Steve is an ass.

Steve Jobs, the long-time egomaniac in charge of Apple, is an ass. Apparently, he's not happy with the unauthorized biography published by Wiley, and has ordered all their tech books pulled from all Apple stores.

Sheesh. What an ass.

-B

Make your elected officials work for you!

I always get all proud and citizen-y when I actually get motivated enough about an issue to write to my Congress-critters about it. Well, yesterday there were two.

First off, the committee-neutering rules that the Republicans passed for the House Ethics Committee just make me mad. House majority leader Tom DeLay has been accused of taking trips (a golf outing to Scotland, I think) funded by lobbyests, and under the current new rules, no ethics investigation can even start until both parties on the Ethics committee agree that there's a need. Both parties agree on something in this Congress? Give me a break. It gets worse: if there's no agreement, nothing happens. Any ethics charges just quietly go away, and that's a bunch of crap. The Democrats have stonewalled the whole ethics process until the rules get changed back to closer to what they were before, and I say bully for them. And I let the Honorable David Price know exactly that.

The other thing that got me riled up was all the blustering about the filibuster in the Senate. The Democrats don't like Bush's judicial nominees, and threaten to filibuster any that come up for confirmation. The Republicans, of course, don't take kindly to this, and keep threatening to invoke the Nuclear Option (got to love the emotional payload on that term, eh?) and through parliamentary rule changes remove the ability to filibuster from the rules. I'm not at all nuts about what Bush has sent down in the way of judicial nominees, and I strongly support the current process remaining intact. It's worked well for many, many years, and the Republicans threatening to change the rules just because they don't like the way the game is going seems really childish and not at all good for the country. And I let Senators Dole and Burr know how I felt about that.

Relatedly, this also makes me mad. (I really don't usually spend this much time mad. The Republicans have just been doing a really good job at it lately. :-)) Bill Frist out making talks to the religious right (the same ones who kept Bush in office :-/) to oppose the filibuster as irreverent and UnChristian. I hope this backfires and gets exposed as the stupid emotional manipulative play that it really is.

-B

Good weekend

Hey world, good weekend here on the home front. :-)

We:

• Did the Angels Among Us 5k and Family Walk w/ Sus & B & O Lotsa fun, and for a good cause, but a bit much runwalking for the kiddo's, esp O. Yay Justin's Buddies!
• Blew off the Hash to work around the house. So much Spring yard work to get done.
• Ripped out the last ugly 70's-antique-gold bathroom fixture - the sink - and started replacing it with a gleaming new non-gold one with a new faucet set to match what I put in the shower last Summer.
• Bought plants for the garden and yard. Finally time to replace the grapes the city dug up a couple of years ago when they were doing the sewers.

Good, if slightly chilly weekend. But who am I to complain... at least it didn't snow here. :-)

Cheers,
-B

A couple of cat links...

First, I found this one. The Infinite Cat Project It's cats watching cats, kinda like an infinte reflection in a mirror, except excellently staged with cats. Something like 875 pics sent in by people as I write this. Ah... gotta love the internet. :-)

And the waaaay-too-cute-not-to-post category is cats sleeping in weird poses. If that's not cute enough for you, and you feel like you can take more, check out the 'duets' link on that page.

Meow,
-B (&M&M&S&JJ)

More travel searches...

Okay, premature post....

Here's a couple more travel searchers:

Kayak
SideStep


So far, in a quick comparison, Kayak wins for finding the lowest prices.

All of these were found on LifeHacker

-B

Cool new Travel Fare search tool on Yahoo!

This one's worth checking out. It's a fare search engine that checks a bunch of sites for travel prices to match your search criterion. Seems pretty slick.

Cheap Airfares, Hotel Rooms and Rental Cars on Yahoo! FareChase. Search dozens of travel sites with one click.

-B

Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion - Technology

I always wondered why no one used nuclear power for aircraft. Well, other than the obvious problems of weight, sheilding, environmental safety and the anti-nuke protests. It seemed like it'd be a good idea if they could overcome all those. This article talks about the research that went on around this during the cold war, and some of the politics as well. It's a pretty interesting read.

Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion - Technology