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Showing posts from January 4, 2004
Whilst I'm excited about the prospect of Bush's speech on returning to the moon on Wednesday next week, the skeptical side of me says it's probably another popularity stunt in an election year. If it's not, then people might start to get so excited about the project that Bush will use it to mask something important, like invading Syria or Iran.... Then there's the subject of money - if we're going back to the moon, who's paying for it, and with what. The US has record budget deficits because of the "war on terror" and Bush's runaway spending. It's like Labour's scorched earth policy in England: Rape the country for all you can and leave the next poor bugger to sort it out.
Great headline on Fark.com today.... "U.S. terror alert drops from Tang™ to lemonade" Made I larff.
Ever the bargain hunter, I found a deal online at Luxor.com today for $10 a night off hotel rooms there. So we're going to Vegas for 4 days at the start of February for $69 a night. Sweet!
Hubba hubba! Ford unveiled the 2005 Mustang GT at the motor show today. Dayam! It looks good. Apart from the tail lights which look diabolical. But the rest of the things looks awesome. They've gone back to the familiar shape Mustang from the 60s complete with heavily recessed headlights. It looks like Steve McQueen's car on steroids. But those bloody tail lights. So close, yet so far, Mr Ford. Still - this will be a huge seller. Heck I might even look into one.....
This is pretty cool. Mars Global Surveyor has photographed the old Viking 1 mars probe landing site, and the Mars Pathfinder landing site too. Amazing - you can see the smudges that are old space probes lying on the surface in a couple of photographs here.
I've just come across a piece of software that is absurdly easy to use which does slideshows. Photodex ProShow is amazing. It took me about 40 minutes to assemble a slideshow of images from a vacation a couple of years ago, to fit in time to "ready to go" by Republica. I was blown away by the .exe creator and the self-running CD, and the screensaver, but the damned thing also does DVDs and VideoCDs. Holy snot! It rendered up the slideshow on to a VideoCD for me and we were able to play it back on our DVD player. I mean DAYAM! These people have made a totally awesome piece of software. Hats-off to Photodex. In a world of bloatware and difficult-to-use shite, ProShow is almost too cool for words.
Aha. So now we know why Bush waited to wheel out Saddam when he did. Whilst the world was distracted with the convenient capture of Saddam, Bush quietly and quickly pushed through a vast change to the Patriot Act in the hopes that nobody would notice. The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 grants the FBI unprecedented power to obtain records from financial institutions without requiring permission from a judge. Under the law, the FBI does not need to seek a court order to access such records, nor does it need to prove just cause. Another part of the constitution chewed away then. Meanwhile, it seems that all us motorcyclists are not only hooligans and criminals, we're now terrorists too. There was a knee-jerk panic in Paris as a woman with a heated motorbike jacket got on board a jet bound for Cincinatti. Apparently airport officials don't know the difference between a heated motorbike jacket and a bomb. She was arrested on terrorism charges before they
I'm all for snow - it's fun. And now it's a week after the event, I can look back on it with some humour. Believe me though, by the third day without power, 24 inches of fresh powder in the driveway and burying the house simply wasn't funny. I mean come on - that's a retarded amount of snow to get in such a short period of time! And trust me - no amount of willpower is going to get 2ft of snow out of your drive with an electric snowblower during a blackout.....
George Orwell was unavailable for comment today as the US panicked and started fingerprinting and photographing everyone entering the country. And this will help kerb terrorism how, exactly ?
Oh and in true carbon-copy style vice president Blair has copied El Busho by paying a "surprise" visit to the troops in Iraq. Wow. We weren't expecting that. Much.
NASA Finally got it right last night. Spirit bumped down on Mars and sent back a carrier tone indicating it was alive. This morning, the net is alive with amazing b+w pictures taken from the lander camera showing the unfolded lander with the Spirit buggy parked awaiting deployment. Our own Beagle 2 is still quiet. They now think that the clock software might have errored, or that it might be sitting in a small crater which is blocking signals. Mars Express is being moved into a lower orbit tonight to see if that brings new clues.