Chris's Rants

Friday, July 30, 2004

Not unlike the breakfast of champions...

The lunch of monkies (more precisely a Monkey's Lunch) was the staple for a few of us during our stay in Hawai'i. Mark managed to wrangle the recipie from the barkeep.

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Aloha!

Aloha,

My wife Cheryl and I just returned from Hawai'i and have been doing some scuba/snorkling dives during our stay. The following is a narrative list of the sealife we spotted. (Okay, mostly snorkling because it is way more cost effective... but scuba is way cool!)

Our first major dive was an introductory scuba dive with Deep Ecology in Shark's Cove. The most impressive sight I saw on that dive was the male spectacled parrotfish. It was huge! I'd say it was approaching 10 lbs. There were lots of schools of yellowfin and multibarred goatfish about. Quite a few orangespine unicornfish. These are impressive to be sure and many were appraching a foot in diameter. The raccoon butterflyfish and fourspot butterflyfish were shy, but we spotted a few of these.

We returned again to Shark's Cove for a snorkle just about every day of our stay. We actually enjoyed the snorkling a bit more than the scuba, mostly because we had a bit more freedom to pursue whatever we chose. There were a few potters angels, many christmas, psychedellic and five stripe wrasse, and tons of convict and orangespot tang in Sharks Cove.

We both saw the beautiful peacock grouper. Not a large one, only about 5-6 inches in length. There were many convict tang (schools of these), achilles tang, orange shoulder tang (also known as orangeband surgeonfish), yellow tang, hawaiian sergents, hawaiian surgeonfish, and goldring surgeonfish (also known as kole tang).

The most beautiful fish we saw were of course the many types of butterflyfish abundant in Hawaiin waters. We saw five kinds of butterflyfish! There were teardrop, threadfin, ornate, fourspot and raccoon. We also came across a pair of moorish idols, also very shy.

The most unusual fish we saw were a pair of bird wrasse and what we believe was either a hawkfish or reef lizardfish in Sharks Cove. It was certainly an unusual fish, perched on its fins and snuggled into a crevice. Additionally, we saw a couple of cornetfish, a few needlefish (one was enormous but most were fairly small) and we also came across a couple of spotted pufferfish.

We saw a number of sea cucumber both in the bay adjacent to Turtle Bay Resort and in Sharks Cove.

We also went for a guided "kayak adventure" where I saw a red pencil urchin tucked away in a crevice in the reef at Kailua Bay. The other notable spotting during the kayak adventure was a humpback cowry pointed out by our guide. The snorkling in Kailua Bay was really impressive. The coral reef was really alive here, more so than in other spots we dove. There were also tons of blennies in the miriad tide pools in the lavarock. They spend their days hiding from the crabs that invade their pools looking for a quick and captive meal.

Of course, we saw many green sea turtles both in the bay next to the resort and at Waimea beach. There were dozens in the surf there. Very cool! The one I caught on film during a dive had a missing front flipper but he seemed to manage dispite his disability.

We saw cornetfish both here at Turtle Bay and in Sharks Cove on our scuba dive. There were chubs, reef triggerfish, whitespine surgeonfish in abundance. I saw a few hawaiian cleaner wrasse waiting for their next appointment.

In the cove beyond the pillbox, in addition to the usual suspects, we saw many domino damsel fish and a large pair of ornate butterflyfish. The ornate butterfly is very shy, but if you are patient and very still, they will hang around.

Update: Note that all of the images linked above, with the exception of the bird wrasse, were taken by me using a SnapSights underwater camera with 800 ASA film, no flash. Not a bad deal because the camera is reusable so instead of $18 you need only by extra rolls of film and reseal the housing. As long as there's plenty of sunlight and you aren't diving below say 30 feet, it works quite effectively.

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Friday, July 23, 2004

Leadership...

mnot caught Jim, Chris and Tom hard at work.

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Thursday, July 22, 2004

Amen!

To this post by Michael O'Connell on open standards.

Subscribed!

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Saturday, July 17, 2004

Yikes!

The results to polling this question are truly disturbing. 52% polled think that the government should restrict content on the internet. While it is probably the case that most are responding to the excessive p0rn on the net, allowing the government to control its content is a dangerous threat to the rights guaranteed by the first amendment.

