FRESNO, Calif. - A jury awarded $500,000 Friday to a woman who was spanked in front of her colleagues in what her employer called a camaraderie-building exercise.

The jury of six men and six women found that Janet Orlando was subjected to sexual harassment and sexual battery when she was paddled two years ago at Alarm One Inc., a home security company in Fresno.

The jury, however, said that Orlando did not suffer from sexual assault as she had alleged.

Orlando, 53, had asked for at least $1.2 million in lost wages, medical costs and damages.

Orlando quit in 2004, less than a year after she was hired, saying she was humiliated during the company's camaraderie-building exercises.

Sales teams were encouraged to compete, and the losers were made fun of, forced to eat baby food, required to wear diapers and spanked with a rival alarm company's yard signs, according to court documents.

Lawyers for the company said Orlando and others took part in the exercises willingly. The company has since abandoned the practice.

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C'mon - this isn't about sexual harrassment. This is only about public humiliation.  You lost. Neener, neener... And after this jury award, she can look right back at 'em - "No, you lost."

"Neener, neener..."

Bush was at Stanford yesterday. Or perhaps I should be more accurate. He was supposed to drop by the Hoover Institute, except there were just too darn many bloody protesters. So at the last minute they changed plans and went over to George Shultz's house instead. George lives up in the hills behind Stanford.

He (Bush) promised der GropenFuhrer some federal aid to rebuild the delta levees - but with a "don't hold your breath" clause attached. Unlike New Orleans, our delta levees protect Republican voters. So you would think we'd have priority with a somewhat Republican governator and a Republican administration. The only problem is there are only 12 voters at risk if Frank's Tract springs another leak, even though 10 of them are Republicans. And it will cost a few billion to patch it up. 10 voters. A few billion. You do the math. 

The newspaper photos were all less than flattering. (This is actually one of the better ones.) That's a very important indicator of somebody's overall popularity. When the press likes somebody they always show a very flattering photo. When they don't, they go out of their way to find a bad hair day to plaster across the front page.  

Tickets for the upcoming Madonna tour are running about $250. That's before parking, refreshments, t-shirts, etc. A discussion on slashdot blames the high ticket prices on file-sharing networks. With less income from music sales, artists are forced to raise concert prices to maintain their decadent lifestyles. 

But what are you buying for $250? A chance to see a middle-aged rockstar pretend she's young and sexy again. An hour or maybe two at best of choreographed dance music dripping with sexual references. Why would anybody spend this amount for such a cheap marketing gimmick?

In most cities you can actually get laid for $250.   

Every few months I have a look at my site with Internet Explorer. I don't care if it doesn't work great, but occasionally I find that it works absolutely awful. I'm always amazed at how badly it can screw up the simplest things. Syntax Error in line 2. Great. Except this is in the Javascript editor. Line 2 of what file? There are a few hundred... And what kind of syntax error? What syntax threw the error? It would be nice to be able to grep for something so I could fix it.

Reminds me of AIX. Error 46392. You have to call your IBM sales rep because mortals weren't allowed to know what error number 46392 means. The sales droid makes the problem clear as mud. "It's a DXJ fault in the I/O:grip:204 system. You'll need to fix your code". Right. After a few weeks and a few hundred phone calls an IBM internal engineer finally sheepishly admits - "It's a known bug. We're working on it. You can apply patch #24573294.3 but that breaks the event scheduler. You're better off waiting for the next release.". 

Anyway, back to MSIE. I then try to view an RSS feed as text/plain. Hmmm. IE doesn't like text files. OK, view it as application/rss+xml. Now it gives me 'unknown type'. OK, now I see. Even though I specify what type of file it is in the HTTP header, it can't handle it, because the file has no extension. It's just a data stream. Why does it have to be a file with an extension? I thought file extensions were dead.

Not at Microsoft...

I previously turned off drop shadows for IE because it doesn't support transparent PNG files and GIFs are just too ugly. Turns out it does support transparent PNG - by applying an HTML input filter as a CSS style declaration. Huh? Here's how... 

  <div id="something" style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='path/to/file.png', sizingMethod='scale');"></div>

Didja' get that? You don't use an img tag at all to put an image into a web page. And you have to know in advance what kind of image it is. Parse the file to determine if it has transparency enabled. Last time I saw syntax that was this ugly was when I tried to make AIX (which incidentally is IBM's old Unix-like OS) dynamically load a shared library.

If it's any consolation, IBM isn't trying to push AIX anymore. Nobody wanted it because it was too difficult to work with.

IBM is a Linux shop now.