I usually don’t go in for this sort of thing… But a co-worker forwarded it to me, and it’s a great slice of Americana runnning head on with the Net:
SIZE 12 WEDDING DRESS/GOWN NO RESERVE
SURE IS A BEAUTY! CHEAP! USED ONLY ONCE!
Monthly Archives: April 2004
Meme thing
1.Go into your LJ’s archives.
2.Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3.Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4.Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions
From Sept. 7, 2001.
“This being 2001, he put up a website: LetMeStayForADay.com“
As it turns out, fairly self-explanatory. I’d just heard about Ramon on the radio, and did an old-school blog post.
Protected: Orkut (a rare friends only post)
All the News
First off, I have a new job. I’m again working for Volt, doing e-mail support for… Well, my contract stipulates I cannot say. Some call them The Empire. Some place a normative judgement on what kind of Empire they are. Me, I just like to call them: The Jackal The Client.
{yes, that was a west wing joke that just flew by. shoot me now.}
This means I suddenly have access to a bunch of things I’d missed, sometimes without even realizing it. A cheaper cafeteria. Factiva. Free MCP testing. The Client’s Library. You know, stuff.
The contract is for a year (unless they change their mind, which they can do on a moment’s notice). There’s a slight temp-to-perm buzz, but then, I heard that last time, too. So… I’ll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, I’m hoping to just take advtange and get my MCDBA and MCSE certs out of it.
*^*^*
In other news, a part-time-ish job I’ve been slowly developing has been being a professional DJ for Pro DJs. It’s run by a jock from Mix-92.5 here in Seattle, D.K. Erickson, and tends to do weddings, school dances, parties, corporate events, etc.
Saturday I did my first solo gig, having been to two training things leading up to it. It was the wedding of Brooke and Dario Rojas, held at Lord Hill Farms. It was a very religious group, it seems, so the “Lord” in “Lord Hill” is like, you know, The Lord.
Even so, it was pretty fun, even if there were two or three panic cell calls to D.K. (“Hey, D.K…. I only have one power cord for the two speakers — now what?” Answer: Wing it, Daddy-O.) But after the clear air turbulance at the start, I mostly settled into my groove. At the end I had to go up to the groom, Dario, just to check in how well I’d done because… Remember the religious angle? Seems this group doesn’t dance. Tough to judge feedback, at that point.
I’m not expecting to go great guns on this gig, if for no other reason than my new schedule with The Client: Wed-Sat, 7AM-6PM. That means three-day-weekends, true, but it also means Sunday is the only day off I have in common with Ulrika for the duration. It also makes it tough to make a 7PM gig in Tacoma, say, on a Saturday night.
So, call it one-and-a-quarter jobs. Beats the alternative. 
Endlessness
I’ve been involved in a discussion on another website regarding politics.
And the thing of it is… To me, one of the problems of the Republican push for “character based” politics is that, inevitably, the party will throw into the ring candidates and officials of extremely dubious character. Like, say, Bush.
And that, further, rather than having the cojones to say, “My party is OK, but sometimes… sometimes this guy is slippery.” Rather than being honest enough to say that, a certain kind of Republican, in a most delicious irony, ends up constructing a nearly Stalinist cult of personality around Bush. He’s Republican, so he must be Virtuous. (Or, he’s our the President, so he Must be Respected. Until a Democrat takes office.)
And when it becomes an issue of personality and character, rather than objective fact, the involved parties just end up spinning their tank treads in the sand.
I’m not excepting myself here.
But as I step back, and take a deep breath, I realized there’s a great thing about the law:
Sooner or later, the case ends.
Either the jury hands down the verdict against you, or the appellate judge rules in your favor, or the Supreme Court denies you certioari… But the damned thing ends.
Which means, I suppose, that while I may write a few things about legal interests of mine, I’m going to try, at least, to stand back from politics for a while.
Hey, Kids!
Here’s a real cool web site for you to see! The NSA/CSS Kids & Youth Page! That would be NSA like National Security Agency, who… “works to keep America safe by using the art and science of cryptology: making and breaking codes.
The codes we make keep our information protected from our enemies, and by breaking our enemies’ codes we can find out what they are planning and thinking.”
You can break codes, and print out coloring book pages, and watch their ultra-fly mascot, Crypto Cat!
(Actually, if they had a plush version of Crypto Cat, I would buy him. Just for sheer silliness.)
Nassim Taleb in the NYT
I see, poking around his web site, that Nassim Nicholas Taleb, one of my favorite writers about statistics and risk (Fooled by Randomness), had an op-ed in the New York Times a little less than two weeks ago on the 8th.
Good stuff. Go, read.
“The greatest flaw in the (9/11) commission’s mandate, regrettably, mirrors one of the greatest flaws in modern society: it does not understand risk. The focus of the investigation should not be on how to avoid any specific black swan, for we don’t know where the next one is coming from. The focus should be on what general lessons can be learned from them. And the most important lesson may be that we should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible. After a black swan like 9/11, we must look ahead, not in the rear-view mirror.”
Baa Baa Meme Sheep
I want everyone who reads this (and feels up to it) to ask me 3 questions, no more, no less. Ask me anything you want. Then I want you to go to your journal and copy and paste this in, allowing your friends (including myself) to ask you anything.
Once I searched the Prince of Spain…
…now I work at the Pizza-Pizza.
Or so one would hope.
Spanish Crown Prince Felipe and his fiancee Letizia Ortiz went on a trip to the Bahamas.
On their return trip to Spain, they took a chartered jet to Miami International, where they planned to transfer to a commericial Iberia Airlines flight.
Problem: The Crown Prince of one our few allies in Iraq, an ally increasingly likely to pull out, so you’d think an ally we’d like to treat in as diplomatic a way as possible to persuade them to continue to work with us… Anyway, the Crown Prince gave only a six hour advance warning to the airport that he and his party would be flying through.
Apparently, policy is that one needs to give 72 hour notice for expedited VIP security handling. So the TSA searched the Prince, his fiancee, and the entire party.
The Miami Herald, who broke this story, takes the stance of, Those wacky royals. Expecting special treatment.
I certainly hope our troops appreciate that when the Spanish pull out of Iraq. And I look forward to the Herald‘s reaction should Air Force One be subjected to similar search procedures.
But it doesn’t end there.
“The need by the princess-to-be to go the powder room caused another flare-up. Ortiz was told her already-searched purse would be searched again on her return from the nonsecure area. She decided to hold it.
That sparked more angry words and exchanges, delaying the process and making the entire royal party late for the flight, which waited.”
Have I mentioned yet that Ms. Ortiz is the anchorwoman for the number one TV news program in Spain?
No?
Can you imagine the possibilities here? What happens if she leads off every future broadcast with, “Today, I wasn’t searched by the United States.” That’d be a running gag at least as good as anything Letterman is doing vis-a-vis Oprah, or Saturday Night Live and Francisco Franco. (Talk about irony…)
