Ah, it’s good to be home (and it’s even Friday; how cool is that). And to get a good night’s sleep (as good as it gets these days, anyway). They seem to be quite afraid of transmitting disease or something down there. I saw more bottles of hand sanitizer in five days than I’ve seen in my entire life before that. I always knew DC was a dirty place filled with dirty people. Actually that’s not true. Most of the people there are very nice. It’s the ones that aren’t from there that suck.

Meanwhile, oil has started washing ashore on the LA coast and into the Mississippi River. I hope you like your shrimp nice and slippery. Not to worry, though, because we have square watermelons. I’ve never really cared for watermelon (or shrimp, for that matter; I don’t like food you gotta fuck around with to eat, whether it’s spitting out seeds or cracking shells or whatever, and I also don’t like food that looks like it did when it was alive, and I don’t like food that has more than four legs and looks like a bug), But that’s just me. I don’t like big hats, either.

Speaking of big hats, yes, as Vernon mentioned yesterday, the big hats were out in force for the Dorothy Height funeral in DC yesterday (in fact, Joe Biden was caught on-mic leaning over to President Obama at the service saying, “that’s a big fuckin’ hat), and it was of course big news down there. Such a shame – she was only 98. I don’t think I’d have had much chance to get in, though, as they were only handing out 700 tickets to regular people.

One thing I will guarantee right now (and you can hold me to this): you will not need a ticket to get into my funeral, though I hope to have DVDs available for purchase in the lobby. At least a soundtrack CD.

President Obama has interviewed a potential Supreme Court nominee – 56-yr old Sidney Thomas of Montana, who was appointed to the 9th Circuit in 1995 by Bill Clinton. Thomas looks like a “safe” choice (gee, what a shock that Obama would go for a safe choice), and he’s a white guy (the fact that he’s from Montana – which comes in at #51 for number of black people, with a little more than two thousand black people, or three-tenths of one percent of its population – should have tipped you off to that), which is cool ‘cuz what the Supreme Court needs is more white guys. Of course, this is just the first trial balloon to go out, and no nominee is safe when it comes to Republican fundraising and faux outrage.

Oh well, time to get ready to go through the motions of getting through the day.

The hardest part of today will be waiting around long enough to avoid rush hour (which, unlike home, lasts a lot longer than an hour; with any luck, I’ll be home in time to see Rielle Hunter on Oprah). Maybe I’ll head over to the Church of Scientology for a quick e-meter session. I hear the first one’s free. It’ll be nice to get back home, though I’m not really looking forward to the drive (looks like a clear day all the way, unlike the drive down, which was drizzly with heavy fog through most of PA). No matter where you are, though, things are pretty much the same – even down to the “don’t text and drive” fluff stories on the lo-cal news. Well, except you don’t get any disappointing “the Panda isn’t pregnant” items on the news back home. I had thought about catching game 7 of the Caps/Canadiens last night, but the cheapest ticket available was $90, and I’m just not that big a fan. In case you’re wondering, after being up 3-1 in the series, the Caps went down 2-1 last night, and lost the series 4-3.

Looks like the killer oil slick is bearing down on the LA coast. In order to help slow things down, they’ve set the oil on fire, so now there’s both black smoke in the air and black oil in the water. Very nice.

Oh well, I guess I’ll go see if they dropped off the NY Times yet (you’d think they’d leave the Washington Post around here; better than the Washington Times, I guess).

Have a good day. I’ll be back to bitching about having to go to work tomorrow.

And so, my last day here in DC begins (though I won’t actually be leaving ’til tomorrow). It began pretty early, actually, as I couldn’t sleep, and finally gave up trying at about 4:00. Being sequestered in a dark room behind a computer all day yesterday, I didn’t get to catch any of the Goldman-Sachs fun (I’ll listen to the Olbermann and Maddow podcasts on my way home tomorrow; that’ll help kill some time). Of course it’s all a big joke on us. Just Theater for the peasants. I don’t expect much to come out of it (my guess is that financial reform will be about as reformative as health care reform; maybe they’ll mandate brokerage accounts for everybody). Still it’s always fun to see multimillionaires get scolded on teevee by rich old white people feigning outrage.

