News Media in the USA sucks.  They (particularly Good Morning America) has concentrated on the Salahis as party crashers and media whores, and haven’t spent enough time on the fact that the Secret Service was asleep on the job.

First off, the Salahis deserve jail time, but not much.  They knew what they were doing was wrong, but their intentions don’t appear to have been to commit murder.

Second off, the fact that the Secret Service did NOT do their job indicates one thing: those under their protection are not safe.  They have the PRESIDENT to protect.  The most powerful man in the world – he controls the most powerful military force in the world.  No wonder 9/11 happened.  The Secret Service was likely asleep on the job.  We just didn’t know it then.

I read some of the comments on the linked article below, and someone brought up that some Northwest pilots were allowed to fly for over an hour, off course, without contact from the air traffic controllers.  We may never know if the air traffic controllers contacted the Secret Service, but that was also a definite failure of national security.

So what do we do?  We spend billions every year in homeland security, and we can’t even protect the president in the White House.  Terrible!

White House Party Crashers Michaele and Tareq Salahi: How They Slipped by the Secret Service – ABC News.

Palin’s former aide annoyed by portrayal in ‘Going Rogue’ – Politics AP – MiamiHerald.com.

The third comment from “Truthfairy”.

I am looking into getting cable and Internet services at my new house.  Needless to say, I am letting my fingers do some work and I’ve looked up Dish Network, DirecTV, and Time Warner to see who has what.  I figure I’ll go with who has the most for the cheapest.

Time Warner has the absolute WORST interface to compare.  You can’t get a channel list of the basic, digital, family, etc. tiers.  On the opposite side of the spectrum, DirecTV has the best – you can go to each of the packages and click on ‘print’ and you get a nicely formatted page to print and make notes on.  I had to copy Dish Network’s packages out to NeoOffice Calc (like Excel, but open source and based on Open Office).  At least it was easy to read and see the differences among their packages.

I have to admit.  I like flying.  Security doesn’t bother me that much, and I try to keep the flights short enough that the closeness to strangers doesn’t bother me too much.

What does bother me?  Delays.

Last Thursday, I flew from Palm Springs, CA to Dayton, OH.  Two flights (Palm Springs to Dallas, TX, and Dallas to Dayton).  I’ve flown many times before (2 flights on US Airways, 4 flights before on AA, 2 on Continental, and 16 that I can remember on Delta).  I’ve been to several airports (CVG, DAY, DFW, IAH, PSP, HSV, TPA, MIA, FLL, ATL, CLT… that I can remember).  Prior to my first flight on AA, I had been delayed on a plane once, and it was short.

Enter AA.  Last year around this time, I went to Palm Springs and was delayed 1.5 hours because maintenance decided to ground the plane that was supposed to take us there.  Adding that to the gate debacle (below), I was pretty pissed.  I vowed never to fly AA again.

The Gate Debacle

While flying from CVG to DFW, the flight attendant gave us the gate numbers to connecting flights.  We landed at gate D-something.  The flight to Palm Springs was going out of A-something.  I went to gate A-something with one of my associates, and noticed that gate A-something was going to Seattle.  My companion asked the gate attendant what was going on, and he told us that the assignment had changed, and it was going to leave from gate D-something.  We return to gate D-something, and around the time to board, they announced that there was a maintenance problem and the pilot wanted maintenance to look at it.  Ultimately, the plane was grounded, and they scrambled to find another plane to send to Palm Springs.  They found one… at gate A-something.  In retrospect, we should have checked the board.  Still, there was a 1.5 hour delay going to Palm Springs, causing us to arrive after they closed several restaurants in the area where we were staying.

Back to the current mess…

Despite my vow, I have a travel budget to preserve (I may want to travel to another conference later this fiscal year).  AA came up the cheapest.  Flying to Palm Springs was surprisingly easy, but I did learn from The Gate Debacle, and it didn’t matter because I couldn’t hear the flight attendant when she called the gates anyway.

Upon returning from Palm Springs is where the problems started.  Before leaving the ground in Palm Springs, the flight was delayed 15-30 min or so while they drained off the “over serviced” hydraulic fluid.  I passed this off as being chance and nothing more.  Seriously, would I have the bad luck of having another problem on this flight?

