With the new year, I am planning to move my "social" blogging to my LiveJournal account (rjray.livejournal.com). Thus far, I've just been using it to enable my LJ-using friends to include me in filters they create for privacy. But it has a lot of features, as any die-hard LJ user will attest, and it just makes more sense to use them than to keep trying to hack Blosxom to add the same basic functionality as already exists. Perhaps one day I'll get around to writing a nifty, pluggable, slick package of my own. But for now, LJ will fill the space just fine.

This site is not going away, though, just changing in its focus. I will be making this domain a portal for the varied blogs I keep (most of which update far too rarely, an issue I'll probably set as part of my New Year's resolutions). Specifically, I will be aggregating all of these many and varied sources into this blog. So if you prefer to read from here, not only will you not miss anything, you'll be getting more than before. Well, you may actually miss some things, because LJ will allow me to create filters for friends which will allow me to write about things that are more personal, things that I currently don't write about here because I have no control over the readership. (I could add more Blosxom plugins or write my own, but that goes back to the previous argument about using LJ instead of reinventing it.) So, you may still miss things, but you wouldn't have seen them anyway so does that really count as missing them?

At present, I plan to be collecting the following here:

• LiveJournal - http://rjray.livejournal.com
• use.perl.org Journal - http://use.perl.org/~rjray/journal
• Java Eye for the Perl Guy - http://jroller.com/page/rjray
• This Week in Warfare - http://www.thisweekinwarfare.net

The last item is a podcast that I started back in May, but which I've only managed two installments. That's also on the resolutions list.

Should I (foolishly) add any other journalling to my pantheon, those too should get reflected here. When I make the switch-over, odds are that the others will initially show up here as a flood. In the case of the LJ, Java and podcast streams that won't be too bad; the LJ account has fewer than 15 posts in it at present, and neither of the Java or podcast blogs has yet reached double-digits. The Perl blog, though, I've been using for quite some time. Whatever the limit of entries it returns in an RSS feed, expect them all to land at once. These things, they happen.

And speaking of RSS (and/or Atom) feeds, if you use them then the one from here will just be that much more useful, since it will encapsulate the whole mess. Currently, there's a syndication channel on LJ that reads the RSS feed for this site. I'm hoping to have the current one removed so that I can re-create it under my ownership (the existing one was created by a friend, but as such my ability to monitor/control it is essentially nil). I may even go so far as to customize a feed specifically for LJ-based syndication (for those of you who read this via that channel, and might be thus interested). Otherwise those who are LJ users already and have me listed as a friend will end up seeing my LJ posts twice, which is not a good way to keep people interested and reading.

Went well, very well. I felt very welcomed by everyone here, the people I met last month at the interview and people that were new to me. Any worries I may have had about whether I made the right choice, these were laid to rest today. I'm home.

In about, oh, 12 hours or so, I'll be hitting the road to return to California. This isn't what I had planned for December, back in May when I left. But then, nothing has really gone as planned these last 7 months or so.

Yesterday, I had lunch with that pastor I mentioned earlier. I mentioned that I was worried that at some hidden emotional level, I'd really chosen the job in California strictly for the money. That's a dangerous reason to take a job, because you can find yourself without any foundation if the going gets at all tough. But he pointed out that I'd already talked a lot about the friends I have there in the bay area, and that it seemed to him that there was more to this choice than just the difference in salary.

Either way, I wish I'd had the foresight to stay in California. I mean, Colorado has been beautiful, my friend that I've been staying with has been super, and I've met some interesting new people. But moving a second time within the year, that's going to be the opposite of fun. Trying to pick and choose what I can fit in the Saturn and what has to be left behind... and this is just in reference to the materials I've been using on a day-to-day basis. I'm not even counting the stuff that was intended all along to stay in storage while I was in London. I've been most of the day packing, and trying to sort things into "stay" and "go" boxes. The car will be pretty full, much more so than in 1997 when I only carried a suitcase and 4 boxes of books. For one thing, I learned that I need more than that to get by on.

