General

Here is an update on my friend and boss Dave Winer.   He is in the hospital and will remain there until next weekend.   To those that are sending notes, he should be OK, but in the meantime send positive healing thoughts in his direction.  He will be providing more details when he is able. [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

Wishing Dave a speedy recovery

The weather is miserable & rainy today, as it was all week.

I had lunch at Peter Pan Diner on Oakland Park Blvd. & Dixie Hwy. This is the first time I’ve been there & I’ll definitely be going back. It’s good, cheap, and fast even though it was jammed (which is probably why it was jammed). It’s a good place to know, since it’s open 24 hours a day.

Next I went to Bed Bath & Beyond to use the gift card my mom & her friends gave me. I only spent $20 on some stuf for my kitchen and I still have $20 left on the $40 gift card.

“5-Point” is definitely the intersection from hell. This is where NE 26th Ave, Dixie Hwy, and Wilton Drive intersect and it’s very confusing. When travelling on NE 26th Ave, if you’re in the right lane you must turn north to Dixie Hwy, in the left lane, you must turn south on either Dixie Hwy or Wilton Drive, and in the center lane you can either travel straight on NE 26th Ave (as I wanted to do) or turn south on Wilton Drive. It takes a bit of advance planning, since NE 26th Ave widens to 3 lanes shortly before the intersection. There’s always someone in the wrong lane attempting to get into the proper lane when it’s already too late.

I had a bit of a scare in the Publix parking lot. As I was returning to my car, I saw a stray shopping cart heading towards my 2-week-old 2003 Corolla. Luckily (at least for me), it hit the car next to mine, which, thankfully, didn’t have even a scratch from the shopping cart.

At This School, ‘It’ Is a Touchy Subject [Daypop Top 40]

The principal of Franklin Elementary School in Santa Monica became “it” when she banned the children’s game of tag–for reasons that included issues of self-esteem–from the playground late last month.

Jeez! I really feel sorry for kids growing up today. When I was a kid, nobody told us we couldn’t play tag or cowboys & indians and we weren’t suspended from school for simply pointing a finger at someone and saying “bang”. Things are just getting more ridiculous all the time. When will the stupidity end?

I had a pretty busy day today. I talked to the other programmer I’m working with several times about my project & there are some interesting developments. He’s giving a beta version of my application to a big potential customer and they’re very interested in moving forward with the project, although one faction would like to drop the Mac product due to lack of support from Apple.

If all goes well, I’ll have a few more months of work from this project.

I also installed CodeWarrior 8 & updated my project. The update was completely painless – this is the easiest upgrade I’ve gone through in all of the years I’ve been using CodeWarrior. Some upgrades in the past were pretty traumatic and caused me to lose several days or even weeks of work, but this time I had my projects compiling in less than an hour.

This morning, I got the following email from BellSouth:

Dear valued BellSouth Internet Service customer,

In the process of updating our billing system we discovered that your

account information is no longer valid. We value your business and

would like to continue providing you with BellSouth Internet Service.

To avoid any disruption of your service, your account information must

be updated within 7 days of receipt of this e-mail.

Please contact the BellSouth Internet Service billing department via

phone at 1-800-4DOTNET(1-800-436-8638) so that we may correct this

oversight. Please do not respond to this email.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and look forward

to hearing from you.

Thank you!

BellSouth Internet Service Customer Care

I called them and it turned out that when I moved I was issued a new username, which I was never aware of and I never used. I had continued to use my old user name, but I got it cleared up & my old username is still good and I can continue to use it instead of the new one that I never even knew about.

The Nail in the Coffin.

Another View on Replay TV and Forcible-content-watching

“Here is an alternative view of the Replay TV issue, that I haven’t heard presented so far. Please feel free to post this to politech if you find it interesting.

Using Replay TV to skip commercials is not theft. Actually it should be completely legal, as the people of the united states have already paid for programming on the public airwaves.

First, the people of the US gave the broadcast companies access to the public airwaves. This access wasn’t granted so that the broadcasters could then “sell” us programming. This access was granted so that the broadcasters could present us with content. We also granted the broadcasters the right to present us with advertising to help them meet the costs of producing the content they are presenting over the public airwaves.

If you accept this premise, then using a Replay TV to skip advertising is not theft in any way. The people have already paid for the content of a TV broadcast with a very valuable public resource, the RF spectrum it is broadcast on. So there really is no contract between the TV viewer and the broadcaster when it comes to advertising. In effect we have already paid our share….” [Allen Hutchison on Declan McCullagh’s Politech, via Corante Copyfight]

[The Shifted Librarian]

interesting point!

Is it just system problems or has AIM decided to block third-party clients? I find that I can’t connect to AIM with either Fire or Adium, but I can still connect with the official AIM client.

Timeless Words: The Latest Religious Right Wacko Sound Byte. OK kids, we’ve now heard it enough that it must surely be a talking point written in some religious right how-to brochure… [Morons Dot Org]

Sheesh! According to some of those idiots, separation of church and state is a “myth”.

Sunrise police Lt. Charlie Vitale recognized the name instantly, even a decade later.

JosŽ Padilla lived in Lauderhill when Vitale arrested him after a road-rage shooting incident in 1991. Vitale was a brand new detective, on the job for only two years.

“I almost shot him because he went for his gun,” Vitale said.

Padilla is in a lot more trouble now.

Prosecutors announced Monday that Padilla, now Abdullah al-Mujahir after converting to Islam in the early 1990s, is part of an al-Qaida terrorist network that plotted to unleash a radioactive bomb in the U.S.

Padilla told government interrogators after his arrest on May 8 in Chicago that he turned to Islam while incarcerated in the Broward County Jail and ultimately took his Islamic name.

FBI agents showed up at the Sunrise Police Department about a month ago, looking for his fingerprint cards and paperwork, Vitale said.

Like some of the terrorists who flew airplanes into U.S. buildings on Sept. 11, Padilla had ties to South Florida, living here from 1990 to at least 1997. Religious leaders at several local mosques said they did not recognize his name or his photograph.

At the Lake Park Gardens condominium complex in Plantation, there was a plaque quoting scripture on a door to the home of Padilla’s mother, Estela Ortega: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” There was also a statue of a cherub reclining, two bows decorated with American flag patterns, and a handwritten note: “Please leave this family in peace.”

He lived very close to me. I live in Wilton Manors, which is east of I-95 and just south of Oakland Park Blvd. Lauderhill is about 2-3 miles west on Oakland Park Blvd. Plantation is about another 2 miles west.