Swine Flu
There’s way too much hype over the swine flu (CDC info). The deaths are in the 100s, and mostly in Mexico. “Every year in the United States, on average 5% to 20% of the population gets the flu; more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from flu complications, and; about 36,000 people die from flu-related causes.” -CDC
So, @explicitmemory (who I don’t think I know) tweeted a link to GuideSpot.com’s article about surgical masks. The @toadstar retweeted it, then I read it, and this is the funniest part:
(from the filenames over at guidespot, I can only assume they are strictly protecting their unattributed photos – i.e. sas.localguides.com/bundles/guides_ep/assets/widget_dEgcm5ag9jLAO3iwIW7S2F.jpg)
on the other hand, this one is hot linked, we’ll see if it stays updated:
Tentative Itinerary
If you haven’t noticed me mention it yet, I am planning a 31 day Amtrak trip from Houston, mostly to the west. Two key points on the schedule are Padre’s Grand Opening over Memorial Weekend in Marfa, and Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.
So, here’s the rough timeline. Some of the pre-WWDC San Francisco and Reno parts aren’t exactly timed out yet. I have purchased the 30-day pass, and booked most of the legs of the trip.
Houston: The train only comes through Houston three times a week, so I’m leaving Wednesday night; Tentative Itinerary – continue reading …
Comment on Tentative Itinerary
TravelPod
I’m currently planning a 31 day Amtrak trip to WWDC and back. In a circuitous fashion. I’m going to test out TravelPod.com when I take my trip. From the little work I’ve done with it so far, the only benefit it has over WordPress is its location awareness. It’s much harder to edit.
I’ll likely cross-post to both it and this location. But if you want to check it out, click the link above.
Preamble
Some students in NYC produce an homage to the Preamble of the United States Constitution:
(HD) A More Perfect Union from Andrew Sloat on Vimeo.
And you’ll have to make your own connection to how this ended up in my head…
“I have to admit,” he said, “that I’m one of those people that still thinks the dishwasher is a miracle. What a device! And I have to admit that because I think that way, I like to load it. I like to look in and see how the dishes were magically cleaned.” -Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as quoted by the New York Times
Smelly Stuff
I’m not going to mention the words in text (the spiders will find them and send more people here), but I have daily visitors looking for the word in the image below. It leads them to an “in the news” post I made five years ago.
I’m not sure if it’s weird or it’s reassuring that so many people are interested in one of nature’s oddities.
DPS Fail, By Proxy
The Texas Department of Public safety subcontracts fee collection to the Municipal Service Bureau. I’m trying to pay a charge online and get all the way to the payment page where it fails quietly, without doing anything.
I call their 800 number. It only took 3 minutes on hold before I was informed that it doesn’t work “on Macs or on the iPhone. Maybe on Firefox. But there’s no way to be sure. So, wait a few hours and see if anything’s gone through my bank.”
I can certainly wait to give you money, but it would have been much more of a service to those of up whose taxes (and fees) are paying for your company to exist if you would have put 2 lines of code in your web app to say “sorry this isn’t going to work for you, stop now!”
I don’t mind this kind of public/private partnership. And indeed I suspect I would get worse support from a government run version of this. (DPS is closed today. Good Friday. Passover. Religious Holiday. MSB wasn’t.) But the government should also lean on this provider when they are not providing for all citizens.
Courteous: check, Service: partial, Protection: n/a.
