“It was a bookmark,” Harrington, a special education teacher, told the St. Petersburg Times. “It’s not a weapon. I could not understand why I was being handcuffed and put into a police car. I cried for hours.”What is wrong with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)? When will the TSA ban people from flying because hands and feet can be considered a weapon? One day will you be charged with carrying a concealed weapon if you wear shoes onto a flight? When will people fight this madness?
Monthly Archive for September, 2004
Do you know how far things have been taken since the attacks on September 11, 2001? This is how far things have gone. A 52-year-old special education teacher was arrested in Tampa, Florida, as she went through airport security because her weighted bookmark was considered a concealed weapon. According to the article:
Sometime today or tomorrow I should have all of the professional pictures by Leonard Anzelde scanned. All I will need to do after they’re scanned is crop out the edges, then make some web pages where you can place an order. Hopefully I can do it quickly, but we’ll see.
I am going to move away from MovableType for posting to my blog. I am going to give WordPress a try. It appears to be more flexible than MT, is truly free, and will allow me to setup and administer multiple authors on the site much more easily. Those of you who read my blog and would like an opportunity to post to it, let me know. This can be especially useful as I will probably clost the forum at the end of the month.
There is an iTrip mod here. Since my iTrip has opened up by itself (cheap adhesive, if you ask me), I may just try it. I have to read over the process a few times just to see if I even really want to bother with it. I’ll post any notes if I do it.
If only I had four spare LCD monitors of identical size laying around the house, then I would build a virtual window, a la The Virtual Window Project.
The Virtual Windows above consist of eight 15″ LCD panels connected via custom-built cables to two nVidia Quadro PCI video cards, each with four DVI outputs.
I’ve got just the space for it in my office, too 
I browsed to this flash movie during my morning news read. It has an interesting take on the events at the Pentagon on 9-11-2001. I have never seen this footage, these quotes, or other information contained within the flash movie. I have not had the time to verify the information contained within the flash movie, so watch it knowing that.
I just finished Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress (DF), and I can’t say that I truly liked the book. After having read The Da Vinci Code (DVC) and Angels & Demons (A&D), DF seemed all too predictable, and quite a bit dated.
The story followed the same pattern as the two previously mentioned Brown books: the main character is an intelligent hero (in this case a heroine) with an equally intelligent companion, both of whom are trying to solve the same puzzle (although they do not know this for quite some time), while being tossed into strange conflicts and situations that sometimes are just too uncanny or strange, until the problem is finally solved through some haphazard detective work (and at least for me, what seemed to be many idiotic Duh! moments). The technical aspects of this book bothered me more so than anything else. For example, at one point the head Sys-Sec (Systems Security) officer aptly named Jabba because of his obeisity yells “VR!” to his right-hand woman, who brings up a visual representation of the NSA databanks being attacked by hackers from around the world in realtime. It is described in such a way as to make it seem like you were watching a video game as hackers tried to break into the NSA computers. It was just too flashy.
Without getting into too much more detail about the story, I will only say that this book is a decent read, although by no means does it compare with the thrilling story of A&D, and it comes nowhere close to DVC. If you’re looking for a great read, pickup the other two books and pass DF up. If you just want to read another Dan Brown novel, go ahead and read this, because it follows his story pattern exactly. I once thought of Dan Brown as a great author, but now I realize that he’s just like R.L. Stine and other serial writers: a single-story author who can from time to time come up with an interesting story to fit his usual pattern in an unusual way.
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