The internets are "broken" at work. Hence no posts.

I was going to write a quick-n-dirty call-out to certain people to get them to post in my absence. Fortunately Forrest has already made them look bad. But let's do it anyway:

• Dwight - hey, man, where's the latest update of the outsider's guide to anime? Or some new music reviews?
• Brad - well, you know you need to post some movies up on the site. I mean, come on, I've seen a few with you I deferred so that you could.
• Jenna - okay, so you have a blog. Whoop-de-do. Dinosaur Comics was brilliant. Sysadmin Day was not. How about some more gossip and less humor?
• Helena - hmm. the cookie post was excellent, as all of your posts normally are. so why don't you post more? hell, just once every two days would make a huge difference. your dog alone has more fun adventures than i do at fast food places...
• Deborah - adding your craigslist posting to the site has to be a new low. asking about screen on the green was fine, however. unlike jenna, you've had a blog for awhile. so how's-about posting some personal stuff?
• Ronald - now that you're staying in dc, you should have plenty of time to update stuff. hell, cross-post stuff from your regular blog here. why? because most people don't read your blog, but more would if you posted the info here and included a link back to your site. got it? good.
• Forrest - you win a cookie. now go back inside.
• Jill - read the advice to forrest. cross-post. it's been ages since you've linked to any lobster related material on the site.
• Fincher - i know, you're busy. but keep those great food reviews coming. and try to beef them up a bit with, you know, actual commentary. i may be too busy to call, but at least i still post.
• Kevin - we need much much more. look here! yes, it's a post by you! amazing! Now rinse, lather and repeat...

Okay, time to get back to work. By the word "broken" above, I meant that somehow my T1 line has been reduced to 50kbs. Yes, that's a k. Not fun at all.

Whenever I get into a debate about the relative merits of the NYT vs the WaPo, my trump card is always the bizarre Judy Miller. That the Times would continue to employ such a person as a reporter is idiotic. But sadly, many of Miller's wacky antics aren't well known. Luckily for those not in the know, Arianna sums them all up here in a fairly easy to read piece.

Go check it out.

Back yet? Okay. Can you imagine if, for instance, the WaPo embedded Charles Krauthammer into a military unit designed to catch UBL? And if he reported back from the field with blatant spin and lies (a typical CK piece, in other words) and got them in print? On a bad day, CK is still, at best, mired in the opinion section of the WaPo. No reporters (Susan Schmidt maybe...) at the WaPo seem to be even half as bad as Miller.

Ugh.

Come on, Tony, run already okay? Do people not remember the previous pack of mayors? They all stank. You, alone, managed to pull us out of the muck. Slowly (some would say in SE, too slowly) it's true, but DC is coming back after a long drought.

Cropp I just cannot stand. Her disastrous plan to shelve the "bonds for libraries and stadiums" proposal until an undetermined future date managed to accomplish two things: it ensured the stadium would still get built, but that no money would be raised for local needs. She brings a new meaning to the term sell-out.

I woke up this morning, opened my covers, and found a boot in my bed. Odd.

yes, yes, it's my boot, but still...

This story is why contractors tend to stink. Why couldn't the government have done this quicker and cheaper? The irony is that the purpose of the contract in question was to hire private people to become government baggage screeners. Idiotic.

They're trying to swiftboat this guy. Screw 'em. I just coughed up some change. Will you?

It's one of those mornings that I realize, driving to work on the parkway with blue skies and cool temps, that I have lost count of the things I do not deserve. I raced a guy in a jag...we were poking along until the right moment came in the song I was listening to and I downshifted to fifth gear, hit the accelerator and the two of us weaved through traffic until the beltway and backroads entered the picture. Taking Jenna to work was a breeze earlier, as the traffic in georgetown was non-existent. Everything seemed clearer. Everything seemed brighter.

Fortunately, the multitude of work awaiting me here snapped me out of my reverie. Of course, all it takes to get back into it is to turn around and look out my enormous windows to see the lake, geese and the prospect of an enjoyable lunch break.