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  • And I dare say that 67% of USAns would vote to lower the earth's gravity by a third, to make up for us being supersized. Or to make pi be 3, to ease those pesky calculations. Seems to me to be about the same level of possibility.

    By Blogger scruzia, at July 20, 2004 12:48 AM  

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Policy of pre-epmtion

From the latest The New York Times Poll comes this tidbit in question 66:
66. Which comes closer to your opinion about what the United States policy should be after the war with Iraq? The United States should not attack another country unless the U.S. is attacked first, OR the U.S. should be able to attack any country it thinks might attack the United States?









U.S. should not attackU.S. should attackDK/NA
4/11-13/03 51 38 11
4/26-27/03 50 42 8
5/27-28/03 53 39 8
7/8-9/03 58 33 9
9/28-10/1/03 55 35 11
1/12-15/04 58 32 10
7/11-15/04 60337
Fully 60 percent are of the opinion that the U.S. should not adopt a policy of pre-emptive attack. Yet, dubya and dick are hell-bent on such trying to convince us that such a policy is imperative. As you can see from the trending, the American public are not buying. Dubya and his minions had to scare us silly, with visions of mushroom-clouds, cherry-picked intelligence "findings", and highly suggestive statements that Iraq was behind the attacks of 9/11, that they had no choice but to pre-emptively launch an attack on Iraq to defend us from the "evil-doers".

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

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Friday, July 16, 2004

Failure Is Not an Option, It's Mandatory

This NYT The New York Times >op-ed piece is spot on. Of course, it is published in the newspaper that is possibly #1 on the "liberal elite" list and hence has little chance of being read by those who are being duped.

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Thursday, July 15, 2004

Sage

Tim Bray blogs about Sage. I too have been impressed but haven't quite weaned myself from SharpReader because as with Tim, Sage barfs on importing OPML and I haven't the cycles to manually enter in all of my feeds into bookmarks. Maybe I'll take a que and write a script instead... but I haven't too many spare cycles for that either:-)

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Cheney the spook?

USNews.com: Washington Whispers (7/19/04):
Cheney the spook?
White House insiders say it's bunk, but there's persistent talk that Vice President Dick Cheney may be replaced on the GOP ticket. Top White House officials tell us there's absolutely no truth to the rumor, but other top administration officials told us Cheney might be named to take over the CIA. What's up? Pew pollster Andrew Kohut says Cheney's not popular, but dumping him would be worse. "It would give almost a sign," Kohut says, "of panic."
Yeah, right... bring in Dick to fix the CIA? He's the ef'n problem! As for replacing him on the ticket... my personal plea to the dubyas is: "please don't!". He's such an asset to the Democratic party! Then again, maybe if they did, then dubya could be labeled a flip-flopper. Certainly he'd never admit a mistake... I'd bet that Dick would simply come down with an extended case of the flu or tickeritis. Then everyone would simply say "oh, how tragic!".

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Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Going to JAOO deux

Steve Vinoski is Going to JAOO. I too have accepted an invitation to speak. I've never been to the JAOO conference before, but Steve insists that it is a great conference. How could I resist:-) I have agreed to do two sessions: Overview and status of Web services, and Future of Web services. I need to get cracking and prepare my abstracts!

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Interesting paper...

Programming with Circles, Triangles and Rectangles

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Repeat after me...

As reported byCBS News but widely reported elsewhere
Instead, the president answers his own question: Was the war on Iraq the right thing to do?

In answering this, Mr. Bush uses another trick of modern rhetoric: repeat your sound bite in hopes that it hypnotizes the audience into acceptance. In this case, the mantra is, “the American people are safer.” It is repeated seven times in the speech.
Keep your eyes on the pretty watch... You're getting sleepy... I'm going to count to three... The American people are safer... Vote for me, I'll set you free...

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WTF?

From Hixie's Natural Log:
"There were also some people who commented that instead of calling it a Working Group we should have called it a Task Force, because the resulting acronym would have been much more appropriate. All I can say is that I wish I had thought of that because that would have been a really funny name."
ROTFL!

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Monday, July 12, 2004

No pressure?

