divine right to say that double-standards stink. maybe we could even use the extra money to help outfit the mounted unit in dc. the best part of the last story? well, that the officers managed to injure themselves "at a surprising rate". go figure. i'm all for mounted officers...but maybe we should work on basic coordination first. that doesn't seem to be the problem down at the mixing bowl where pure contractor company negligence seems to be the rule of law. i wonder if they have a sign that says "we've worked 003 days without a fatal accident" down there. even a purely selfish person would have to be a little alarmed that in addition to the accident-rich environment, they might have to deal with falling bodies from the sky during rush-hour traffic.

i'm somewhat of a fiscal conservative: i don't carry a balance on my credit card, i save a little each month despite losing tons of money through bank negligence and i try not go overboard on kick-ass dvds. that said, nothing gets my ire like stupid tax repeals that only benefit the few or crazy theories to allow us to make more money without any effort. today i noticed that the gao and the white house managed to blow almost $200k on an idiotic report detailing pranks pulled by staffers from the former administration. Evidently, this happens each time there is a transition, even if the party doesn't change. instead of simply buying some new keyboards and removing the "vice president cardiac unit" signs, however, the bush staff decided to press their luck and demand satisfaction. when the gao revealed that, in fact, the pranks were minor, they wanted a rebuttal. aren't these the same folks who want to keep reminding us that there's a war going on? you can pay for a lot of bullets with 200,000 dollars...

okay, for starters, i've figured out how to force the 'werkz to accept and process fully xhtml docs in the right manner; it's a hideous kludge, and it's not even seventy percent, but it works using mozilla so far. i'll be expanding upon the theory to start to do more cool stuff later this week. meanwhile, back at the ranch, our illustrious potus still thinks that we could slow down the peace process and that he doesn't need to read his own epa report before deciding to lash out at it as something produced by the bureacracy. If my website were like our country, bush would make sure half the links wouldn't even function.

after yesterday's complete lack of sleep, i'm still running on empty; in addition, i've run into a snag with the new icing section: i can't get my webserver to serve up xhtml as xhtml...instead, it's served up as text/xhtml (mimetype) which means that embedded coolness like svg is simply ignored. Grr. i'll knock this gremlin out today as soon as i figure out the solution.

while performing my job the other day, i happened across an obscure simpsons item: a tiny head of homer simpson, divided into eight pieces, much like a rubik's pocket-cube. the top of his head was cut into four quadrants, as was the bottom. together, each portion could be rotated, just like the pocketcube; in vain, i tried to put it together but could not, and so i thought i'd try to figure out a mathematical solution to the problem (rather than reading all the web-literature out there, of course!); after thinking about it long anough, though, the homer-cube is actually exactly like the pocket cube...despite the homer-cube's ability to project in 3 dimensions (opposed to the flat color shapes of the pocket cube), each physical property could be described by a color, resulting in the pocket cube. With the major problem out of the way, i'd still like to see an algorithm to help 'solve' the pocket cube rather than merely explaining the concept. any takers? if so, e-mail me at the sysop address at the bottom of the main page. to clarify...if an algorithm detailing every possible move were created, then i could slap together a svg page based on it, which would allow people to solve the pocketcube from any particular point, with the animation to show you how. so hit me!

man, i'm hurting; i'm only 16 minutes through the day and i just want to go home and sleep;

i'm now at work a full hour early. why? because i got up even earlier, at 2:30, to watch the us play south korea. the game was good, although the koreans dominated throughout. we managed to pull out a tie, despite being outshot 18-6. A brilliant penalty kick save was all that stood between us and disaster. i was reminded of the old football quote "the prevent defense prevents nothing at all" when, after scoring one goal, we shifted into defensive mode, despite there being over 65 minutes left in the game. we had a few more scoring opportunities, but couldn't convert. Now, if the portugal versus poland match goes in portugal's favor, we'll be in good shape for our final groud d match against poland. let's just hope we can light up the scoreboard more...