So about two months ago, I signed up for a research panel designed around consumer purchasing habits. I thought it'd entail the regular amount of survey filling, etc., but to my surprise, they shipped me a fully functional bar-code scanner/modem that would allow me to scan every item I purchased. Excited, I broke the box down and began to play with it.

The scanner looked like an ice pick, with a small red led point that emerged from one end or the other. In addition to scanning UPC codes, you could also enter stored you purchased items from, and even enter in items without codes, using a special codebook. So far, so good. After scanning in the items, you'd hold the speaker in the scannerpick up to a modem, Wargames-style, and it'd call back to HQ to report in. Testing that out was fun too.

Eager to start, I instructed Jenna not to unpack any of the groceries I had just purchased from the store. I got ready to scan, cracked open the instruction book, and read that before I scanned any items, I needed to update the store list. Sounds simple, right? Inside a huge booklet was a list of every DC store imaginable from which I could purchase goods. The instructions said to scan each one into the scanner (well, each one I could ever conceivably shop at) so I began the arduous task of scanning in every code from Dean and Deluca to the CVS at Thomas Circle. Why do I say arduous?

Well, the icepick scanner had one major deficiency: instead of using a powerful laser to scan UPCs, it used a lower power one or an led that emerged from a single point. Thus, instead of holding the entire code under the laser as most scanners at stores do, the pick had to be dragged across the code. At. A. Constant. Speed.

The instruction manual said to "do it briskly" as one would "light a match". I tried brisk. I tried quick. I tried slow. I tried medium-speed. Occasionally a store would register, sometimes even on the first try. Others I'd spend ten minutes simply running the scannerpick on top of, over and over again. After I registered about 10 stores over the course of an house, I realized that if it took me this long to scan 10 stores, how long would it take me to scan 10 items from said stores? Disgusted, I put the scannerpick away.

Late last week, I received a notice from homescan saying they wanted their scanner back. I dutifully packed it back up and shipped it off. What was especially frustrating was that I, of all people, wholly support the idea of tracking my consumer habits. But if AmEx can give me a yearly statement that shows me how much I spent on dining, on tips and on purchases at the gas station, why should anyone have to go through the hassle of scanning particular items a second time, after someone else has already done so at the store itself?

In the end, I flipped through the homescan catalog of "rewards" for customers. You'd get a dvd player if you scanned each week, every week, all year. That's over 52 transmissions. Given the amount of purchases I made, I could spend two weeks just scanning stuff to transmit. Just so I get a lousy $200 dvd player. I mean, come on. I did market research for Network Solutions once and got $200 in half an hour of looking at a website and clicking on some hyperlinks. That beats two weeks any day.

So maybe the technology is not there yet. But I'm sure that there are others like me who'd gladly give up the farce people call privacy these days in order to be market indicators. Just tie our habits to our credit cards, okay? Or put some RFID chips in our products and have the scanner check them wirelessly, okay? That way you'd know not only what was purchased, but how long it lasted before it broke. And that could be the end of planned obsolescence.

This is nauseating.

Andrew H. Card Jr. had some candid advice for 2,000 Washington interns who gathered at the Ronald Reagan Building on Monday evening to hear him speak at an event intended to recruit talented people into the federal civil service. Some of you should go corporate, the White House chief of staff told them.

"There are many programs for young people to have employment opportunities, but the greatest employment opportunities in our society come through the private sector," said Card, a former vice president of General Motors Corp. and ex-president of the American Automobile Manufacturers Association. "And so I don't think that everyone who is looking for a job should expect or even want a job with the federal government or one of our agencies. In fact, our economy would not do very well if people just worked for the government."

Occasionally a Republican slips up and says the truth, rather than their talking points. They really do, honestly, hate the government. The force that has liberated nations, helped the less fortunate and put a man on the moon is, in their mind, something to loathe. That sentiment disgusts me. What could be a nobler calling than to serve one's country? Card should at least offer some explanation.

A fun new public search site.

