Archive for February, 2006
I was taking a look at the current temperature in Calgary and it’s cold: 12 degrees F (-11 degrees C). About two weeks ago, the temperature went as low as -20 degrees F (-29 degrees C). Holy molly! My ex-roommate Boon and his wife 少红 moved there a few weeks ago.
I lived in Calgary between 1991 and 1992, and i spent very first winter there. I can’t remember how i survived those chilly winter months. After spending about 10 minutes searching for the historical weather data for the period of time when i was in Calgary, i found the information i wanted at the National Climate Data and Information Archive of Environment Canada. The site is really neat, i can search for weather related info that goes as far back as 1881. The degree of detail can be as trivial as the hourly temperature. At one click of a button, i can, for example, generate a graph for the daily mininum temperature in the month of February of 1992, as shown below:
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An Austrian court recently sentenced British David Irving to three years in jail for making a holocaust-denial speech 17 years ago. Surprisingly, i have not seen a lot of statements from free speech advocates defending Irving’s freedom of speech, not unlike those that defended the European media’s right to publish the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. This smells like double standard to me. Regardless of how disgusting and grotesque his opinions are, David Irving has his rights to spew outrageous baloney, even those involving the denial of certain aspects of the holocaust. Just like those offending Danish cartoons, as much as i think that they were done in bad taste and that they were published intentionally to provoke the Muslims, i believe in the right of the media to publish them.
Robert Scheer wrote a similarly-titled article that expresses exactly how i feel about the double standard. Deborah Lipstadt, who had to fight the libel suit by David Irving against her for six years, was also against his sentencing.
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According to heise online, the earlier reported Safari vulnerability is actually more serious than initially known. Shell script, hidden as an image or a document by changing the metadata of the file so that it is opened by Terminal.app, can also be automatically executed in the Mail.app when clicked on.
On careful inspection of the file using Get Info, you can see the default application for the jpg file is Terminal.app.
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Michael Lehn of secunia.com discovered a vulnerability in Mac OS X’s built-in web browser Safari. The temporary solution is to disable the “Open safe files after downloading” option in the preferences for Safari.
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A friend of mine stopped using Safari because there is no default option in Safari to disable animated gifs. I found a really useful plug-in called SafariPlus that not only allows you to disable animated gifs, it also has the ability to opt-in whitelist of sites from which cookies are allowed and to remove cookies from unwanted sites when quitting Safari.
The SafariPlus does not prevent animated Flash images though.
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Last night i watched Why We Fight, a documentary directed by Eugene Jarecki, who also directed The Trials of Henry Kissenger. Why We Fight, in my opinion, is the most important documentary i have ever watched. An often repeated theme in the documentary centers around the farewell address given by President Eisenhower in 1961, in which he warned against the danger of the close-knit relationship between the military and the defense industries, using the term military-industrial complex.
According to the wikipedia, “in the penultimate draft of the address, Eisenhower initially used the term military-industrial-congressional complex, indicating the essential role that U.S. Congress plays in propagating the military industry.” But to “avoid offending members of the legislative branch of the federal government”, it is said that the president chose to remove the word congressional. In the film, Jarecki successfully demonstrated the worrisome relationship among the defense industries, The Pentagon and the United States Congress. For example, in Why We Fight, Chalmers Johnson notes that the B-2 bombers have parts made in all 50 states and if someone dares to phase it out, even the most liberal members of the congress would be “howling” for heads to roll.
The film also exposes a fourth element in the military-industrial-congressional-complex - the think-tankers. Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski witnessed how our foreign policies, especially regarding Iraq, were dictated by the neoconservative think-tankers like Richard Perl, Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol that were brought into the Pentagon. In a way, Eisenhower’s worst nightware came true: Former military officers, think-tankers, lobbyists, and politicians are spinning through the revolving door between public and private sectors to serve on the boards or as executives of corporations that do business with the Pentagon. A prime example is Dick Cheney, who was a Congressman, a Secretary of Defense, and then the Chairman and CEO of Halliburton, prior to becoming the current Vice President.