Speaking of fun, a couple of guys were outside the Founding Church of Scientology (next door to where my training is), taking pictures of the well-dressed walking mannequins coming and going, and hollering at them that it was OK to leave. One of them had a sign that said “Google Lisa McPherson,” so I did that when I got back to my room. Turns out she was a physically healthy 36 year old who went a little bit wacky one day, and got “cured” by the Scientology practice of Introspection Rundown, which left her bruised, dehydrated, bug-bitten, and dead.

Now there’s a pleasant thought to start out the day with, isn’t it?

So, congratulations to the Republicans (and Ben Nelson) for filibustering financial reform. I know they’re proud of themselves, but I just want them to know I’m proud, too. I’m just glad I could be here for it. Better here than the Gulf of Mexico, I guess, where over 40,000 gallons of oil a day are oozing out of of that ill-fated drilling platform. The oil spill is covering 1,800 miles so far. Not to worry, though. I’m sure oil industry profits won’t suffer.

Kudos, too, to Seattle authorities, who swooped down on Gizmodo editor/blogger Jason Chen for publishing photos of a next-gen iPhone left in a bar.

Authorities seized computers, digital cameras, a cell phone and other items from a technology blog editor who posted pictures and details of a lost iPhone prototype.

A computer-crime task force made up of multiple law enforcement agencies searched Gizmodo editor and blogger Jason Chen’s house and car in Fremont, Calif., on Friday, according to a statement and search warrant documents provided by Gizmodo. Members of the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team took several computers, hard drives, digital cameras, cell phones and other gadgets, plus Chen’s American Express bill and copies of his checks.

Last week Gizmodo had one of the Web’s hottest scoops when it posted photos of an Apple device that appeared to be a next-generation iPhone. It had been found in a bar in Redwood City, which is in San Mateo County, and sold for $5,000 by an unknown person to Gizmodo, a gadget blog owned by Gawker Media Inc. After Chen posted photos and details about the phone, Apple acknowledged the device belonged to the company, and Gizmodo returned it. Gawker Media said California’s shield law, which protects journalists from having to turn over anonymous sources or unpublished material to law enforcement during a search, should apply to Chen’s property.

Don’t mess with Apple, dude. You’re lucky they didn’t get you shipped off to Gitmo.

I’m across from the Australian Embassy, so I think I’ll go over and protest this at lunch time.

An Australian restaurant has been forced to apologize and pay compensation after refusing to let a blind man enter because they thought his dog was gay.

In May 2009, Ian Jolly, 57, was attempting to dine at the Thai Spice restaurant in Adelaide, when he was refused entry after staff misheard his female companion, and thought his “guide dog” was a “gay dog.”

“The staff genuinely believed that Nudge was an ordinary pet dog which had been desexed to become a gay dog,” the owners said in a statement to South Australia’s Equal Opportunity Tribunal.

Jolly is now set to receive a written apology and $1,400 compensation.

Well, with a name like Nudge….

Oh well, time to get ready to get ready, I guess.

So, here I am again. I got here a little bit before 4:00 yesterday, but didn’t much feel like tromping down to the Mall to see what was left of the Earth Day concert. Instead I watched the Coal Miner Memorial (was surprised at what a good reception Obama and Biden got; maybe there’s hope for this country after all). One of these days I have to stop at the Anthracite Museum on the way down. Then I walked over to Whole Foods (which was really, really crowded, and smelled kind of like piss) to buy some groceries since my room has a kitchen. It was too busy, so all I got was beer. Warm beer at that. Then I proceeded to turn the wrong way and wound up walking way out of my way, which wasn’t bad, other than it’s too damn hot down here. Between that and the six hour drive, my foot was killing me by the time I got back. Fortunately, my training thing is right across the street, so I don’t have far to walk to get there.