Actually, it's been up since February, but still, it's cool. Some people apparently don't think so. In my mind, if this is all public information, the silliest quote comes here in the piece:

"It's a fundamental invasion of privacy because they've put all these records together and give them away for nothing instead of keeping them separate and making people pay to get them."

Um, so if zaba charged money for their service, would it be any less an invasion of privacy? I don't think so. It'd just mean that rich people could snoop on others exclusively. I've never understood why so many people seem to think that public information must be protected. It's self-defeating. Just like the weather companies complaining that the national weather service is, gasp, letting people check the weather for free, if the government has this information and is making it public, isn't that good? I long for the day the IRS allows completely free digital submissions of tax returns for all Americans. Over the web. It'll happen eventually, trust me.

But to get back to the point, go check out zava and find out about the people you want to!

• Recovering from illness? Check.
• Record high temperatures? Check.
• Loss of power over the entire house? Check.
• Another great Tuesday Salon? You bet.

Sometimes minor inconveniences seem to add up, but last night, chilling with friends outside the darkened 'werkz, I realized that with a fully stocked ice pit, almost any obstacle can be overcome. Sure enough, after a lengthy time, the power came back on, the party faithful returned inside, and all was again right with the world.

Well, it's time for another salon. I'll be working hard this time to keep the inside of the house super-cool, so be sure to come on by.

Last night, I caught my first screen-on-the-green this year, "Treasure of the Sierra Madre". A good film all around, and it was fun to see it with Kristen and friends. That cooler is pretty heavy, though...

werkz advice: skip it.

So I finally caught Scorsese's "The Aviator". Not really that good, actually. It wasn't due to bad acting, or an uninteresting topic. It just never took off. Instead, the movie seemed long and dull. Still, better than Gangs, I suppose.

werkz advice: skip it.

So I finally caught Wes Anderson's latest flick "The Life Aquatic". Let me save you the trouble of renting it. Don't. It's not as good as either of Anderson's earlier works. Why? Because it's just not that funny. It's all somewhat campy, in a bad way.

So I upgrade to the latest firefox, 1.0.6 and gmail starts to act funny. This morning, it doesn't even come up at all. After a little hacking, I get it to display the following message:

Hello,

Our system has detected abnormal usage of your Gmail account. As a result, we have temporarily disabled access to this account.

It will take between one minute and 24 hours for you to regain access, depending on the behavior our system detected.

Nice. So I decide to download the bleeding version of Firefox, Deer Park Alpha 2 and what'dya know? gmail is now working again.

It's a race.

Say what you will about Russ Potts, the Republican-turned-Independent from my hometown, but he's dead right on policy issues. It's kind of sad to think that he couldn't win the GOP primary...although if he had, this race would be worse, because both candidates would agree about the important issues and disagree about less important issues, like gay adoption. Instead, Kaine and Potts can continue to bash Kilgore's idiotic fiscal ideas, and focus on Virginia's true needs: a stable tax base and a plan to solve our transportation woes.

The most idiotic thing, in my mind, of the entire Brazilian Terrorist Fiasco, is that the British policy is simply, "if there's a possible terrorist, we shoot to kill". Why? Because they think, oddly, that if they attempt to incapacitate, that the terrorist will be able to still set off the bomb.

So, in other words, they assume terrorists are sophisticated enough to setup a handheld button that would trigger the bomb, but not sophisticated enough to fashion a dead man's switch in case they were shot. I am constantly amazed that we continue to think of the terrorists as tech-savvy, but in this instance, we not only think that they're smart enough to be able to set off a bomb while their legs have been blown away, but that they're not smart enough to create a simple device for exactly this situation. I mean, come on, it involves a spring. Not much more. It's certainly not rocket science.

Besides the obvious idiocy, there's the secondary one as well: why shoot a terrorist subject in the head if you're trying to roll up cells? How are you going to interrogate a prisoner if he has five bullets in his head? All citizens, of all nationalities, need to think about what these bombings are turning our police squads into...