Logging on to Gmail just moments ago, I saw the following:
Invite 6 friends
to Gmail
I believe one of them is already promised away, unless that person has found another outlet, but that leaves five sort of up for grabs. The bidding starts at…
If you thought the Leah wedding reception thing was bad, you probabally should stay away from this, because its many times worse. But if you like reading about people’s suffering, or just want to put a problem in your life into perspective, read … and now I just feel terrible.
…
When the joke that we call our law can’t protect the good people in this world, what do the good people do?
If I ever want to recieve gifts at a party in my honor I should actually have the party at the date, time, and place I specify.
This seemingly simple addage played out today as I attempted to attend Leah’s wedding reception. Note the word attempted, because after I showed up at 8:00 for the 7:00-9:00 event at the announced time and the proper venue (which I double and triple checked when things didn’t seem right), it turns out that there was no reception going on. Nobody even at the house.
Maybe, joked my mom when I told her, she called it off. But, I think it would have been in order to tell the people she invited about the change in plans… especially since the original invitation was an email. It wouldn’t have been tme consuming, hard, or expensive. Maybe it was a bit cruel, but I sent in response to the email invitation this little blurb:
Awesome reception, had a great time……
Bah…
I am not much of a bookmark man. While I do extensively use my bookmark bar, which currently has silverfir.net, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, mail.com, Bernie Zimmermann’s site, my blog, and a Press It, a quick way to blog about a site (which I used to start this post, in fact), up until today, these were the only bookmarks I had. I have had several bookmarks in previous Firefoxes/Firebirds/Phoenixes, but an occasional bug wiped them out, and I didn’t miss them much, so I never really rebuilt them either. When I want to go to a site, I usually just remember the URL (or get autocomplete to help me), or I Google for it… But today I came across something which was worth bookmarking.
Sure, all it is, is a list of DOCTYPES. But oh, how useful. After all, it is a list apart. Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE!: A List Apart. So yeah, maybe Firefox will let me keep this one too.
For the first time in a long time it seems, I saw a little bit of chemistry between me and a girl I met at Costco. Today is the second time I saw her, and we got to talking, and I ended up with her phone number. So we’ll see how things go from here.
In other news, I spent a few hours playing Counterstrike tonight – doing ridiculously well in one round, and decent in the other two. Not the best Friday night ever, but tomorrow there’s ultimate and a TRC hack session, and Leah’s wedding reception (oh yeah, I got some gifts for her and her lucky guy), so it should be a good day.
And now… off to the physics book!
The last plan didn’t work very well, but I’m not giving up on this whole plan thing. The new plan is to read every night once in bed instead of bringing the laptop with me. With properly selected texts (a Electricity and Magentism physics book, in this case), I shoul dbe able to learn something and fall alseep quickly. It will also get me reading again, since I recently noticed that I haven’t read anything significant in quite a while.
The second plan is to take the proper courses at BCC to get an Associate of Science degree, which I hope will improve my chances with the UW in the future. Regardless, its officially half way to a Baccalaurette degree pretty much. I’ve signed up for Intro to Linear Algebra as an evening course right now, and will hopefully add to it some classes that will quickly get me an Associates after I tranfer my BYU credits and get some advising. So, the next step is advisement.
I briefly watched some prerecorded 9/11 Commission footage as the Olympics coverage was winding down tonight. The topic was maritime port security. I was dismayed, although not terribly surprised, to hear the exteme lack of faith that the commissioners had in the ability to cope with terrorist threats. A heard one commissioner, a democrat woman of some sort, say that she didn’t think there would be a good way to get all the competing companies together to discuss vulnerabilities that might lead to greater terrorist risks, because its against nature for companies to share with each other like that. The supposedly pro-business republican chairman showed no more faith in the free market to cope with the possibility of terrorism in his comments about how the Coast Guard had forced a lot of changes on the companies, but that the government needed to do more.
What crack are these people smoking?
They talk like the companies would harbor and help terrorists into ports if it would increase their profits. But there are very strong financial incentives for companies to prevent terroism from happening on their ships, if the government would just leave the responsibility there. No company wants to loose a ship to bomb, and no port that fears a company’s ships will allow their ships into the harbor, wary of immediate physical damage or a much longer term tarnishing of reputation. This is one situation where I don’t see any government role, in fact. The externalities are minimized and the incentives to do the right thing for the socil good are strong, so government involvement can only foul up the issue.
The same goes for Airlines, although now it has long been far too late to do much about it. If it had been the job of the airlines to ensure security of the planes, would 9/11 have happened? I doubt it myself, but even if it had, United and American would be suffering for a long time for the consequences of their lack of security measures. Instead, it is government’s job to enforce security, and when they fail, they only get bigger and more likely to hassle you and me. There is actually an institutional incentive for the screeners to screw up, so the institution can grow, although the personal incentives are to get it right, so hopefully that will happen more often then not. But the point remains: the TSA generally helps nothing. I am convinced I could, still today, get a gun or a bomb onto a plane with a high likelyhood of success. Oh, and if you don’t hear from me again, it was good knowing you and the feds have me in custody now…