April 2007 Archives

I was reading an article about the impending veto showdown on the military appropriations bill, which sets a deadline (non-binding, I might add), for withdrawal from Iraq. Bush claims he'll veto it when it hits his desk.

I say, let him. But let him do so after telling him: That's the only appropriations bill we're going to pass.

Congress speaks as the "voice of the people", and the people want a withdrawal. If Bush doesn't want to withdraw, that's fine, he can ignore the will of the people. He just has to figure out how to fund it without the aid of Congressional spending.

Make him choose between "doing what the people want", and "keeping the troops safe," because without any spending, those troops are going to run out of necessary supplies pretty quick. Maybe he can go ask some of our "many many" partners in the "coalition of the willing" to pony up some cash. That would certainly solve his problem. He just can't take the money from my wallet to pay for his bullshit war any more.

I've been thinking a lot about the Virginia Tech thing the last few days. Partly because my brother-in-law is a VT alum, as is my father-in-law. Partly because I also work on a college campus. But I've been very reticent to talk about it. Why? Because to a certain extent, I agree with this blog entry about it not being an appropriate moment yet to discuss my real thoughts.

Because oh, do I have thoughts on the topic. But right now is a time to, as Jack Bogdanski says, shut the fuck up about such thoughts.

There will be plenty of time to talk about "where things went wrong" at a macro level, or any of the various blame-game type things. For now, it's time to let people grieve, to give them the time and support they need to get through the upcoming days. After the worst of that is past, then we can look back and start to try and prevent future occurrences.

Got the following e-mail:

The following events have been Accepted for Consideration. After Gen Con reviews your event you will only be notified if we cannot schedule your event.

RPG00176 Barroom Blitz IV: The Musical Interlude
RPG00177 Barroom Blitz IV: The Musical Interlude
RPG00178 Barroom Blitz IV: The Musical Interlude

Sweet.

Like many folks, I have my e-mail protected by various anti-spam features. However, there's also companies I deal with that I want to always receive their mail, and I don't want it tagged or blocked as spam. So for those companies, I create custom addresses, and set them up in my mail server so that they are never ever spam-protected.

I came home from Easter dinner last night to find that I had 50 or so spam messages in my inbox. This was highly unusual, one or two is about average. Turns out, the super-secret e-mail address which has only ever been given to Intuit/Quicken ... is the recipient address.

In other words, Intuit's quicken billpay contact list has been compromised, near as I can tell. I won't claim that it has, but short of random attacks on my mail server to find a working e-mail address that isn't exactly "common" (no evidence of which, by the way, is in my mail server logs), I'm hard-pressed to offer up any alternative hypothesis. Their No-Sharing Practice page seems to indicate there's no significant reason this leakage should have occurred.

I've looked over my transactions online and see no evidence of wrong-doing, so it doesn't appear as if they compromised my financial data (but then again, who knows?). I've filed a ticket with Intuit and asked them to call me today to discuss the matter.

So, if you use Quicken Bill Pay service, you may want to take a hard look at your transactions and make sure that nothing crazy is going on.

The Yankee Stadium parking page has this to say about construction related parking lot closures:

Ongoing construction of the New Yankee Stadium may cause street and/or parking lot closures in the area around the current stadium. Please budget ample time when planning your trip and be sure to consider using public transportation.

If I could re-write that, it would say something like this:

Our parking map shows a total of 17 different parking lots in the immediate surrounding vicinity of the stadium. Unfortunately four of them are closed. Worse still, these are the parking lots with some of the highest capacities of all of them. If you want a parking spot, plan on showing up about three hours in advance. If not you'll be parking along the side of the road about a mile away from the stadium. Oh yeah, seriously don't just "consider" public transportation -- swear by it.

But that's just me. I guess that wouldn't sound as official. Maybe that's why I'm not in PR.