I just hope I know what I'm doing, taking this route. I feel good, very good about the job itself. But part of me still feels like I took the easy way out, picked the safe option rather than challenge myself. But the pastor-guy was right in that a lot of it came down to missing my friends, a lot. I would be a hell of a wreck right now, emotionally (well, moreso than I probably already am), but for the people that are waiting to greet me when I get there. My life's suck-meter is reading pretty low right now, so I am definitely stopping short of any actual complaint. But complaint and self-doubt are two different things, and I still have plenty of the latter to go around.

See you guys pretty soon, now...

After weighing some very nice competing offers, I've decided to return to California to take a job with a company in Palo Alto. It means delaying my desire to migrate to London (and I say "delay" in an effort to assure myself that I can try again as some future date), and turning down an opportunity to work on the guts of the Mozilla SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine.

But lest you think I'm complaining, what it also means is that I'm going to get to do some very interesting work in high-traffic management of news feeds (as in actual journalistic feeds, not just any yahoo with a blog and an RSS link on the sidebar), with some added potential for research into semantic web issues as they apply to content itself. It also means that I'll be returning to the bay area, where I have a pretty nice circle of friends, all of whom (that I've talked to thus far) are eager to welcome me back. So while London held a certain romantic mystery for me, I'm awfully lucky to be able to go back to a place where I have so many friends and where I know the lay of the land so well.

Exact details of transition, starting-date, etc. have not been worked out (I'm actually in London as I type this). I'm eager to start as soon as I can, but in practical terms that will probably still take a few weeks, as I have to get things together in Denver, establish where I'll be staying until I've banked enough money to get a new place (not looking forward to apartment hunting again), and wrap up some contracting committments that are still outstanding. Plus, this upcoming week is Thanksgiving, and I had planned on visiting family in Mesa, Arizona. So there are several days this week where nothing will really get done, either. Still, I expect to start not later than December 11th, unless the company has paperwork-ish issues that take longer than that to work through.

So if you're in the bay area and have missed me, I shall be back in mere weeks. If you haven't missed me, at least pretend like you did. I'm going to be having enough self-doubt over the decision I made in the initial 2-3 months, until I can get more or less settled, at least let me think you're sympathetic...

Full version of Hacking Democracy downloadable from Google.

If you don't get HBO, this is your chance to check it out and draw your own conclusions.

For all our sakes, get out and vote tomorrow. I don't care who you vote for (well, that's not true, I do care– but it isn't my business so I'm not asking or offering my own suggestions), just do it.

I don't share the optimism that so many liberals seem to be riding on. I think there are plenty of ways this can go wrong (from my perspective of "right" and "wrong"). But it would be nice to have an actual reasonable turn-out for a midterm.

So, yesterday I went to a church service for the first time in over 14 years. As I've written recently, I have a lot of crap rattling in my head. So I wrote to the pastor, seeing as I did in fact enjoy the service and the guy seems like a really genuine person, and, well, I found it really easy to be writing.

So now, I have a reply and I'm afraid to read it. After all, the guy might actually have something useful and/or helpful to say. Can't have that, now, can I?

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (HSA) has proposed that all airlines, cruise lines-even fishing boats-be required to obtain clearance for each passenger they propose taking into or out of the United States.

This proposal would trump passports– whether you have one or not, you would still have to get a definitive "yes" from HSA to leave or re-enter. A non-answer would count as "no" until/unless clarified.

The article's author trips over Godwin's Law at the end, but there have been plenty of (other) regimes over the last 100 years that forbade their citizens from leaving without prior permission. And we don't want to be on that list with any of them.

May I please get a job overseas and get out of here, preferably before I have to rely on "permission" to move about freely?

I just got back (well, not just, as it's taken time for me to write and edit this) from seeing Shortbus, for the second time. I realized I hadn't reviewed it, and I will after I write this post. But for some reason, the movie leaves me highly emotional, so I want to get some thoughts written down before I dilute them with things like a movie review. They're diluted enough as it is, just from driving back home to the suburbs. Suburbs seem to have that sort of numbing effect on people, I've noticed.