Taking Tim Bray's advise and reading the U.S. Senate Intellegence Committee Report, I stumbled across this line on page 41 (31 if you follow the page numbers in the document itself)(emphasis mine):
CIA officials interviewed by Committee staff indicated that, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the trade craft of terrorism analysis shifted and analysts now feel obligated to make more conclusive assessments regardless of the quality of available intellegence.

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Be very afraid!

Newsweek has this story that sheds light on plans that Homeland Security is drafting to enact legislation to permit the postponement of national elections in the event of a terrorist attack.

Talk about your slippery slope! Conspiracy theories aside, this is something that simply should not be permitted to pass under any circumstance.

Article II, Section 1, Clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution reads:
The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.
Thus, it seems that only Congress (U.S. House and Senate) can establish the date of the election.

Congress mistakenly ceded its authority to declare war against Iraq to an administration that was predisposed to wage an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation based on faulty (if not deliberately cooked) intelligence. It is imperative that Congress not make a similar mistake in ceding its authority to choose the date of elections. We may never see another.

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

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Sunday, July 11, 2004

Sneak Preview! The Cheney-Edwards Debate

The NYT has this article Sneak Preview! The Cheney-Edwards Debate by Andy Borowitz which is priceless. I was tickled by the
QUESTIONS FOR DICK CHENEY

1. Former Senator Alfonse D'Amato has suggested President Bush dump you from the ticket. What's your response to him, in two words?

2. If Halliburton and the Carlyle Group both invited you to the movies on the same night, who would you go with?

3. Over the past four years, how many days would you say you spent above ground?

4. Describe in detail your favorite high-impact aerobics routine.

5. Didn't "Fahrenheit 9/11" totally rock?

6. Exactly when did you remove Kenneth Lay from your online buddy list?

7. If there really are no plans to reinstitute the draft, why did you just request a sixth deferment?

8. Is it true that you wept during Darth Vader's death scene?

9. If anything happened to you while serving a second term, would George Bush be fit to be president?

10. Here's something I've always wondered: Does the other side of your mouth work?
If this had been in the form of a Letterman Top 10, then I would have put #9 at #1.

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Thursday, July 08, 2004

This is disturbing

Wired News: Data Nightmare at Pentagon:
The Pentagon says it has 2,274 systems for staying on top of everything from its supply of uniforms to its health-care costs. That includes 311 personnel databases in the Army alone and 276 financial systems just for the Navy.

But it's all just a best guess. The Defense Department's comptroller "recently acknowledged that the actual number of business systems could be twice as many as previously reported," the congressional report notes.

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Friday, July 02, 2004

Welcome to the neighborhood

The BBC reports that Hubble discovers 100 new planets.

Add this to the list of reasons that the adminsitration's decision to abandon the Hubble is a mistake.

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Compatible Evolution for Web services

Once again, Dave has offered up some very useful guidance on versioning (the next two entries to this are related... read 'em all). He also raises some interesting observations as to limitations regarding annotation of WSDL as to the compatibility of one interface/operation with its predecessor.

I've some interesting ideas brewing...

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Thursday, July 01, 2004

Animusic

Animusic (warning 32Mb) (via Stefan, always a good read) is soooo incredibly kewl!

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Subliminal Man

Fascinating. The html version of the letter from dubya to congress authorizing the war against Iraq is accompanied by an image of dubya with Mayor Bloomberg of N.Y. sitting in the oval office. If this wasn't intended as a subliminal message to help plant the idea in people's minds that there is a connection between Iraq and 9/11, then I'm the queen of England.

I traversed the link from this blog entry on BOPNews just out of curiosity even though the text of the letter was inlined. The substance of the article was to answer the question "Where ever did so many Americans get the idea Iraq was related to 9/11 ?".

Sure, as the article maintains, the letter itself is strongly suggestive of a direct connection even though the administration is now insisting that dubya and other administration officials never said that Iraq was involved in the planning and/or execution of the 9/11 attack. But, the image juxtaposed with the html version of the letter hosted from the White House's web site is just further evidence that the administration used every trick in the book to suggest that they were, so as to justify the unprovoked attack on a soveriegn nation (regardless of how unsavory, nasty and evil its dictator was).

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