Mom’s in the hospital with a broken hip, and I’m worried about her. It’s 7:00pm on the dot, and her surgery should be starting any minute now.  Hopefully I’ll get a chance to visit her before I leave town.

We’ve been talking about moving to Seattle after Amy finishes school. If only we were there already! Babeland (a Seattle sex shop) says to bring your “voter registration card, ballot stub or your word of honor” tomorrow and they’ll give you a free sex toy. Oh well, at least I can still get a free coffee at Starbucks — maybe.

I don’t want anyone getting the impression I’m jumping ship, but I think these articles from Bruce Webster are important for IT managers & leads to understand: How to Retain IT Talent with Goal Alignment and How to Retain and Improve Your IT Staff Simultaneously.

I’ve been meaning to write a blurb about Warp 11, a Star Trek band. They do a variety of rock styles, with lyrics that sound like a cross between Gene Roddenberry and Lords of Acid.  You know, songs like “Boldly Go Down on Me” and “She Make it So“.  If you’re a Trek geek, go buy one of their albums now.  I came across The Vulcan Freedom Fighters thanks to a Reddit posting last night, and they’re pretty good too.

I listed some interesting Commodore items on eBay last night: a Turbo-232 high speed serial interface and a commemorative t-shirt from World of Commodore 1988.

Tomorrow’s the big election. After two years of campaigning, it’s almost over. This will be the first presidential election where I’m not voting Libertarian. I can’t lend my support to Bob Barr after all he did in his legislative career, and this is one election where I don’t think it’s in my best interests to “vote my conscience”. I don’t want another eight years of the current regime, I certainly don’t want Sarah Palin in national office, and I think this country really needs a charismatic, positive person in the White House who can actually string together a complete sentence.

The article is dated April 1st, but I doubt it’s a joke.A South Carolina state senator wants to add a 20% “surcharge” on magazines that show frontal nudity (Playboy, Penthouse, Juggs, Gay Midget Fisting Weekly, to name a few). The money would ostensibly be used to help the state keep better tabs on sex offenders.Of course, the reporters found a mom who wholeheartedly supported the “surcharge”:

“I agree with it. I agree with it because we need all the help we can get to keep them away from our kids. It’s better than tax payers paying out of their pockets for it.”

But, wait. If these people are paying a tax, I mean “surcharge”, aren’t they (by definition) taxpayers too? Of course that’s not what she meant. She really meant people who pay income tax to the state, which must exclude people who look at porn, too. They’re too busy looking at boobies to get a job.

It’s such a typical mindset these days.  People want some service provided by mommy government, so they find some unpopular group to pay for it.  Seriously, who is going to publicly fight this in the name of smut readers?  How would that person get people to take them seriously, and how would they fight that battle when nobody wants to admit to reading porn themselves.

Something needs to be done about the abuse of databases. The collected data about us is ruining lives, and leading others to untimely deaths. Schools & training programs focus on computer literacy, using Microsoft Word and surfing the web, but there should be classes in data literacy as well. People need to know how to interpret the data that’s out there.

Some heart-breaking stories after the break. I expected a lot better from my fellow human beings.

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Back in 1996, I took part in a project called 24 Hours of Democracy, run by Dave Winer. It was a protest against the Communications Decency Act, where anyone on the fledgling World Wide Web could contribute an essay on Internet freedom.

Mine sounds like the ramblings of a rebellious 19 year old. But that’s exactly what I was.

It amuses me how I could have written this same essay, albeit in a much calmer tone, today. Since the original post is lost to the history of the web, I am “reprinting” my essay here. I’m glad I kept a printed copy.

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When I first heard that people were attacking UK targets with car bombs and flaming suicide runs, I got a little nervous…and a little skeptical. I’m glad to see I was half right.

Over at the Register, a former military bomb squad operator weighs in on this week’s “attacks”. From ‘al-Qaeda’ puts on big shoes, red nose, takes custard pie:

The mindset of a man who’s willing to set himself on fire to make a point - as one of the Glasgow terror-clowns seems to have done - but not to spend any effort at all on researching methods is a difficult one to understand. Even if these jokers were illiterate or had no internet access (seems unlikely, one of the suspects is apparently a doctor) they could have at least done a test. In my part of town, fun-loving teenagers burn out a car or two down by the canal every week or so: nobody would notice another one with some nails in it.

Such a test would have told these idiots what every bomb-disposal operator and Hollywood effects guy already knows: that petrol, gas etc make for an excellent, photogenic fireball which you can normally be quite close to without ill effects. Too much real, killer, shrapnel-throwing blast will actually prevent a fireball effect, if you’re interested (When putting on shows for people, we used to use a quarter-stick of plastic explosive taped to a bottle of petrol. Any more bang than that, and you don’t get a fireball. The petrol just vapourises harmlessly).

Remember, this country carried on successfully for six years with hundreds - thousands, sometimes - of tons of explosives raining down on it every night for six years, delivered by very competent Germans who often died doing that job. The civilian death toll was around 60,000 according to most sources; the equivalent of 20 9/11s, more than three for every year of the war. Civilisation was not brought down. Germany and Japan withstood even greater violence, and survived it too.

Our parents and grandparents stood that kind of punishment, not to mention four times as many military dead, and got on with life. Sad though it is to confirm the oldsters’ world view, by comparison our generation - our generation’s journalists, anyway - seem a bit lacking in backbone. If all we have to put up with is an occasional 7/7, that’s background noise by comparison - it should merit the same sort of headlines, the same political response as motorway pileups or airline crashes.