I'll start off with a nice, bland disclaimer. Nothing in the whining-to-come should be interpreted as me feeling like I "identify" with some aspect of the movie. This is no tortured Emo kid's plea to be noticed and "understood". So if you think you'll find yourself smirking over any of this, you might want to just skip it. If you venture forth and end up smirking anyway, do me a favor and just move along. Don't send me e-mail tut-tuting my self-indulgent navel-gazing. Just don't.

I'll make it easier... I'll put in a cut-line to keep anyone from accidentally reading.

(more...)

Women acting as human shields aid escape of Palestinian militants

Okay, here's a little shift in perception for you. After establishing myself as mondo-Liberal (note the capital "L"), here's an opinion you'll probably consider to be inconsistent: the Israelis in this case should have levelled that mosque long before the women had arrived to act as shields.

I am no longer at all interested in or involved with any form of organized religion. I haven't since, hmmmm, around 1992 or so when I walked out in the middle of a Sunday-evening service when the preacher was using the pulpit to push a political, rather than spiritual, agenda. But I will say this: if you want to claim that your faith is basically peaceful notwithstanding a perceived need to fight for your own freedom, then you don't get to use your houses of worship as fortresses. If and when you do, you have defiled it and it is no longer sacred. I don't care if you are Christians holed up in a church, Jews in a synagogue or Muslims in a mosque. These 70+ gunmen were hiding in a mosque, counting on the reluctance of the IDF to seriously attack it out of concern over public perception. And to make it all the worse, they used, and I mean used, women as human shields to escape. And odds are pretty good that most of the stories we read in the media will focus more on the deaths of the two women, than on the fact that there were over 70 armed people using a house of worship as a bunker.

I'm not real fan of Israel these days. There was a time when I felt that they were just doing what they had to in order to survive as a nation and as a people. I think they've been over-stepping those bounds for a long time, now. But I have to side with them in this case, because the only thing about this situation that is more cowardly and base than hiding behind the walls of a mosque (what were the rest of the local Muslim populace supposed to use for worship, while they were doing this?), the only thing lower and more deserving of scorn, was putting out an appeal to women to come and risk being shot so that the "brave" fighting "men" of Hamas could skulk away.

That building should have been (and still could be) razed to the ground. And if I read about some weird separatist Christian sect using a church to hide weapons and/or armed persons in, I'll say the same. Ditto for temples. It's bad-enough when religion is used to justify violence in the first place, but when it's also used to protect cowardice, that's beyond the pale.

I'm fifteen minutes from the end of the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy. And I'm having a reaction I have not yet had to any political issue before: I'm weeping.

Most of you who know me know that I am an unashamedly big-"L" liberal. And my reactions to the elections since 2000 have been pretty much all negative. I've responded with anger, disbelief, outrage and no small amount of profanity. But before tonight, I hadn't outright wept before.

In Tallahassee, Florida, on December 13th of 2005, several people from the Florida Election Commission and the organization Black Box Voting, are taking part in an exercise they're calling "The Hursti Hack". Finnish security expert Harri Hursti has claimed that the Diebold tally machines (the machines that scan the optical-recognition ballots) can be hacked in an effectively "hands-off" manner by attacking the memory cards that the machines use. Diebold officials had denied Hursti's originally written report. The report included the revelation that the memory cards contained not only data files for vote tallies, but an executable program. By hacking this program on a sample memory card, Hursti believed he could alter the votes as they were being tallied, obviating the need for trying to hack the central tabulation machines. After all, if the memory cards themselves have altered the data, your work is done for the day.

They set it up like this: Hursti is kept out of the room. He has no input in which of the scores of tally machines will actually be chosen for use. One is chosen by drawing it's number from a bowl. A test ballot is used, that has just one yes-or-no question: Can the votes on this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card? Hursti and Dr. Hugh Thompson, another security expert who had come to the conclusion that the Diebold machines could not be trusted, will vote "yes". Six others, including Leon County supervisor of elections Ion Sancho, will vote "no". After the machine is selected and placed on the table, Sancho fetches the memory card from Hursti in the other room. It is plugged in, the machine switched on, and the boot-up print-out spools from the box. We watch as all eight ballots are fed into the machine, followed by the special marker-sheet that instructs the machine to stop accepting new ballots and print the tape with the vote tally.