No boobleheads for me, I’m afraid. I’ll be leaving in a few hours for DC to attend a few days of training. While I’m happy to not be at work for a few days, I’m not really looking forward to being away from home. I guess I’m kind of a baby like that. On the bright side, I’ll be staying in a hotel with a 32″ plasma screen and a Playstation, with a daily complimentary happy hour, so at least I won’t be stuck in a cinderblock wall dorm room. There’s also wireless Internet access, of course (my #1 criterion), so odds are I’ll still be able to post, but if you don’t hear from me for a while, you’ll know something’s wrong with the connection (or I died in a fiery car crash on the way down or something). Anyhow, have a good Sunday, and I’ll say hello to Barry for ya.

Ever hear of a company called HTC (the High Tech Computer Corporation)? They make mobile phones and are, in fact, the largest manufacturer of phones that use the Android operating system, which is the free and open source software released through the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), which was spearheaded by Google, but includes companies like Texas Instruments, Broadcom, HTC, Intel, LG, Motorola, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile and has the goal of developing open standards for mobile devices. Enter Apple and the iPhone.

Words like “free” and “open” are anathema to a company like Apple, and it sees Android as an enormous threat. And when Apple feels threatened, it sues. They’d love to go after Android directly, but I reckon it’s pretty hard to sue open source software. Instead, they’ve decided to sue HTC, and have filed a lawsuit alleging 20 patent infringements for patents ranging from 1995 up ’til Feb 2010.

Apple has much deeper pockets than HTC, so don’t be surprised if you see some sort of settlement that will ultimately result in huge licensing fees for Android-based phones (which will of course be passed along to the rest of us). Then again, if Google and the rest of the OHA get involved, this could drag on for years.

As I understand patents (and I’m certainly no expert), the original idea was to encourage innovation. The idea being that, if you came up with some cool new invention, you got the exclusive right to make money off it for a certain period of time (say, 20 years, though the terms vary) in exchange for the full public disclosure of how it works. Good for the inventor, good for the public.

That’s kind of changed over the years – especially in the Tech Sector. It’s not unlike how our economy has shifted. Used to be people made shit and sold it to make money. Shit got manufactured, people had jobs; not a perfect system by any means, but at least we were making stuff. Now, people push paper back and forth and take a cut out of each transaction to make money. Nothing gets made (except money), and fewer and fewer people have jobs (or homes). Similarly, companies buy up intellectual property (patents and copyrights) and sit on it, waiting like vultures for a chance to pounce on some new innovator for patent infringement and force a settlement. Good for the vultures, good for the lawyers, not so good for the rest of us.

Our lawmakers and the courts are pretty much clueless when it comes to technology (SCOTUS, for example, doesn’t understand the difference between e-mail and pagers, and of course we all remember the then 83-yr old former Chairman/Ranking Member of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation describing the Internet as “not a big truck,” but a “series of tubes” while debating the rather important issue of Net Neutrality). This has led to companies getting ridiculous patents (and settlements) for things like “1-Click” checkout (clicking on a button to check out) and “parallel tasking” (basically, doing two things at once). Hell, Google even got a patent for displaying patents, and Microsoft got a patent for “page up and page down.”

The patent system is in desperate need of reform, and people who don’t know the difference between a pager and an e-mail, or think you can “send an Internet,” over a series of tubes shouldn’t be in charge of deciding the future of the technology the don’t understand.

It’d be like having me decide who wins next year’s Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group Grammy.

Some good news on the environmental front, for a change, as NYS said it will impose strict regulations on drilling for natural gas (aka, hydrofracking).

New York State environmental officials announced on Friday that they would impose far stricter regulations on a controversial type of natural gas drilling in the upstate area that supplies most of New York City’s drinking water, making it highly unlikely that any drilling would be done there.

Although they did not impose an outright ban on drilling, state officials said that any natural gas company would have to conduct a separate environmental impact review for each well it proposed to drill in the Catskills watershed, which supplies the city.

Those rules also apply to the smaller Skaneateles Lake watershed, which supplies drinking water to Syracuse and some other communities.

In other areas, companies would face a far less cumbersome permit process that would rely on the state’s own environmental assessment of where drilling can be allowed.

In other words, the drilling companies can go frack themselves.