Then it happened.  They had just called the priority boarding, and then immediately came over the speaker and said that the pilot wanted us to wait so maintenance could look at the pedals.  Ultimately, maintenance grounded the plane.  We were 1.5 hours late to Dayton.

I know stuff happens sometimes, but seriously. I was delayed on  3 out of 8 flights with American Airlines.  In 20 flights on OTHER airlines, I was delayed once for 15-30 minutes.  So, with AA, there is a 37.5% chance of being delayed (and 25% chance that the delay will be in excess of 1 hour), and with the other airlines, there is a 5% chance of a delay.

To add insult to injury, I noticed that the gate attendants were having such a great time.  After telling my experience to a friend that works as a gate agent for another airline, she indicated that they are not allowed to joke (etc) in these types of situations – they would get ‘chewed out’.  I admire the forced professionalism.

From the “I’ve seen it all” file.

Soft Serve and Jingles Jangle Moms – NYTimes.com.

It amazes me that the parents in this article don’t put their foot down and say “no” to their kids.  “I’ve left my wallet at home” and “that’s not an ice cream truck, it’s a music truck” are signs of “I don’t have the guts to be a parent”.

For the record, my daughter, who does run to the door for the ice cream truck, knows what we mean when we tell her “no”.  We don’t make stupid excuses, and I think it breeds respect from her to us as parents, and she does enjoy the occasions that we do take her up to the truck for some ice cream.

Another example of a ranking done wrong.

The 30 Strongest Housing Markets in the U.S: Boulder rocks – BusinessWeek.

In this one, there are several things that make me want to question their ranking capability:

1. #6 is Pittsburgh.  If that isn’t reason enough to question the entire thing, look at the median value of only $119,800.  Not many rich people there, and ‘median’ means that half of the homes sold for less than that.

2. Pictures on 8, and 12 are bad in some way shape or form.  #8 looks like it is falling over, and #12 looks like a scan of an old slide… almost like they found something on Flickr or Panoramio instead of something from Realtor.com or the local convention-visitor’s bureau.

3. #10 is Oklahoma.  Not Oklahoma City, but Oklahoma… which was a state last time I checked.  Evidently, this article lacked the proofreading of someone with a degree higher than a GED.

4. #14 is Springfield, Ohio.  Locally, we know Springfield as the capital of antique malls.  Also, the median value is $93,500.  Perhaps due to foreclosures?

5. #22 is Bay City, Michigan.  The median value is $80,100, the annual change is -11%, and the economy is built on manufacturing (which includes a GM plant).  Take a look at some of the old steel cities (Youngstown, Ohio, for example) and look at what happens to the economy when a major employer tanks.  Not good for home values, is it?

6.  #25 is in California.  That not being enough, look at the median value (over $500k) and the annual change (-10.8%).    The 2008 National Average was 196.6.  Anything more than twice that is asking for disaster.

Some ideas to fix or avoid this:

1. Don’t publish lists of things that are currently under impact by wildly irregular circumstances.  The country is in the middle of a recession caused by a complete implosion of the housing market.  There are some great places to own houses that are not on this list because they are impacted by the mortgage crisis.

2. Make sure the criteria is obvious.  I don’t want to have to look for it.  When looking at the results, it should be obvious.  Don’t show things in the result that don’t relate or obscure the criteria.

3. Rankings should be geared towards the readers.  BusinessWeek readers are, presumably, business oriented.  Why show them half-metrics (annual change, but no indicator of which annum) or omit important metrics (change over last 5 years, change over last 10 years).

One of the local media must have been having a bout with lack of things to use the towercam for… Read the rest of this post… »

This was originally from http://www.orangelabel.com/icons.htm… They haven’t fixed it yet, I’m not sure if they’ve even noticed, but I saw it on Twitter…

Take a look at the IE webpage

Take a look at the IE webpage.

I’ve been working at home yesterday and today due to the bad weather.  We had 4″ of snow yesterday (Tuesday 1/27/09) and it was covered by 0.5″ of ice and another 3″ of snow, which is taking down tree branches and power lines.  I took my camera outside, below are some pics. Read the rest of this post… »

I took my Radio Controlled Car out into the snow last week, and got some pictures… Read the rest of this post… »