Final tally: seven votes "yes", a single vote "no".

Susan Pynchon, Director of the group Florida Fair Elections Coalition, utters the sentence that titles this post:

Oh my gosh, do you know what this means?

I do, Susan. I know what it means. It means the only reason I don't feel like I wasted my time voting in 2004, is because the state of California had already booted the Diebold machines out of the precincts, and offered a back-handed smack to Diebold in the process. OK, it was just one model, and Diebold got out of the suit with a laughable $2.6M settlement. But since it's already past, I'll have to settle for what reassurance I can scrounge together.

But this also means that I won't be the least bit surprised if I wake up November 8th to hear that a "surprising Republican voter turnout" is credited with them retaining control of both houses of congress.

If by "liberal", you mean, "We won't run a movie ad that is disparaging of the president."

Los Alamos docs turn up in meth lab bust

This is another one I first heard about on NPR. It's very different from My Brightest Diamond, and in a lot of ways it's more my style. There's no really easy basis of comarison, though, so I'll stick to the merits of this one on its own.

Again, I know next to nothing about this group. The first time I even heard their name was the NPR review of this album. The review included snippets from two of the songs– "The Island" and "Sons & Daughters"– that are probably the two strongest tracks on the disc. The latter, in fact, is my personal favorite. I have yet to tire of it, and I have no idea how many times I've played and re-played it. This isn't to say that the rest of the album is weak, though. Like my last review, this is an album that has a quasi-concept feel to it, in that it plays very well from start to finish as if it were a whole musical piece in 10 segments. The other track highlighted in the review, "The Island", is itself a three-movement piece (the NPR review excerpted from the second section). And the title track, "The Crane Wife", is in three parts that are divided oddly: Part 3 opens the album, and parts 1 & 2 make up the next-to-last track. Other noteworthy tracks include "Shankill Butchers" and "Yankee Bayonet".

The sound reminds me a lot of XTC, with the vocalist coming across a little like Edward Ka-Spel of the Legendary Pink Dots. "Shankill Butchers" really reminded me of some of the simpler accoustic LPD material I've heard in the past. Musically, the group is very tight and clearly very comfortable playing together. There's a moderate progressive vibe running through the album, with some of the songs being a good distance from the "safe" 4/4 beat. I've listened to this one straight through, end-to-end, at least a dozen times since I got it last Saturday. Highly recommended.

The Decemberists - The Crane Wife

It's starting to look less and less likely that I'll ever see London from the perspective of a resident. The job I was supposed to move there for, fell through some time ago. I've been looking for a new one by means of the recruiter who initially set me up, but it's been moving extremely slowly. At the same time, I've been looking back in the bay area, and that's moving much more quickly.

As far as conflicts go, I have no real room to be complaining. There are so many people out there with problems more serious and facing consequences more severe. "Oh no! I might have to live in California again!" Geez. Still, I'm laying awake at nights trying not to actually break into tears. I've wanted to spend time in Europe for ages, and I fell in love with London in 2000. I really thought I had shit together for this, but it's been one mis-step after another. Not all of them have been mine, but I can't blame them all on other people, either. The more I think about not living in London, the more depressed I become. It's affecting my ability to do the work I currently have, and I'm sure it affects my demeanor when I interview. I've been doing mostly OK in the interview department (I'll be in the bay area around the 8th of November to do a full-day interview with $EMERGING_INTERNET_STARTUP, to be named later when I can talk about them here), but there have been several that should have gone without a hitch but were instead train-wrecks.

To make matters worse, I feel bad about feeling bad about it. I have so many friends in the bay that I've missed terribly. When I came back to Denver, it was supposed to be for only a few weeks. Maybe a month. But I also saw myself as re-basing here, with the plan of coming back to here after finishing my great European Adventure. But instead, the time here has driven home how much I had finally put down roots in the bay, and begun to feel like I belonged. So it seems almost as though I should be elated at the prospect of moving back. And I am happy to know that if/when London does fall through, I can so easily go back to the bay and pick up where I left off. (Mostly, that is. I don't relish trying to find an apartment out there after giving up my way-below-market-rate digs in Campbell.)