Finally, I just have to mention this. On the Today Show this morning, they briefly showed security camera footage of a homeless man lying stabbed and dying on a NYC sidewalk as people walked around him (and somebody even took a cell phone picture of him). Then the B-Team Today Show newsreader twit segued into a fluff piece on how the most expensive house in America (the Spelling Mansion somewhere in California) is on the market, which she, Amy, and Lester all had a nice lengthy giggle over.

Do these fucking people get the irony there (that’s a rhetorical question, of course; I know they don’t)? They did the teevee equivalent of walking up to a human being dying on the sidewalk, taking a picture of him, then moving along, window shopping and giggling at the prices of all the fancy baubles.

I really hate these people. But they’re gonna have Buddy the hero German Shepherd on, so I gotta watch.

I hate to get all footbally and stuff, but a quick question for the Broncos: Tebow? Really?

Just ten more days, and I get to go see a Podiatrist. Any idea how many chickens you need for a visit to the foot doctor under the POP (Pullets for Podiatry) program? I just hope frozen is OK, ‘cuz I don’t really have a live chicken connection. Well, except for Melina, but Connecticut is a long way to go to pick up chicks (especially at my age). Plus I’m boycotting the state of CT until either Joe Lieberman is voted out of office or I have some reason to go there.

Speaking of CT and picking up chicks…

A student-teacher from Connecticut has been arrested in Central New York, and is accused of having a sexual relationship with an underage girl.

State Police tell CNY Central that on Tuesday they apprehended 30-year-old Micah Saul Brown at the Quality Inn on Collamer Road in East Syracuse. Troopers say that Brown admitted to them during an interview that he traveled to the Syracuse area to have sex with girls he believed to be 14 and 16 years old, which were actually undercover police officers posing as the girls online.

Hard to believe a good-lookin’ guy like that needs to troll AOL chat rooms to hook up with underage girls.

No doubt everyone’s heard by now that the oil rig that was burning in the Gulf of Mexico, spewing black smoke and oil into the atmosphere has now sunk, spewing oil into the water. This is why I’m so proud of our environmental President for opening up more of our coastal shores for drilling. No reason Louisiana should have all the fun.

When Ben Heinrich’s workshop caught on fire, he told his German Shepherd, Buddy, “We need to get help.” So Buddy went off and got help. He flagged down a State Trooper (who was out trying to find the fire in the remote Alaskan town of Caswell Lakes but was lost, as his GPS had frozen up), and led him to the fire (pausing occasionally to make sure the trooper was still following). Thanks to Buddy’s quick thinking, while the workshop was destroyed, Ben’s house was (mostly) unscathed. In case you’re keeping track, this is reason #4,328 why dogs are better than cats (and GPSs). I mean, seriously. Shitting in a box is pretty much their only trick (cats, not GPSs).

Well, another week has slipped on by. Another show and tell this afternoon to get through, and then we can put this one in the books.

Ah, been a pain in the ass couple of days around here. First, I’m getting really tired of this friggin’ Mac laptop losing the wireless connection constantly. It just drops for no reason, and then I have to turn the radio off and back on again (and there’s no hardware switch on the damn thing, either – I guess they figure that’d just be asking for a rush on the “geniuses” when throngs of average macsters couldn’t figure out why for they’re wireless don’t work no more, or maybe at the rate their hardware fails, they figure it’d just be one more thing to break). It drops a few times a session when I’m not even moving around with, which is pretty annoying, but when I try roaming from one access point to another (say, from downstairs to upstairs or outside), and the stupid thing will drop constantly. Needless to say, none of my other wireless (Windows, Linux, Android, etc) stuff has a problem. I tried some updates (there’s another thing that bugs me; I thought Windows was a pain in the ass with the updates, but the Mac ones seem more frequent, and, damn they’re HUGE). That frickin’ update icon jumping up and down bugs me, too. Look, I don’t want anything to do with iTunes, OK? So, don’t keep telling me there’s an update for it!

