Dickie's Quickies

Shawn's coming home today. Yay! It's only been a weekend, but I'll be happy to see her. I'm heading in early this morning to work because her plane arrives at 9AM. I'll pick her up at the airport, head on home and not go back into the shop. Hell, they aren't prepared anyhow. After Matt told me on Friday that he'd have A) the packing slips printed for 2 orders that were packed on Friday for shipping yesterday, B) the new wax melter cleaned out and up and running, or at least part of the way there, and C) new tables to increase capacity to pour, he did none of it. So, we're not going to make the one third of the order that Victoria's Secret wanted delivered by the end of the month let alone that half of the order that they really wanted. It's a pity because I think we could have done it if Matt had done what he said he was going to do. "nuff bitching 'bout work...Shawn's coming home today - Yay!

The Associated Press is reporting on babies whose names appear on the "No Fly" list from the Fatherland Security Department. Do the security folks see the ridiculousness of this and let them pass straight through? Of course not. It's a bureaucracy after all. To be fair, the TSA does instruct the security to let children under 12 pass through, but they get stopped anyhow. Choice statistic:

The TSA has a "passenger ombudsman" who will investigate individual claims from passengers who say they are mistakenly on the lists. TSA spokeswoman Yolanda Clark said 89 children have submitted their names to the ombudsman. Of those, 14 are under the age of 2.

The Bush Administration is objecting to the ICANN approved ".xxx" domain. Apparently, they are worried about "creating a virtual red light district" reserved exclusively for pornography. Yea, like the current system of letting the pornographers use any suffix is pleasing anyone. It seems to me to be perfectly reasonable to put them all in one suffix. It will make filtering software much easier to manage (and get rid of the goofy anomalies such as filtering good medical information while trying to address pornography). Let's face it, if it has to do with pornography or sex there are some conservatives and liberals who just want to regulate it out of existence. That's not going to happen, folks. It's been around for centuries and it's only grown as an industry thanks to the Internet which has provided not only greater access in the privacy of your own home, but also more anonymity for purchasing. A better approach is to do exactly what ICANN did which is to work with the industry to reach reasonable standards that we can all deal with. Oh, and a note to those politicians who disagree: what people might say in public via email or speech is not necessarily what they do in private, including how they vote in the private voting booths. Ask Jimmy Swaggert, Jim Bakker, and any number of priests. Hypocrisy is part of the human condition.