A random image captured from when surfing the 'net. Showing the weather in Baghdad. Much like that old "which one of these things is not like the other?" comes:

Yeah. I'd like to meet a local myself...

Here's the current weather over there. Still warm. Still plenty of white girls with "69" logo t-shirts on.

Friday night I hung out with Madonna and Kristen and Sean. I was a complete ass to Madonna and Kristen's co-worker. (Since she is no longer Madonna's co-worker.) Atonement might be in order, but I'm not sure redemption is a possibility.

Saturday I helped Deborah move. A while later Dwight and I helped Deborah move. Deborah moved across town to the house. Dwight, Deborah and I unpacked. Dwight, Deborah and I cooked some food. Nikki, Kristen, Jill, Ronald, Kevin and three other friends from Deborah's current workplace helped us consume the food and beverages.

It was not a party. It was an impromptu cookout.

Yesterday I went to Target with Jill. Then I saw Shrek 2 with Deborah. Very amusing.

Today I am very busy at work.

A mouth guard? While cycling? A little excessive, no?. Perhaps Bush needs to realize the entire country needs more safety from his illguided policies...

Is really, what was in JC's cubicle?

Seriously, did Washingtonienne bring toys to work? Because that's just dirty. I wonder if Dewine "confiscated" them...

The Post just scored the transcripts of the prisoners abused at Abu Ghraib. A huge scoop. They're horrible narratives...but Americans need to read them to realize how far we have fallen.

My month of purgatory is coming to an end: namely, the idiotic tech troubles harpie-hounding me are close to being resolved.

Ever want to take a picture of everything you witnessed during a day? With proper framing and lighting of course, but the tiny objects that stick in your mind like a bad tune need proper aesthetic documenting. Not possible to share, of course. Or, really, to explain. Better to wallow in vague generalities.

Sometimes I am sloth personified. Sometimes I have ingested too much Powers.

For the first time in 24 hours I'm not going to eat any sushi. I'm not happy about it, but I desperately need to save money. I'm really in the hole right now...so much so that I actually cancelled my green Amex. (I had been meaning to do that for some time, in fact.) This leaves me with only one extraneous credit card, which I will hopefully dispose of tomorrow, bringing me down from my high of 8 cards to a much more reasonable 5. I'd get rid of my craptastic MBNA card tomorrow as well if it wasn't for the fact that it's the one I've owned the longest, so my credit history is tied to it, for better or for worse. As a consequence, it has the highest limit yet the least rewards: zero. I was going to get a replacement Visa from some Foolish people but their card is also owned by MBNA and I figure there's no point in enriching the same GOP donor, regardless of how many rewards I get. So I'll just bide my time...

The whole subject of the washingtonienne debate resonated through my mind (and office) today often. Many wannabe blogerati seemed to think that the essence of any blog is anonymity. (Of course, the most widely read blogs are all not anonymous, with atrios being the exception that proves the rule.) They're wrong. The essence of the internet is open standards: the days of proprietary networks where information was jealously guarded are over.

Washingtonienne is a case in point: her "outing" led to her eventual dismissal, because Wonkette picked up her noname blog and gave it notoriety. Within hours most of the people mentioned in her blog by initials only had been similarly outed by people using google and the internet. To have an affair with an intern is bad. To be the victim of a girl who blogged about it later is deliciously bad. But this is the point: no one is anonymous.

Yes, in the good ole' days, one could simply launch a whois query to determine who ran a website. I remember being excited the first time I hacked into Langley's phone network to pull up the address of a contractor I wanted to talk to. Totally unsecured. It even listed e-mail addresses. These days you don't even have to be a script kiddie to get tons of public information. It will only get better (or worse, depending upon your perspective) as time goes on.

Why?

Put simply, in any given system of information, there are costs and benefits. Right now, the benefits to pushing as much information as possible into the public domain forces people to publish all their data. The net gain is huge for society. The drawback is that the notion of privacy continues to shrink. Simply utility dictates that in a couple decades, the currently "inappropriate" idea that one could be tracked and marketed perfectly will be commonplace. Sure, we may not all have an ID chip embedded in our heads, but every piece of clothing will have an RFID tag, enabling seamless wireless networks to hit us up constantly. The benefits outweigh the negatives...

It's a typical Friday night in 2075. You've hit dinner and want to move on, where to go next? A simple search turns up a couple clubs. You hit the one with the shortest VIP line and the lowest cover. Highest rated, of course. You stroll in, wave your hand, have your age verified and your credit checked. Next thing you know you're purchasing beverages for the attractive group in the corner. Soon you're back on the street, searching for the next spot, wirelessly.

People will know where you were if they want to. Shame and privacy will be outdated. Sure, having the annoying people know where you are 24/7 will eliminate the little white lies many of us traffic in, but that will actually force people to be honest. Instead of saying "I'm washing my hair" women will say "Actually, I'm not that interested in you." Guys won't take phone numbers they're not interested in. They'll know where similar people hang out, so less crazy mornings will happen.

Crazy future talk? Maybe. But if the speed at which an entire group of random hillies were outed today by a bunch of novices from Dirkson halls to Foggy Bottom offices is any indication of the future, information access will continue to drop. The vexing questions of where to go and what to do will be replaced by a bevy of choices and information. It's a nice trend, as long as you get used to the lack of lies now. Secrecy doesn't work in such an environment. This, dear readers, should be the lesson of Washingtonienne: if you want to write a dirty sex blog, don't use initials. Don't give specifics. Be vague. Post from your cell-phone on your lunch break. Randomly mess the timestamps up. Insert tons of fake garbage to skew the believability factor. In fact, when it comes right down to it, just write a fiction book about lesbian lovers.

