“Men, there’s nothing to get excited about. The situation is normal; we are surrounded.”
– Capt. Dick Winters, 101st Airborne, Uden, Holland, 22 Sept 1944. (Band of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose, pg. 131.)
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court today ruled that cities could seize private land — homes and businesses — for private development:
As a result, cities have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes to generate tax revenue.
Local officials, not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a [...]
The following phone conversation just occurred:
Coworker: “I want to buy a new video card.” [NVIDIA GeForce 7800, just released]
Wife: “You just bought a new card. [NVIDIA 6800GT, Dec. 2004] Play with that for a while.”
I just added a new image to the top of my blog. Isn’t it puuurrrrty? That’s sunrise over China, which I took during my trip to Hong Kong last year.
In writing about the latest outrages in Zimbabwe, Winds of Change discusses an interesting epiphany, which can be boiled down to this quote:
The Right to Bear Arms is the only reliable way to prevent genocide in the modern world.
Genocide is only one form of Tyranny of course, and as gunowners have said for a long [...]
Have you ever wanted to shoot that virus-ridden, evil-doing box of electrons on your desk, but had second thoughts? These guys aren’t bothered with things like “second thoughts”…
(Be sure to check out the movie at the end!)
Update: For those of us who are offended by the American flag burning that happens every time Newsweek publishes [...]
Throughout college, I drove a 1975 Pontiac Grand Prix. It was your basic 70s Detroit 2-door floatmobile, but it did have the big 455 engine. Apparently, that 455 made the car somewhat special, as only 7166 SJ-455s were built in 1975. Further, 1975 was the last year that the 455 was widely available; it was [...]
I just stumbled upon this “customer spotlight” marketing brochure from TGS which I was involved with a couple of years back:
“HardCopy is a far superior solution for this type of output than the ‘traditional’ method of printing in standard Open Inventor—namely, using a SoOffscreenRenderer to render a bitmap to a file,” says [eengstro] of [eengstro's [...]
I just observed the following telephone conversation between one of my coworkers and his wife:
Coworker: “Hello honey.”
Wife: “Hi. Did you know that Phil Jackson is coming back to the Lakers?”
Coworker: “Yes, I had already heard that.”
Wife: “Oh… you already knew?”
Coworker: “Yes…”
Wife: “Oh… ummm… well, that’s all I had to say. Bye.”
Coworker: “Bye.”
Phone conversation ends.
Coworker to [...]
Every year, BMW puts on The Ultimate Drive, a fundraiser for breast cancer research. Take a new BMW for a test drive, and BMW donates money. Cool!
On Saturday, June 11, The Ultimate Drive came to Coast BMW Nissan in San Luis Obispo, and I took the opportunity to test-drive three BMWs: the 2005 325Ci convertable, [...]