Blizza Blizza

The New York Times:

That means no pennants baring sports team logos, no Jolly Rogers, no rainbow banners celebrating gay pride and no historic flags showing a coiled rattlesnake bearing its fangs.

Indeed, I’m sure that were rattlesnakes capable of written language, they’d have written themselves a constitution granting the right to bear fangs, especially since fangs are an inherent trait of their species and all, but I do believe the copyeditor over at the old Grey Lady somehow managed to interchange “baring” (uncovering or showing, often in a display of aggression) and “bearing” (bringing or carrying) in this sentence.

I love soccer, and I’m fully aware that 90% of Americans don’t care about it, but how’s about FIFA grant the ability to the referee, in consultation with the linesmen, to award a goal when an opposing defender (say, Uruguay’s Luis Suarez) commits an intentional handball within the six-yard box, and said infraction is the last line of defense between the ball and a certain goal?

Heck, limit it to within the lateral limits of the goal mouth if you want. But it’s pretty clear to all involved that what Suarez did was a (legal, under the current rules) deal with the devil that cost Ghana the match. If that goal is awarded, Gyan doesn’t miss a penalty, and Uruguay is forced to score in the last few seconds of the game. Suarez himself said the red card and automatic one-match suspension were “worth it”, and no one would argue otherwise — without that handball, the match for which Suarez would earn his suspension would be some meaningless international six months down the road with Uruguay out of the World Cup.

Life isn’t fair, but sport is man’s attempt to construct a framework of fair competition. Awarding only a penalty as compensation after a defender has illegally prevented a certain goal is, well, unfair. Memo to FIFA: fix it.

“Australia in sex-tourism campaign” does not in any way mean the same thing as “Australia launches a nation-wide advertising campaign to accompany tough new laws against sex tourism.”

My mom was trying to send a .zip file of photos to my aunt and my cousin tonight. Easier than e-mailing a folder, especially since my aunt uses Hotmail and my cousin doesn’t have a Mac. Gmail’s SMTP server threw up this ever-so-helpful error in Eudora (which is not addressed at all in Gmail Help):

Couldn’t send message; server says “552 5.7.0 review our attachment guidelines. f6sm13922652anb.16”.

The same attachment sends just fine if you change the extension from .zip to .txt.

The ultimate solution? There isn’t one. Gmail, for whatever reason, does not like this file, which was created by Control-clicking a folder of a few JPEG images (all with the “.jpg” extension) in Finder and choosing “Compress”. Hey, Google, a folder full of JPEGs created on a Mac is not a security risk.

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

Patrick Smith’s “Ask the Pilot” column this week is another must-read.

Someone hand Jim DeMint, the junior Senator from South Carolina, a dictionary with the words “irony” and “hypocrite” highlighted, fast:

[Southers] will not give me a straight answer [as to whether he would allow TSA employees to have collective bargaining rights]. This is all about politics and not security.

This is the same Jim DeMint who has been blocking the nomination of Errol Southers as head of the TSA because, as Joe Sharkey so eloquently put it, “DeMint, a former market researcher, has surveyed the situation and identified the real terrorist threat to America: Unions.”

Now who’s about politics, Jim?

From the Grey Lady:

“If the American government really wants to advance relations with Cuba, I recommend they leave behind the conditions of internal governance that they are trying to impose on us and that only Cubans can decide,” Raúl Castro said in his assembly speech.

So, Raúl, how about letting Cubans actually, you know, decide? No population in the history of the world has ever voted to uphold a Communist or totalitarian government in free and untainted elections, and it strikes me as unlikely that it’ll happen this time. (As far as I can remember; readers are free to point out obscure exceptions in the comments.)

The latest ruckus here in the Great Lakes area is about the Asian carp that are on the threshold of invasion. Chicago, and by extension, the rest of Illinois, claims they aren’t a big problem and aren’t as close as all kinds of scientific evidence says they are, while Michigan outdoors types are quite literally foaming at the mouth at the idea of 100-pound carp invading the already-devastated (zebra and quagga mussels, sea lampreys, etc.) Great Lakes ecosystem. Wisconsin is the latest of the Great Lakes states to file an amicus brief with the US Supreme Court in Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox’s request for an injunction to close a major shipping canal in Chicago. Minnesota and Ohio have already filed briefs in support of the injunction.

Notably absent from the list is Indiana, the state with the least shoreline along the Great Lakes. Of course, Indiana has already demonstrated it doesn’t give a crap about Lake Michigan anyway, when it issued a permit to BP/Amoco to dramatically increase its pollution output from the Whiting refinery south of Chicago.

So the two states with the shortest coastlines on the Great Lakes get to destroy them for the rest of us? Yeah, screw you, Illinois, and that Hoosier horse you rode in on.

I don’t really have anything to say here that this guy and Joe Sharkey haven’t already said.

Just to reiterate, though: if the bomb gets on the plane, we’ve already lost. Once it’s there, no procedure anyone can ever invent is going to stop someone from succeeding in bringing down an airplane.

Signing up for online access to Consumer Reports…

Why bother telling people passwords are case-sensitive if you only allow them to use all-lower-case letters in the passwords? Besides decreasing security (it cuts the number of characters required to guess the password roughly in half), it’s pointless — there’s no technical reason for forcing passwords to be all lower-case while simultaneously using case-sensitive comparison routines when checking them for accuracy.

OK, so I fixed that…and was promptly greeted with this:

Aside from the idiocy of telling the user the password is invalid before telling them the username is also invalid, it’s bad UI to present errors piecemeal like this. If there are multiple invalid parts of a submission, you should be telling your users all at once, so they can fix it all at once, rather than making them click multiple times and becoming increasingly frustrated each time. (I believe my exact exclamation after I was presented with this was “You dumb motherf*ckers!”)