Hell, Mrs. Cheney did. And she still has a job.

As for me, I welcome our new database overlords. Chip me up, mod me out, and get me back on the club floor instead of waiting for beverages. I didn't bulk up my credit score over the past three years to be forced to wait in line behind some 25k staffer with less brains than backside on her lunch break. I deserve to be treated better than her. And in the future, she won't enjoy anonymity for as long as she did.

I'm finishing the Third Man this evening...definitely not the sort of work a bunch of Delerium is good for as I found out the other night. In honor of that, I present the actual Washingtonienne, Jessica Cutler:

Yes, now the gratuitous Orangemen shoutouts make sense...I just haven't figure out how she got hired by Dewine. I'll have a lengthier rant about anonymity shortly...I'm in the middle of maintenance right now.

Oh, and yeah, I've got multiple sources for this. And they're not all named Ahmed Chalabi.

Okay, I've got the winner. Which makes sense. I'll post the image in a minute.

I can't find a picture of Matson anywhere...but the numerous hints about Syracuse on the Washingtonienne site lead me to think it might be her after all instead of Hallie. More when I get it. I have a larger picture of all the Dewineans, but it's too blurry to make out which one she is. (I know which one she is...but she looks nothing like Hallie. Perhaps she's Matson after all?) I'll upload the picture after I get off of work. Too much work!

Maybe The Washingtonienne?

It still could be Melissa Matson. But I've gotten several confirmation it is Hallie. Damn.

If you're new to the saga, check out the archives of the infamous blog itself.

In an effort to keep my compartments clean and well demarcated, I hung out with Ronald and some friends last night. We mostly just talked about Ronald's obsession with caulk.

I'm all wet. And filled with telecom lingo.

I wasn't implying "nationalists" killed Izzedin or that Sonia was the best woman to run India...merely that those two events are both symptoms of larger problems. When we can't provide security for Iraq before the mystical June 30 date, or when a woman has to refuse the right to lead a country because of blatant ethnicism....there's a problem. Back to work.

So Izzedin is dead and Sonia won't be PM because of idiotic nationalists. Not a good couple of days. I don't feel like ranting about either of these, since they are bad enough on their own.

On a lighter note, I just realized a second ago that I tend to "voice" my e-mails; that is, if I receive an e-mail from someone and I'm reading it, I hear the particular person's voice in my head. Obviously, this isn't true for everyone, but the realization was odd nonetheless. Maybe I've been working too hard lately.

Back to work now...tons of stuff piled up from yesterday, despite coming in for a few hours last night.

Okay, let's get the anagram out of the way quick. The solution to the one on Friday was "O! Gardening". The next one, courtesy Kevin, is "Empires now? hah!". Remember the extra o is still there. (And I added a letter, since Kevin screwed something up...twice!) Start working on it...

As far as this weekend was concerned, Friday evening was a great deal of fun, courtesy Kevin and friends. The only negative was that arriving home early in the morning after non-stop revelry left me low on sleep. Saturday I recovered by early afternoon, at least enough to hit Troy with Leto, Deborah and Dwight. A great film, and a perfect way to begin the summer movie scene.

Post movie, Deborah and Dwight joined me at a cookout hosted by Gwyn, at which Kevin and others showed up. This brings up a point I'll mention later...After this event Dwight hit a party near the 'werkz itself, Deborah bailed and I crashed at the house. After, of course, I ventured next door, saw the people who ran over Brad last year and enjoyed the thrill of having a complete stranger/idiot come up to me, yell, "that's the worst costume ever" and spray me with water. I replied "I'm the next door neighbor" at which point the girl in question flushed beet red, apologized and ran away. I eventually found Dwight and departed.

Sunday I cleaned up the 'werkz with Deborah. The whole day. Yay!

Three points were brought home this weekend. In no particular order, here they are:

1. I really need to find a way to turn it off when I go out. Eventually, I'm going to get hurt. Or, rather, someone else will. Apologies to Kevin's friends, etc. It would, of course, be much easier if people actually figured out that flirtation is, by definition, innocuous. Perhaps my puritanical tendencies simply don't allow me to see a problem when one exists. Oh, well.
2. I really need to work on my compartmentalization skills. It used to be simple: few friends interacted with each other. Many openly hated each other, forming an odd melodramatic touch to any occasion and resulting in complex logic games before any events on Friday or Saturday night. Now, half the people know each other, which leads to trouble. I've got to get back to basics.
3. I really need to punk those losers two doors over. Maybe we'll have a party where everyone dresses to the nines, invite them, then kick them out. Suggestions should be e-mailed to me. Nothing is off the table.

Okay, time to get some caffeine, hit some powers, then crash. I won't bore anyone with the vagaries of the political events this evening. Return to your homes...nothing to see here.

werkz advice: catch it in the theaters!

Wolfgang Peterson's "Troy" is a good epic film: light on substance, heavy on action, with plenty of awesome imagery and memorable lines. Initially I was disappointed some scenes weren't included (like that of Laocoon and the sea serpents) yet all these doubts were erased with a late cameo by Aeneas. (I can already see the sequel in my mind: "Troy 2: Aeneas's Revenge!". Don't bother re-reading the illiad, just go watch the trojans and greeks mix it up.

Someone from my office said my new nickname should be "Job". It was only partly in jest.

Needless to say I haven't been able to do any work (I had a whole series of items planned for today) because of some technical issues that arose. About an hour ago, I finally managed to start working on the things I had intended to do when I arrived at work this morning. Not a fun way to spend the day.

Of course, this also impacted the anagram and story-telling I was to partake in at lunchtime. I had to get out of the office, even if just for 10 minutes, so I did so. I'll post some after I get off...