Then yesterday, as many of you may have heard, McAfee (which I’ve never really liked) released a DAT file (an update) for their virus scanner which identified a harmless (and somewhat necessary) Windows file as a virus, quarantining and (in some cases) deleting the file. In networked enterprise environments, this had the effect of causing Windows XP SP3 machines to reboot constantly and/or disable certain capabilities (like copy and paste, the toolbar, some properties pages, etc.). This is quite a hassle when you work in a networked enterprise environment that uses McAfee. It didn’t really affect me all that much, as I was able to kill my computer in time, and didn’t allow McAfee to delete the file. A quick power down/up, and I was good to go. For about 2,500 of our 6,000 computers, though, things weren’t quite as good, and IT people had to go and touch a lot of them. Bummer for them.

And of course, this morning, no DB connection for this website. A couple weeks ago, the web host decided to enforce new password rules which required me to change my server passwords. Not the database ones, though. Not until some time last night or this morning, that is when, without warning, everything went to hell. Took me a while to figure out what the deal was, but now we’re back up and running.

So, OK world. Whattya got for me next?

I hate to say this out loud for fear of jinxing it, but I think it’s possible that Obama and his entourage finally get it, and realize that no matter what they do, the Republicans will oppose, stonewall, and demonize it. So apparently Obama figures he might as well appoint an actual liberal to the Supreme Court.

“It doesn’t matter who he chooses, there is going to be a big ‘ol fight over it. So he doesn’t have to get sidetracked by those sorts of concerns,” the official told me. The GOP has attempted to obstruct “anything of consequence” put forth by the Obama administration since he took office, the official said. “The president is making this decision with a pretty clear view that whoever he chooses is going to provoke a strong reaction on the right,” the official added.

Well, duh. Welcome to reality, Mr. President. Though I figure it’s likely that this is just posturing, and Obama will appoint some “centrist” (which has come to mean a person to the right-of-center), and then say, “see, I told ya,” when chinless fuck Mitch McConnell acts like a prissy little bitch in opposing him or her.

Speaking of prissy little bitch Senators, some xenophobic konservative nobody is calling on li’l Lindsey Graham to come out of the closet and admit he’s gay.

William Gheen, head of the conservative, anti-“amnesty,” anti-illegal immigration group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), spoke at a Greenville, S.C. Tea Party rally this weekend and called for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to “come out of that log cabin closet.”

According to Gheen, being gay is “a secret that Lindsey Graham has.”

Secret?

Gheen told the crowd: “I hope this secret isn’t being used as leverage over Senator Graham, so today I think Senator Graham, you need to come forward and tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality.”

“Barney Frank is more honest and brave than you,” Gheen continued….

Well, that pretty much goes without saying. There’s video of this, and I tried to watch it, but Gheen is one of these loudmouth sanctimonious pricks that I can’t stand. I got through about five words, and shut it off, not wanting to start my day all pissed off and aggravated.

The no longer mavericky Senator from the great State of Arizona – St. John McCain – has declared that illegal immigrants are deliberately causing accidents on the freeway. I’m not sure what their plan is (maybe they want to ensure they get picked up and deported?), other than it must be truly insidious.

Great news for New Yorkers who were on the verge of having to open doors and hail cabs all by themselves: a Doorman strike has been avoided with a new deal between the Doorman’s Union (who knew?) and, um, whoever it is that represents Door Management. Management agreed to a not exactly stellar (almost) 10% raise over four years and no cuts significant cuts in benefits. This is good news for rich people, I think, who might have been forced to choose between paying more money (which we all know they really, really hate), and opening a door manually. Not that living in a building with a doorman means you’re wealthy, of course. It just seems that way to those of us out here in “real” America.

What with all the excitement (and fatigue) associated with yesterday’s Dolphy Day, I failed to notice that it was 4/20 (aka, Marijuana Day – not to mention Hitler’s birthday). Alas, I was unable to properly celebrate the pot part (and, not being a neo-Nazi skinhead, I have no desire to celebrate the other), but I’d like to take this opportunity to plead with you Californians out there to vote to legalize pot this November (the vote’s in November, right?). My hope is that this will be the big breakthrough, and, once the sky hasn’t fallen, there will be a cascade effect that finally leads to marijuana legalization all over the US (or at least here in NY).

Either that, or I’m moving to the Golden State.

Oh well, got a show and tell to do at work today, so I better get crackin’.