More human cost of Wilson’s folly…

The Montana Sedition Project

Imagine going down to your local brewpub or coffee shop. You meet some friends. The talk turns to the war. You criticize the President and his wealthy supporters. Next thing you know, a couple of husky fellows at the next table grab you, hustle you out the door and down to the local police station. You are arrested on a charge of sedition. Within months you are indicted, tried and convicted. The judge sentences you to 5-10 years in prison — and off you go! Think this could never happen? Well, it happened not that long ago — during World War I — to scores of ordinary people in Montana. They discovered very painfully that their free speech rights had been stripped away by the state legislature.

via BoingBoing.

“Cubicles: The great mistake”

Ok, breaking the streak of this having NOTHING to do with Cubicles, we get (via Google “What’s Hot” and Technorati)…

Cubicles: The great mistake
Even the designer of the cubicle thinks they were maybe a bad idea, as millions of ‘Dilberts’ would agree.

By Julie Schlosser, FORTUNE Magazine
March 22, 2006: 2:03 PM EST

NEW YORK (FORTUNE Magazine) – Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called “monolithic insanity.”

Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the world, we are still trying to get out of the box. The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.

The article goes on to discuss the history and original concept of the “Action Office” which became the cubicle as we know and … love?… it. I’m very pleased that my present employer doesn’t use them; the open-desks layout took a little getting used to (probably about my first day), but it’s much more congenial.

The “Perils” of Progress…

Tempest in a D-cup as bust sizes grow

BEIJING (Reuters) – Bra producers have been forced to offer bigger cup-sizes in China because improved nutrition is busting all previous chest measurement records.

“It’s so different from the past when most young women would wear A- or B-cup bras,” Triumph brand saleswoman Zhang Jing told the Shanghai Daily from the Landmark Plaza of China’s commercial hub.

“You…never expect those thin women to have such nice figures if they are not plastic.”

Forwarded by several different people today.

Moved!

That’s a very long day-and-a-half of moving done with, and I am about to be headed to sleep in my new apartment… I’ll miss San Francisco, but I’m not far away (Foster City, about ~25 minutes South along 101,) and being able to once again get to work on Scooty-Puff Jr. in 10 minutes rather than the broad range of 25 (if traffic’s good) to 60 (if traffic’s awful) minutes to get to/from work.

While all the big furniture is here, there is still a LOT of junk left to bring down in the next 8 days. I’m not sure if we’ll have a housewarming once we’re fully moved in.

Hotlinked images…

Wondering why you see this message?
Hotlinks prohibited

It’s because I’ve hit a problem lately with people hotlinking to this site. Most of the cute images you see here on the blog are redistributable things of questionable ownership to begin with, so do feel free to copy them. But when I say “copy” that means do a “Save As” and then upload them to your own blog/livejournal/myspace site, or whatever. DO NOT just copy the direct link and include that in an <img …> tag or similar, or do the same thing via one of the sites that hides the HTML from you.

This blog runs on my DSL line, and when a lot of people are all downloading images, that slows down everything else I do. Normally I don’t have tons of readers, and while hey, it’d be nice if that changed – though it would probably mean I’d have to WRITE more first, it would probably also mean it was time to move it to a real hosting provider who would then charge me for bandwidth overages :(. Either way, losing bandwidth to hotlinks to silly “forward” type images (the “Bible Warning” and the “Pancake Rabbit” in particular) is just a pain I’m not happy with.

We’ll see if that ugly link is sufficient to get people to stop. If not, I’ll just have to block them entirely, and then folks’ll just get the ugly “couldn’t load image” red x.

For the “unintentionally humorous headlines file”

New rings found around Uranus

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two outer rings, one red, the other blue, have been observed around the distant planet Uranus.

While Uranus had been known to have inner rings of neutral color, the newly discovered outer rings show color contrasts that researchers think are caused by light reflected off particles that differ in size from one ring to the other.

via Pryor on DBA.

“We can rebuild him. We have the technology.”

Doctors grow organs from patients’ own cells

Seven living with bladders from new process

[…]Scientists grew new bladders from the patients’ own cells, which were then transplanted back into the patients’ bodies.

Cool. Once again, the future is now… all I want to know is when they going to be able to make some lab-grown replacement arteries? The way I’m going, I may need ’em one of these days…

Does this mean the wine business has “jumped the shark?”

Porn star hits it big as wine-maker

By Daniel Trotta
Wed Mar 22, 2:06 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) – It seemed like the perfect gimmick: a celebrity porn star would launch her own wine, with her alluring picture on the label.

Savanna Samson did just that, but when it received a score of 90 to 91 out of 100 by wine guru Robert Parker, the project became serious. It turns out Samson, the star of “The New Devil in Miss Jones,” has produced an exceptional wine, becoming the toast of two industries: wine-making and pornography.

I have no further comment.

Argentine president to country: “Eat less beef”

Via MSNBC Argentine president to country: Eat less beef

As prices rise carnivores endanger Nestor Kirchner’s anti-inflation fight
Updated: 7:28 a.m. ET March 16, 2006
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Argentines rank among the world’s biggest meat-eaters. But President Nestor Kirchner has told his carnivorous compatriots it’s time to consume less if beef prices continue to rise and threaten his campaign against inflation.

But isn’t that like shunning the tango or telling a soccer-mad nation to skip the World Cup?

Somehow this reminds me of Shrubbo’s “addicted to oil” comment.

On an side note, I’ve wanted to visit Argentina for a while now, and the cuisine – including excellent, relatively affordable beef – is a big part of that.

My kinda mistake!

From MSNBC:
Norway, where beer flows instead of water

Woman pleasantly surprised when alcohol comes through kitchen faucet
REUTERS Updated: 6:36 p.m. ET March 13, 2006

OSLO, Norway – A woman thought she was in heaven when beer instead of water flowed from the faucets in her apartment in west Norway.

“I turned on the tap to clean some knives and forks and beer came out,” Haldis Gundersen told Reuters from her home in Kristiansund, in west Norway. “We thought we were in heaven.”

[…]

It turned out that a worker in a bar two floors below had mixed up the pipes on Saturday evening, wrongly connecting a new barrel to a water pipe leading to Gundersen’s apartment. The bar got water in its beer taps.

Definitely one to file under “News of the Weird.”

I’ve got a new job.

I will be starting shortly at Guidewire, in San Mateo.

It won’t be for another few days (*) , but except on the level of exactly which day next week I start, plans are settled and I am looking forward to getting back to a relatively “crunchy” programming position; it seems like a very cool place. More details to follow later.

(* it’s Saturday as of when I’m writing this, and I have to go on Monday to either do Jury Duty or get it rescheduled having missed my original day due to an earlier interview somewhere else…)