Blizza Blizza

Words cannot describe how incredibly offended I am by this story.

The AP is reporting that two US Airways employees in Philadelphia conspired yesterday to smuggle a gun through airport security — and damn near got away with it but for a suspicious passenger.

I have to take off my shoes when I’m not in uniform, the TSA wants to steal my shampoo and toothpaste when I’m not in uniform, my house keys get the third degree whether I’m in uniform or not (even from TSA “officers” who see me every week), and this jackass gets to waltz through a badged entrance into the security-sterile area of the airport and hand a gun to his roommate?

Can we just admit that the TSA isn’t accomplishing anything, and put that ridiculous agency to bed already? The GM and Chrysler bailouts/takeovers are NOTHING in comparison to the money the government is wasting on the TSA every year.

Some people clearly aren’t getting the concept:

The Freep is running this gem of an article today, by driving columnist Matt Helms:

How to avoid state seat belt crackdown

Uhm…it takes a whole article to say, “Buckle the hell up, idiots?” This is not a complicated concept, folks, and it is certainly not deserving of an entire newspaper article. That goes double when said article consists pretty much entirely of telling people where the enforcement zones are, and only includes the admonition to buckle up as part of a photo caption.

CC: Bike Nashbar, Twitter

If you can implement a multiple-confirmations-to-cancel process, you can bloody well implement a signup process that requires confirmation from the e-mail account owner. This way, I would not be getting friend requests to an e-mail address that has never been anywhere NEAR MySpace (Official Motto: “A Place for Molesters”). No unsubscribe/cancellation process should ever take more steps than it did to sign up in the first place.

This year’s winner for Best Use of “Ziggurat” In A Real Headline: the Knoxville (TN) News-Sentinel.

The Freep:

Quit or commit suicide, Iowa senator tells AIG execs

Might I recommend seppuku with a Frisbee?

So much for Apple Bug Friday (and the related Schadenfriday). No sooner did I finish writing up yesterday’s Fun Apple Bug of the Week post than I noticed a similar bug in Camino. The Camino bug is less of a pain, however, because

a) most people who hide the search field probably don’t use it often, if at all; and
b) it doesn’t create a situation where the app is basically unusable (you could still get the search field in a sheet with Command-Option-F, for instance).

Now if only I could figure out the circumstances that cause ExtendedSplitView to save a width property in the plist in the first place, I could figure out how this is happening and put a stop to it.

Just filed this as rdar://6612125 . Back up your Stickies database (in ~/Library/) and com.apple.Stickies.plist (in ~/Library/Preferences/) before attempting to reproduce this fun one.

1) Launch Stickies.app.
2) Close all open notes. (If you start with no StickiesDatabase file, there will be two by default.) When prompted to save, don’t.
3) Choose “Use as Default” from the Note menu.
4) Try to create a new sticky note.

In an entry about a bicycle headlight (a $500 bicycle headlight, I should note) on the excellent Cool Tools site:

In the winter I mountain bike one to two nights a week after dark on fast technical single track trails.

OK, where do I start? Ah yes: “In the winter I mountain bike”.

I can only assume the person writing this does not live anywhere north of, say, the Mason-DIxon line, because anyone living in the Midwest or Rockies or Northeast knows damned well that riding a bike in two feet of snow is not only impossible but suicidal if you go anywhere near cars.

Continuing on with “one to two nights a week after dark”: I understand work schedules are work schedules and it gets dark at four in the afternoon in December, but c’mon, man.

Then we come to “on fast technical single track trails”. Yeah, you should probably have your head examined. If God wanted you to ride bikes on terrain like that at night in the winter, He would have given you better eyes.

I love biking and getting outdoors, but I’m not anywhere near crazy enough to spend $500 on a headlight just so I can go bombing around difficult, rocky trails in the middle of the night. You better make sure you have the local ambulance service on speed-dial, because the Magic Eight-Ball sees a trip to the ER in your near future.

I’d be more than happy to spend $500 on a light if it kept all the crazies in cars from running over me, though.

New Year’s resolution for the guy who modified his 20-year-old washing machine to Twitter him when the laundry is done: unplug the Intertubes and move out of the parents’ basement.