Tons of people would kill if my problem was their worst dilemma. But I am still distraught over it, and don't know how this is going to eventually pan out. I prefer things to be more stable and predictable than this. I wanted to be in London, already.

Place the 50 states on a map, without outlines.

I scored 92% (46 of 50 placed perfectly), with an average error of 25 miles. I really expected to do much worse.

Heard about this one on NPR. It's hard to describe– a strong Yo La Tengo vibe with a sprinkling of Lou Reed. The singer's voice reminds me a little of Portishead, though not quite as brittle. Thus far, "Disappear" is my favorite single track. But this album has a whole-entity feel to it (again, reminiscient of Portishead and Yo La Tengo). I'm listening through from front to back for the second time, now, and it just has a really nice smoothness to it.

I know next to nothing about the group, except that I had enjoyed the excerpts from the review on the afternoon news show on the local NPR station. There's some nice use of strings, and the melodies are on the alternative side, venturing towards prog-rock territory without getting close enough for the pretentious to rub off. The lyrics are engaging, as well. Certainly worth a test-listen on iTunes, or borrowing from a friend.

My Brightest Diamond - Bring Me the Workhorse

Fortunately, various conservative personas are quick to assure us that there are no threats to our constitutional rights. People are not being arrested for political demonstration (not counting the nearly 2000 in NYC in 2004), the habeus corpus rights of the accused are still intact, and the government is not trying to erode the separation of church and state.

Keith Oblbermann's comments on the Clinton/Wallace interview, and the portrayal of Clinton as "crazed" by the Bush Glee Club that is Fox News:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3592217964261572444

(Link via Google Video)

We needed someone saying these things 4 1/2 years ago.

The following coversation just took place in the house. Note that housemate ("HM") is a Christian working for a faith-based non-profit, and occassionally does catering on the side (she's an excellent cook and baker). This weekend, the two overlap as she's been contracted to make a lunch spread for a social event involving some of the non-profit's board members.

The array of foods she's making includes a few dozen sugar cookies (from scratch, of course), which she's cut out into various shapes: hearts, flowers, stars, and of course crosses. Because these people are protestants (as was I, when I considered myself a person of faith), and for us protestants kitsch is as important a part of the daily diet as vitamins and minerals. A fifth food group, you might say. So she finishes the cookies and decided to turn in for the night. Realizes that they'll dry out in the "crisp" Colorado fall air (it's hella dry here once the temperatures start coming down). Dilemma: how to keep them from drying out without coming back downstairs? Solution: ask the housemate ("ME") to wrap things up:

So touchy...

The Siege is not exactly an Oscar-calibre film. But watching it (more or less, in the background as I write code) this evening, it strikes me how prescient it seems to be; the setting of NYC, encroachment on civil liberties, unlawful surveillance of citizens, torture and murder of suspects by military persons. It was released in 1998, almost obviously as a response to the 1995 World Trade Center attack. But the relevance and resemblance to the present-day, to the way things have gone since 2001, is almost uncanny. (All except the "happy" ending, where all the terrorists are caught and the bad army man is jailed for the murder of a prisoner. I don't really expect to see anything like that any time soon.)

I could do without the over-the-top dialoque, particularly the really bad lines Denzel Washington was given. And I don't necessarily see the president putting a major city under martial law, or said military presence leading to the rounding up of people en masse and locking them up in makeshift detention facilities. But with so much of the rest of it having come around, I do worry. I don't see it, but four years ago I wouldn't have seen our military engaged in torture, and memos from the administration's own legal team justifying it.

(Still, don't watch it expecting any break-out performances.)

