Random noise, incoherent thoughts, whatever.
Harper’s Magazine writes about a cover-up of murders of three Guantanamo Bay prisoners June 9th 2006.
The article convincingly documents how interrogators transferred three prisoners from their prison cells to a “black site” outside of the regular prison compound and tortured and killed them. The commanding officers at Guantanamo Bay then covered up the murders as suicides.
After a whistleblower came forward the Department of Justice also participated in the cover-up.
-TPP
Security expert Bruce Schneier is soliciting ideas for a new TSA logo and motto. The contest is going really well so far.
-TPP
This week’s stats:
1 sick child
4 incidents of projectile vomit per day
3 hours of mopping vomit off the floors per day
6 loads of laundry per day
2 completely exhausted and stressed out parents
Please, for the love of God, Ava, get well, soon.
If anyone’s asking, I had the best vacation ever.
-TPP
Consumerist.com is reporting that iPhones are not currently offered to customers of AT&T in New York City (incl. suburbs) due to capacity problems with the AT&T cell network. Several other sources have independently confirmed it.
How fucking awesome is that.
AT&T PR should have a fairly busy day tomorrow trying to spin this. I can’t wait.
Say, Google, what’s the release date of Nexus One again?
-TPP
A friend of mine is visiting the US and NYC for the holidays. I took him and his girlfriend over to Morimoto for dinner.
Iron Chef Morimoto was visiting the restaurant and was gracious enough to come and say hi and pose for photos. Awesome! My wife and I watch Iron Chef America all the time!
I took out my iPhone to take some photos, and Mr. Morimoto sees the wallpaper image on my iPhone and asks if that’s my daughter. I say yes, and he shows his iPhone and the wallpaper image of his “baby”. He’s got a picture of his little puppy on his iPhone. I ask him which one is cuter, and he says for him it’s the puppy. Cheeky fella 
The food, btw, was ridiculously good.
-TPP
The future of banking:
1. Borrow money from tax-payers at near zero interest
2. Lend the tax-payers’ own money back to them at 5% interest
3. Profit!!!
Watch the video for more details.
Alan Ralsky, a career spammer and fraudster, is finally, after about a decade of spamming everyone with questionable and downright illegal schemes, going to prison.
He’s received a 51 month sentence for his part in a pump and dump stock scheme. Rot in jail scum.
Here’s hoping he’ll do something stupid in prison and gets his sentence doubled. He’s a sociopath and will never stop his criminal activities. When he gets out of prison he’ll be right back to his old ways. Guaranteed. Throw away the key instead.
-TPP
Jackie Ramos kicks ass.
Jackie used to work for Bank of America. She used to be a customer service representative whose responsibility it was to deny BofA credit card holders entrance to programs designed to help people fallen behind on their credit card bills that came with 30% interest rates.
She was so distraught about screwing her employer’s customers every day that she stopped doing it. Instead of denying everyone, she started accepting everyone. No doubt she made a difference in many people’s lives with her good deed.
She got fired.
Good on you, Jackie!
And fuck you BofA for fleecing the unemployed, sick, elderly, the blind and everyone else you can get your greedy little hands on with loanshark rates, fees over fees and other immoral garbage. I am wondering how charging 30% interest rates on compounding late fees is still legal.
-TPP
So Microsoft patch Tuesday came and went. I finally got around to installing the new upgrades last night (yea, yea) and decided to upgrade MSIE7 to MSIE8 at the same time. Might as well…I mean what’s one upgrade among the 15 or so I’m already installing.
Wrong.
MSIE8 upgrade starts at around 6pm, starts doing its malware check without asking me if I really want to do one (I don’t…I run anti-virus scanners every day), and then continues performing the malware check for the next 15 hours with no visible progress. What the fuck!?
I left the upgrade running overnight and when I woke up at around 9am in the morning, the malware check was still running.
Since there is no way to disable the malware check on the installer, I guess it means I will not be upgrading to MSIE8 on this computer.
Way to go Microsoft!
My regular anti-virus scanner finishes its scans just fine, although it does take a while. It does NOT take 15 hours, however. More like 3. I have a lot of files, what can I say.
-TPP
