PBS launched their brand spanking new video portal today (or rather last night).
I built it, btw.
-TPP
22
Apr
2009
13
Mar
2009
I was on a business trip to DC today.
An older gentleman boarded the train in Philadelphia and sat across the aisle from me.
I immediately recognized the distinctive voice, and looked over, but while the face was also recognizable to me, I couldn’t put a name to either the voice or the face. I have a horrible name memory.
He was being interviewed by a writer of some sorts and the writer had a book on the table. The title was “John Bogle on Investing: The First 50 Years”. Aha!
I was sitting next to John Bogle, the founder of The Vanguard Group, the inventor of index mutual funds and a billionaire.
The man is a true legend. Sitting less than 5 feet from me.
Apparently he was on his way to deliver a speech in fiduciary duty.
-TPP
11
Mar
2009
The Estonian Government has long held Russia responsible for the DDOS attacks against Estonian networks in May 2007. The evidence to back that up finally came when a member of a Russian sponsored youth organization Nashe told the press he and some associates were responsible for the attacks.
-TPP
10
Feb
2009
Congratulations, owner of blue Volvo with New York State license plate AMD-3271. You’re a brand new winner of a parking ticket for illegally parking your car on my driveway. Try your luck again, will ya.
Unfortunately I can’t claim the credit for getting your car ticketed as I was still at work when it happened. Maybe next time.
-TPP
02
Feb
2009
Nokia, the Finnish, yet multi-national, mobile telecommunications giant, has had some issues with its employees leaking confidential information to competitors and other outsiders.
Finnish privacy laws have made it difficult for Nokia to gather evidence about such incidents.
So Nokia did what all great MegaCorps do and decided they needed the laws changed. In US, they would’ve just put a few dollars in an envelope to a few key politicians, but that doesn’t apparently work as well in Finland as threats do.
According to a rather comprehensive report about it by Helsingin Sanomat, a leading Finnish newspaper, Nokia threatened to leave Finland, if a new law allowing snooping of employees’ emails didn’t get done.
A draft for a new law, dubbed Lex Nokia, was quickly put together and it’s being decided upon by the Finnish Parliament in two week’s time. Let’s see how the public outcry over Nokia’s actions affect the debate about the new law.
By bending to the will of Nokia, our legislators have, yet again, shown a remarkable lack of independent will and spine. Do they really think Nokia would have followed through? Moving their entire operations abroad would be very costly. Not that they won’t eventually do it anyway. Finnish labor is expensive.
-TPP
06
Jan
2009
A New York Times article documents the plight of a Pakistani citizen, Mr. Muhammad Saad Iqbal, who was arrested in Indonesia in 2002, then transferred to Egypt by CIA to be tortured.
He was finally released from Guantanamo Bay in August of 2008 after more than six months in captivity. He had repeatedly been cleared by lie detectors and other interrogation techniques of having anything to do with Al Qaeda. Yet it took the US six years to release this man.
He’s been on antibiotics for more than five years and is dependent on multiple drugs. He has multiple infections in his ears and suffers from injury to his back that’s making walking difficult. He’s attempted suicide twice and went on hunger strike three times while held illegally by the United States.
You have to wonder about a Government that’s supposed to be the champion of democracy and justice all over the world, and does things like this to innocent people. Here’s hoping a jury awards this man a multi-billion dollar settlement once his lawyers get around to suing the US Government for torture, kidnap and illegal detainment.
-TPP
30
Dec
2008
IDF (Israel Defense Force) has a YouTube channel.
The YouTube channel has recently been used to document, and I quote IDF:
IDF’s operational success in operation Cast Lead against Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip
Interesting choice of words, but what else would you expect from a propagandist. Human beings would probably describe the videos posted on that channel in the past few days as something else.
-TPP
28
Dec
2008
A poll conducted by a Russian TV station about who’s the greatest Russian of all time concluded with Joseph Stalin in third place. That certainly explains a thing or two about what’s going on in that country.
Next week: Adolf Hitler to be crowned the Greatest German of all time in a poll by Der Spiegel.
-TPP
24
Nov
2008
Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, CT, who had the unfortunate luck of teaching children in a community where incompetence is how things get done, has finally put her legal problems behind.