As the initial "OH SWEET MOTHER OF GOD THEY CAN BLOW US UP WITH SNAPPLE BOTTLES!!" hysteria subsides, we discover that these guys had been under surveillance, completely penetrated, by no less than three major intelligence agencies. That they were planning on cell phones, and some of them openly travelled to Pakistan (way to keep the cover, Reilly, Ace of Spies). Hell, Chertoff knew about this two weeks ago, and the only reason that some people can scream this headline:

"The London Bombers were within DAYS of trying a dry run!!!"

– was because MI-5, MI-6, and Scotland Yard let them get that close, so they could suck in the largest number of contacts (again, very spiffy police work). The fact that these wingnuts could have been rolled up, at will, at any time, seems to have competely escaped the media buzz.

This, and the quickness with which the administration tried to make political hay out of this (VP Cheney implying that our democratic process encourages the enemy, and a CNN anchor going so far as to imply that one of the candidates in the Connecticut senate race might be "the al Qaeda candidate"), these are the reasons I'm not running around wetting myself in fear. Another point that seems to be lost on the media: Of all the intelligence gathered by the various British agencies in this operation, none of it involved torture.

Since I have a strong interest in things London, I've been following the arrest of the so-called bombing plot conspirators. It's looked fishy from the very start, and the following editorial from Craig Murray doesn't help:

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.

I'm not saying they didn't want to blow up planes, just that they probably weren't going to. At least, not anytime soon. What I am strongly implying is that the timing of this was politically-driven.

In a few hours, I report in for another surgery. One of the screws that was put into my foot is working its way out. It's caused some serious infection in the area around the wound from the first surgery.

What this means, among other things, is that my departure from California will be delayed by at least one more week. Right now, I'm looking at leaving on May 8th. I'm still waiting on my work permit from the UK before I can make my actual travel plans. This unexpected surgery will also probably slow me down on the packing, so the extra week will be handy to have.

Man, this bites.

Plenty of other people are doing it, so I might as well...

On my birthday:

Three Events

1. 1791 - The United States Mint is created by the U.S. Congress.
2. 1873 - The U.S. Congress enacts the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" books through the mail.
3. 1915 - NACA, the predecessor of NASA founded.

Three Births

1. 1847 - Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish inventor (d. 1922)
2. 1920 - James Doohan, Canadian-born actor (d. 2005)
3. 1973 - Victoria Zdrok, Ukrainian model

Three Deaths

1. 561 - Pope Pelagius I
2. 1850 - Oliver Cowdery, American religious leader (b. 1806)
3. 1995 - Howard W. Hunter, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (b. 1907)

So, the birth of NASA (as a young'un), a good day for (would-be) Scottish inventors and super-hot ultra-scary-smart porn models, and a bad day for religious figures. It's a good day, I think I'll keep it.

(Edit: The first few I saw did 3+3+3, it wasn't until I read further into my LJ friends list that I realized the meme was supposed to be 3+2+1. I don't want to impugn any of the ones I chose by dropping them in favor of others.)

Now, there is Google Mars.

(On a side note, I know the main programmer from the NASA/ASU side of this project. You can hear a short interview with him on the podcast called "Sturgeon's Law", episode 27. And as it happens, I also know the guy behind Sturgeon's Law.)

I've written before about being restless out here. Some time back, I asked the question, "Should I stay or should I go?".

Looks like the answer is, "go".

Barring complications (like a rejection of my HSMP application), I will be taking a position with a company in London. Sometime in the next two months or so. I am contracted to a firm in NYC for the next 4 weeks or so, which is also about how long it will take the HSMP application to be processed (it used to take longer, but the recruiter in England says that it had been much faster lately). I also expect to take a week or so for each of Denver and Oklahoma City, before I leave.

This is more than a little bit scary, to me. It was hard-enough to move from Denver to San Jose. I've wanted to give England a go, but wanting it and facing the reality are two very different beasts. Still, I'm determined, and I'm not going to back out at the last minute.

There will no doubt be going-away-type festivities at some future point. More detail here as it develops.

I've been busy (details in a separate post), so I haven't updated on the foot recently.

It didn't heal, and I had surgery this past Friday. Man, I thought it hurt when it was just broken. It's starting to level off, now, after a few days. But for the first couple of days, not even the Vicodin seemed to do much (though I would have hated to see what it felt like without the V). I'm back on the crutches, and will be for a while. I also have to wear a foot condom when I shower, at least for the next few days.

