I’ve heard and read a number of people saying “political correctness be damned, we should use racial profiling to identify terrorists. The problem I’ve always had with this is that it makes no sense. Try the following test, identify the terrorist: young muslim male young muslim female asian male or female caucasian male or female black male or female hispanic male or female If you said that 1 and 2 have been terrorists and therefore we should profile them, you are partially right. However, what about all of the asian terrorists (e.g. Fillipinos)? Caucasians? Hmm, the IRA, David Koresh, Timmothy McVeigh, etc. As near as I can guess, the only racial groups that shouldn’t be profiled would be blacks and hispanics. This can’t work. ...

I have a small request to make of the NC-DOT, if there are accidents on the interstate at I-40 and I-540 which backs traffic up 10 miles to NC-751, can we please, please make use of the expensive electronic information signs on the interstate to warn people? There’s a difference between a small traffic slowdown that you will soon get past and one that means you’ll be driving 5-10 miles at an average speed of 10-15 mph.

Hmm, someone should go check the “ rapture index, I’m about to link to an article at Cato Unbound – the Cato Institute’s Blog. Richard Rodriguez write’s a beautiful article regarding Mexican Immigrants, their coming to America and what the clash of cultures means to second and third generation Mexican-American immigrants. The response article by Victor Davis Hanson, restores my belief in the general silliness of the Cato Institute. For example, Hanson notes: Only six out of ten second-generation Mexican Americans on average graduate from high school in four years; and less than ten percent have a BA degree—the legacy not of racism or America’s “cold heart,?? but of millions arriving from Mexico without English, education, and legality. ...

Took the day off and spent most of it working on the snake terrarium. Watching him pace (hmm, that doesn’t seem like the right word for a snake) his cage today made me particularly sad and motivated me to get about 95% finished. He could actually move in now – the only things missing are the decorative frames around the side vents. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the terrarium. There are a number of things that I would do differently next time, but some things will definitely stay the same. For example, I used plexiglass for the front which made the whole thing significantly lighter. The plexiglass was about $20 more expensive but definitely worth it. And here’s the (near) finished terrarium. Next time I post about this, we’ll be completely done and have the snake moved in. ...

Some days, I just can’t write about work frustrations. Not that I don’t want to or that I don’t think they’re interesting, just that it’s part and parcel of the whole confidentiality thing. On days like today, it’s important to write about other frustrations (trust me on this). Today’s topic: scare tactics in government funded letters. I received my social security statement the other day and it has a lovely section on the front page entitled “About Social Security’s future… ...

I spent a lot of time last week looking at an application in order to assess its security. The thing that was troubling me was that this is a web application and the primary form for data entry was defined like: form name=foo method=post action= This means that the nothing happens when you hit submit on the form – at least not in the html world. So, I took a closer look and found that each of the buttons (submit and clear) actually had a field “onclick=’doSomething();’ attribute. ...

To the left hand: It is clear that you no longer know what the right hand is doing. This weekend’s “accidental dremeling was eerily similar to the wood carving incident in grade school where a supposed “art project resulted in losing a chunk of left index finger. Combined with the great butcher knife massacre where we almost lost left thumb’s nail when it “supposedly looked like a carrot, we have a pattern that can not be ignored. ...

Just so you don’t think that I’m just a computer and photography geek, I wanted to update folks on another project. As I’ve said before, my wife does wildlife rehabilitation and managed to get conned talked into taking home a boa constrictor. Since they’re not native, he couldn’t be released once he was patched up. For the past eight months, he’s been living in a smallish (75 gallon?) aquarium. Okay, that’s not really small unless you’re a 6.5′ snake whose looking to get to be 8’+. This presented a great chance to do some woodworking. For the past couple of weekends, I’ve been building a 5.5′ x 2′ x 3′ terrarium for the snake. I’ve got the main walls, floor and top cut, stained and coated with many layers of polyurethane. Today, I put the cabinet together, caulked it (the caulk is still fresh, it will dry clear) and started working on the door. ...

There’s an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, the link is behind the subscription firewall), about a mechanical engineering graduate student at Ohio University. After being invited to stay on after his masters and persue a Ph.D., he started having difficulty with his advisor. To help resolve his difficulties, he went to speak with the university ombudsman who advised him to examine disertations in the university library so that he might see where he was going wrong and what his advisor might want. ...

The vacation pictures checklist from earlier: Get 22 rolls of slide film back from the developer [Check – received mid June] Put 800 slides into transparancy holders so they are easy to look at on the light box [Check – took two nights] Go through 800 slides to determine which are worth scanning [Check – took another two days] Scan 120 or so “good slides [Check – finished tonight after three nights of scanning] Color correct the images in the GIMP [done] Remove dust from scans because my slide scanner doesn’t have an infrared channel [done] Upload the results and put ’em online [finished today] Everything is done! Pictures online finally. For the record, I’m not thrilled with them. My biggest complaint is that there aren’t really any good animal shots. This is different from prior years. I blame oversleeping.