There is no doubt Why We Fight has an agenda in criticizing American foreign policy, but the film provides a very convincing case about the existence of numerous conflicts of interests and its detrimental effects. This is one important film that should not be missed. A lot of reviews have been written about this film and i am not going to dwell on it more. For those interested in the reviews:
For those in the Seattle area, Why We Fight is currently being shown at the Landmark Neptune Theatre.
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If you are in need of a good laugh, get all the Dick Cheney hunting mishap jokes here. Some of the funniest ones from late night shows are:
- “Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt … making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person shot by a sitting veep since Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, of course, (was) shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird.” –Jon Stewart
- “Now, this story certainly has its humorous aspects. … But it also raises a serious issue, one which I feel very strongly about. … moms, dads, if you’re watching right now, I can’t emphasize this enough: Do not let your kids go on hunting trips with the vice president. I don’t care what kind of lucrative contracts they’re trying to land, or energy regulations they’re trying to get lifted - it’s just not worth it.” –Jon Stewart
- “The Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now, according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78- year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Wittington’s face.” –”Daily Show” correspondent Rob Corddry
- “Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter, a 78-year-old lawyer. In fact, when people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity is now at 92 percent.” –Jay Leno
- “Cheney’s defense is that he was aiming at a quail when he shot the guy. Which means that Cheney now has the worst aim of anyone in the White House since Bill Clinton.” –Jay Leno
- “I think Cheney is starting to lose it. After he shot the guy he screamed, ‘Anyone else want to call domestic wiretapping illegal?’” –Jay Leno
- “When the ambulance got there, out of force of habit they put Cheney on the stretcher. No, the other guy!” –Jay Leno
- “The weather back East has been atrocious. There was so much snow in Washington, D.C., Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fat guy thinking it was a polar bear.” –Jay Leno
And my very own: You can’t duck Dick!
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I went snowboarding this weekend at the site of the 2010 Winter Olympics. It had not been snowing for the previous few days prior to my trip but the snow was still very good. Arrived there at around 1100 and i have never seen the parking lot at Whistler that full. Other than a 15-minute break i took before i took the last run down the mountain, i was riding up and down Blackcomb. The better runs of the day were all around the Seventh Heaven area.
Just as i was about to take off to head back to Vancouver at around 1630, a teenage girl came by and told us that Highway 99 was closed by the police because of a serious accident and it would not be open until 1830. I didn’t really believe her until i was filling up my car at Squamish and the Korean gas station owner told me about it. After trying to spend some time in Squamish, i took off toward Vancouver before 1800. About a mile after passing the Museum of Mining, the traffic came to a complete halt. Every few minutes, there would be 3 or 4 cars coming north-bound from the opposite direction, but the south-bound traffic was completely stopped. Most of the cars turned off the engine. Originally, i thought we would start moving at around 1900. Well, we did, but for less than 50 feet. My thought was the 50 feet that i moved was probably due to cars moving up to take up the space left behind by the vehicles that decided to turn around. At around 2100, the south-bound traffic finally started moving.
The accident that caused the Sea-to-Sky highway to be closed for 8 hours was pretty serious. One motorcyclist, among a group of three, was thrown into the path of an oncoming SUV and he was killed instantaneously. The second motorcyclist was stuck under a full-size pickup truck for about half an hour before he was finally pulled out. The third motorcyclist was unhurt. According to an eyewitness, the three motorcyclists were “driving like idiots“.
It seemed like this trip is a little more eventful than all my past visits to Vancouver. On my way to Vancouver on Friday night, i got a call from my sister that the US-Canada border might not be open because of some perceived “terrorist threats”. Turned out it was because the Canadian Border Services agency received a warning from their US counterpart about a possible “armed and dangerous man” heading that direction, according to this report on the Seattle PI. Because the Canadian border guards are unarmed, they promptly left their posts after being notified. But fortunately for me, by the time i arrived near the border crossing at Pacific highway, four lanes were opened so i did not have to wait long.
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