You really don't appreciate the little things in life, like the bones in your foot, until they quit playing nice. You don't think about simple pleasures like WALKING AROUND THE APARTMENT, until such pleasures are denied (or at the very least, cease being pleasant).

But anyway, I'm OK, and while the foot hurts I'm sure it will get better in time. I'm getting caught up on rest, while also doing some contracting (again, more in a separate post). So, no worries.

My senior year of high school, I was taking a course in physics. The teacher arranged for us to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger live, on one of the TVs in the library. All 20 or so of us were seated there, watching as the first school teacher launched into space. Our teacher was really excited– had he been 10 years younger (and, perhaps, 50 pounds lighter) he would have applied for the teacher-in-space program.

We watched as Challenger exploded and disintegrated, 73 seconds after lift-off. That image is as burned into my consciousness as the footage of the second plane hitting the south tower on September 11. Seven people gave their all in the effort to explore space and advance science. If I sound a little flowery in my language, it's only because I feel they deserve nothing less.

We still remember you.

I've been laid off. This comes at a strange time for me, as I've been toying with either returning to Denver, or trying to get a work permit for the UK and moving there. Right now I'm still too frazzled to draw any sound conclusions.

More detail to follow.

Went for a follow-up last Wednesday. The break isn't healing like the doctor wants it to. There's a gap at one side of the break itself, which is keeping the little healing-cells from mending the two parts of bone back together. He gave me another 4 weeks of hobbling around in the Franken-foot before he looks at it again. If it isn't doing better, I get surgically screwed, I mean, I get a screw surgically implanted in the bone.

I've written a small Google Homepage plug-in to display the current Astronomy Picture of the Day, along with the photo credits. It scales it using percentages, so the image doesn't screw up browser-window-width like the APOD feed in LiveJournal does. I'd recently switched my news-homepage setup from Excite to Google, and since they provide such a handy API, I couldn't resist.

It links the image thumbnail to the full-resolution version at APOD. It links the section-title to the APOD page itself (handy if you want to read the detailed background of the image). Lastly, it reproduces the complete photo credits section, links and all. It also produces XHTML instead of using HTML <center> tags. (But since I don't know if GH actually emits strict XHTML, this part might not matter.)

I've submitted it to Google for their directory, but until then you can add it to your homepage via this link.

See this article at The Register.

I was able to get in to see a podiatrist Friday, no mean feat on such short notice. Turns out only one bone is broken, not two. He re-dressed the area and gave me an Aircast, which looks like it should be part of something bigger, like skiis, a snowboard, or a Frankenstinian monster. This will be 4-6 weeks to heal, depending on my body. I see the doctor again in a little less than two weeks.

I can walk, drive, dress myself, etc. But none of the above are especially easy for the time being.

I have broken two bones in my left foot. This is problematic for many reasons, not the least of which being that I live on the second floor and I drive a manual transmission.

The ER guys were very cool, we joked and chatted about things from the truly lame-ass way in which I broke it to the prospects of an upcoming Scary Movie 4 (yes, there is apparently going to be a fourth one). I have a "half-cast" right now, a high-tech bundling of carbon-fiber, wetted down with water and molding itself to my foot and heel. I have to do a lot tomorrow: I have to fill a prescription for painkillers (oh yes, I do), I have to contact a podiatrist to get the actual setting of bones and real cast taken care of, and I have to get some sweats to wear for the next 6 weeks, since I won't be cutting down any of my jeans to get them over the cast.

Oh yeah, and I have to go back and get my car. Yes, I drove myself to the ER with a broken foot working the clutch. I had to cab it home tonight, though, since they gave me some Vicodin for the pain. They said I wouldn't be able to drive my clutch with the half-cast. I think I can, but I had already taken the V's. Tomorrow, I'll get a friend (with an automatic) to drive me back, and if I can't work the clutch we can swap long-enough to get me home.

I really didn't need this.

Joe Decker