She was the teacher whose in-class computer had caught a bad case of popupitis and started spewing a neverending stream of porn popups while she was teaching. The school administration had failed to keep the anti-virus / popup blocking software up-to-date, so the computer was completely defenseless against porn-peddling spammers. Instead of quietly updating the software on the computer, the school administration, after hearing from some of the kids’ parents, made a police complaint against Mrs. Amero.
She was eventually convicted of several felony counts because the local police force told the DA she’d knowingly viewed porn during class. The computer security experts were astounded and jumped on her defense.
After more than a year and a half, she can now put her legal problems behind, but at considerable cost. She’s pleading guilty to a single count of disorderly conduct and surrendering her teaching license. She has also suffered severe health problems since her ordeal begun. She’s had a miscarriage and she’s been hospitalized ever since her felony conviction was handed down.
Meanwhile the New London County State’s Attorney Michael Regan remains completely unapologetic after driving an innocent woman out of her profession and into the hospital. Quoting Mr. Regan from an article in Hartford Courant:
New London County State’s Attorney Michael Regan told me late Friday the state remained convinced Amero was guilty and was prepared to again go to trial.
“I have no regrets. Things took a course that was unplanned. Unfortunately the computer wasn’t examined properly by the Norwich police,” Regan said.
Nice work Mr. Regan. Julie Amero’s re-education is complete. Congratulations!
Update: ArsTechnica has more information about the case, including really interesting stuff about the “expertise” of detective Mark Lounsbury, the prosecutor’s star witness.
The security expert(s) who brought the case into public view have started an organization called The Julie Group, whose mission is:
To bring attention to those situations where injustice is being done through the misuse or misunderstanding of computers and computer forensics; and second, to prevent future injustice wherever we are able.
And finally The Julie Group has a well written piece about how just exactly the justice shown to Mrs. Amero really is. Theirs is the article I wanted to write about the case. Kudos to The Julie Group for expressing the thoughts of many so eloquently.
-TPP
16
Nov
2008
I have a 12-month-old baby. Now that she can sit and eat somewhat civilized on her own, we’ve been taking her out to lunch with the grownups more often. It’s great fun, she enjoys people watching tremendously and we enjoy feeding her different things and finding out what she likes and what she doesn’t like.
However, there’s one thing that really, really bugs me about taking her to restaurants.
It seems as though almost all restaurants completely avoid maintaining their high chairs. You know, it shouldn’t be that f***ing hard to replace broken safety straps, but apparently it is. I think we have about a 50/50 chance on getting a defective (and unsafe) high chair for her when we ask for one.
Earlier today we went for lunch to a bbq restaurant in Manhattan. Great place, good food, very nice service. But the high chairs were goddamn death traps. The first one had the usual safety strap problems…the plastic clips were completely shot, so we asked for another one. The replacement wasn’t any better, the safety strap was broken the same way as the first one. Whatever, I’ll just tie it in a tight knot and be done with I thought. And it worked, she was strapped on the seat safely. It would’ve been ok, too, if that was all that was wrong with the high chair.
Towards the end of our meal, she started getting a little restless, like she usually does when she’s had her food and she’s bored with playing with the napkins and utensils. So she started turning about in the high chair. What happened next caught us completely by surprise. The high chair’s left side railing broke under her weight, and she lurched forward about to fall down head first 3 feet onto the ground.
Thankfully the knotted strap held and she was held in her seat.
I took another look at the high chair, and the side railing was completely busted. There was a crack on both ends of it, and the railing itself had come completely off and fallen to the ground. There was no way in hell our baby broke it. It was already broken when the chair was given to us.
This is the last time I will be polite about broken high chairs. From now on, I’ll inspect every single one of them with a goddamn microscope to find out how badly the restaurant has been failing to maintain them. And I’ll be damned if I ever let my daughter sit in a broken one again.
I am getting increasingly pissed when writing this. These fuckers are putting my daughter and every other child sitting on their crappy chairs in danger. With the amount of broken chairs I see, it’s absolutely clear restaurants, by and large, don’t really give a fuck about their smallest and most vulnerable customers’ safety.
-TPP
