I find it extremely amusing that all the fast food joints copy each other to try and gain a 1% market share advantage over the other guy. Why not do something different? I'm referring of course to the breakfast menu.

You can buy a cup of coffee at 7 in the evening. You can buy a double cheeseburger at 5AM. You can buy  a milk shake in Fargo in the dead of winter.

Why then can't you buy a sandwich with egg on it at 10:31?

Enron founder Kenneth Lay was found guilty on six counts of conspiracy and fraud and former CEO Jeff Skilling was found guilty on 19 counts by a Houston jury in the biggest of the corporate fraud cases.

We're finally reaching closure. This is the trial everybody was waiting for, so we can now put to rest the wave of corruption which brought down Enron, MCI, AOL and other corporate houses of cards.

To quote Roger Daltry - 'Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.'  

Found this on the 925 weblog. Thought you might enjoy it...

Just a little humor to help ease the pain of your next trip to the pump…

Compared with Gasoline Think a gallon of gas is expensive? This makes one think, and also puts things in perspective.

Diet Snapple 16 oz $1.29 …….. $10.32 per gallon
Lipton Ice Tea 16 oz $1.19 ………..$9.52 per gallon
Gatorade 20 oz $1.59 …… $10.17 per gallon
Ocean Spray 16 oz $1.25 . $10.00 per gallon
Brake Fluid 12 oz $3.15 . $33.60 per gallon
Vick’s Nyquil 6 oz $8.35 …. $178.13 per gallon
Pepto Bismol 4 oz $3.85 ….. $123.20 per gallon
Whiteout 7 oz $1.39 ……… .. $25.42 per gallon
Scope 1.5 oz $0.99 ……$84.48 per gallon

And this is the REAL KICKER… Evian water 9 oz $1.49……….$21.19 per gallon?! $21.19 for WATER - and the buyers don’t even know the source. (Evian spelled backwards is Naive.) So, the next time you’re at the pump, be glad your car doesn’t run on water, Scope, or Whiteout, or God forbid Pepto Bismal or Nyquil.

Family and friends are advised that I've now migrated all my existing photo albums from the old website. You will need an account here to access the photos. (Contact me after you've got the account so I can add you to the access list). The old password won't work anymore - and the old website is going away. 

I've also finally implemented Atom feeds. I know it's been an RFC for several months, but I already had one feed format so it wasn't a priority while I built the rest of the community site software.

But my RSS feeds won't validate if any articles have more than one attachment. There was a huge debate about this a couple of years ago. Dave Winer and Rogers Cadenhead seem to hold the view that the RSS 2.0 spec clearly states that an item can have at most one enclosure.

I've read the spec over and over - in fact every version of the spec. Nowhere is this spelled out. I can't even find the passages they claim 'imply' this limit. But face it, it's a very poorly written spec which Dave Winer grabbed from Netscape and made his own. He changes it whenever it suits him, and interprets it any way which suits his personal ambitions. Along the way teaming up with Adam Curry and 'inventing podcasting' (which also led to the protocol abortion we call iTunes). Dave also get very wealthy off of RSS during the dot-com crash, probably the only person besides the Google founders to get wealthy off the Internet during this period.

But RSS has run its course. It is now time to rid the Internet of everything associated with Dave Winer. He is a disgrace. RSS is a disgrace.  Upgrade all your feeds to Atom. It's a much better syndication format, clearly thought out - well defined and specified.

Just do it.

The Bush is defending some of the new NSA wiretap programs, stating that this isn't about monitoring what you or I are doing. But in fact, that's what is happening. Everything which goes through the telecommunications structure is being intercepted and filtered. Email, web traffic, phone calls. There are back doors and monitors in every conceivable place.

It is particularly telling in that the Justice Department is not able to review the program. The Justice Department! Seems nobody there has an adequate security clearance. Don't you find that a bit alarming?

It's only a matter of time. The remote control channel changer on your TV already has a little window with an IR detector on it. You would never know if the TV manufacturers replaced this with a CCD through a government mandated covert program. Since it also covers the IR spectrum, it would work just like a channel changer. Just like you expect it to work. Except it's also a webcam, feeding what's happening in your living room back to a monitoring post through your cable system (which coincidentally is also a high-speed internet line these days). The technology to do all of this exists today. All the microchips required to make this a reality are available off the shelf. The monitoring posts are already in place.  

And you would never know...

Happy Cinco De Mayo - where we honor the Mexican army for repelling an invasion by the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1862.

...Just a few years after they failed to repel an invasion by the United States. 

The celebration was short lived. A year later, the French regrouped and took over Mexico anyway.