A lady opened her refrigerator and saw a rabbit sitting on one of the shelves. "What are you doing in there?" she asked.

The rabbit replied, "This is a Westinghouse, isn't it?"

"Why, yes," replied the lady.

"Well," the rabbit said, "I'm westing."

The National Hurricane Center just released a bulletin about the first tropical depression of the year, now developing off the Western coast of Cuba. This would be an exhibition game, I suppose, since the regular season isn't supposed to start until June 1st...

(No link yet; apparently NOAA's Web guys are still hibernating.

The House narrowly passed a GOP-drafted ethics bill, 213 to 207:

The bill would require lobbyists to file quarterly instead of semiannual disclosures, and to include in those reports the donations they give to federal candidates and political action committees. Lobbyists would also have to make public the value of any gift that they give to lawmakers or congressional aides. In addition, appropriations bills would have to list any earmarks that they contain, as well as the sponsors of those projects. Ethics training would become mandatory for House employees under the legislation.

...[Christopher Shays (R-CT)] called the bill "pathetic." On the House floor, he added: "We're losing our moral authority to lead this place."

If by "we" he meant the Republican Party, then he's late to the game, as I'm pretty sure the Republicans lost whatever moral authority they had long before Mitch Wade opened a brothel for GOP Congressmen.

Andy Borowitz reports on a new revenue model for airlines:

Struggling with rising fuel costs and sagging profits, several leading airlines announced today that they would attempt to boost their revenues by stowing passengers in their aircrafts’ overhead bins.

After Airbus announced earlier this week that it was toying with the idea of introducing standing room areas for passengers in the rear of their planes, the airlines decided that the time was right to pitch the idea of stowing passengers in a part of the plane that has customarily been reserved for carry-on luggage.

Jokes aside, I figured out why overhead space is so dear on airplanes (remember I deal with this every week). Simply, the airlines encourage carry-on baggage because it frees up space in the hold. Even with a full passenger load, transport-category airplanes have lots of capacity for cargo, which earns significantly more revenue per kilo than passengers do.

So I'll keep running on the elite-status hamster wheel to ensure that, when I fly, I can at least find a spot for my tiny carry-on bags.

Paul Krugman (sub.req.) offers a hypothesis about the Administration's hiring policies:

The U.S. government is being stalked by an invisible bandit, the Crony Fairy, who visits key agencies by dead of night, snatches away qualified people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees. There's no way to catch or stop the Crony Fairy, so our only hope is to change the agencies' names. That way she might get confused, and leave our government able to function.

That, at least, is how I interpret the report on responses to Hurricane Katrina that was just released by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

The report points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency "had been operating at a more than 15 percent staff-vacancy rate for over a year before Katrina struck"—that means many of the people who knew what they were doing had left. And it adds that "FEMA's senior political appointees...had little or no prior relevant emergency-management experience."

Does anyone think Gore would have let this happen? Anyone at all?

Well, this is interesting. Ten states and two cities today filed suit against the Environmental Protection Agency seeking enforcement of the Clean Air Act to force cuts in greenhouse gas emissions:

The states, led by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer [quel surprise—ed.], want the government to require tighter pollution controls on the newest generation of power plants.

In July 2005, a three-judge panel in the same court upheld the EPA's decision not to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks under the Clean Air Act. The agency argues the law does not authorize them to regulate emissions to reduce global warming, and maintains there is not enough scientific data to support such a move.

Not enough data? Tell that to Kiribati and Nunavut.

(Found first on Dr. Heidi Cullen's blog at weather.com

With only 999 days (or fewer) left in his term, President Bush has scored his 9th consecutive month of under-40 approval ratings, and his lowest-ever rating in the NBC/WSJ poll, "a feat exceeded only by Richard Nixon (13 months) and Harry Truman (26 months)."

[But] with the midterm elections just six months away, the biggest drop in the survey—11 points in one month—is in the approval rating of Congress, which is locked in a bitter debate over what do about these gas prices, immigration, Iraq and a host of other issues.

In the poll—which was taken April 21-24 of 1,005 adults, and which has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points—just 24 percent believe the nation is headed in the right direction, a drop of two points since last month and seven points since January. What's more, only 17 percent think the nation’s economy will improve in the next 12 months, a decline of seven points since March.

MSNBC also has detailed poll results available.

Election day is just 194 days away.

Molly Ivins' column published in today's Chicago Tribune raises some good questions about why we can't ask good questions about our policies toward Israel:

For having the sheer effrontery to point out the painfully obvious—that there is an Israel lobby in the United States—[researchers] have been accused of being anti-Semitic, nutty and guilty of "kooky academic work." Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who seems to be easily upset, went totally ballistic over the mild, academic, not to suggest pretty boring, article by Mearsheimer and Walt, calling them "liars" and "bigots."

Of course there is an Israel lobby in America; its leading working group is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It calls itself "America's Pro-Israel Lobby," and it attempts to influence U.S. legislation and policy.

As she points out, Israelis are pretty harsh critics of their own government (and ours); why can't Americans criticize the Israeli government, too?

Let's sum up: The administration's energy and foreign policies have helped create a dire shortage of oil and prevented creation of alternatives. Yet, Bush is "probing" rising gas prices. There are only two possible conclusions: either he does not understand the connection, or he is lying about not understanding the connection.

"Energy experts predict gas prices are going to remain high throughout the summer, and that's going to be a continued strain on the American people," Bush said....

Under pressure from GOP leaders, Bush is taking a tough public line with the U.S. oil companies that are recording record profits and paying hefty salaries and retirement packages to executives.

Remember Upton Sinclair's wisdom: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

This story directly connects to two important milestones for today. First, as of 1pm Eastern time today (17:00 UTC), there are no more than 1,000 days left in the Bush administration. Let's start the countdown; it's our own "thousand points of light."

Second, as many people know, today is the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. The Russian and Ukrainian governments are still cleaning up from it, yet nucular—sorry, nuclear—energy is starting to look more environmentally friendly than its principal competitors, oil and coal. This suggests that our problem isn't from where we get our energy, but how much we use. What a concept.

As many predicted, and as the perpetrators denied, Soldier Field has lost its landmark status following its destr--er, renovation in 2003, former Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced as one of her last official acts on Friday. Says Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin:

If you obliterate a building's form, the government's decision suggests, you obliterate its meaning. Norton wisely ignored the arguments of those who claimed that Soldier Field retained its historic significance, irrespective of how it looked. Perhaps they would like to drop a steel-and-glass box inside the White House.

I'm reminded of Archimedes, I think it was, being skewered by an invading Roman for no apparent reason.

Just perfect for Earth Day.

I'm even wearing vegan shoes that the Vegan Fashion Scout found for me.

I thought of this lovely poem around 5:30 this morning. (Warning: language.)

A journalist assigned to the Jerusalem bureau takes an apartment overlooking the Wailing Wall. Every day when she looks out, she sees an old Jewish man praying vigorously. So the journalist goes down and introduces herself to the old man.

Josh Marshall reports that newspapers are reluctant to say that convicted felon George Ryan is a Republican.

So the leader of China is visiting Washington this week.

Who, you may ask?

Yup. That's the guy.

(Sorry. I couldn't resist.)

Republican former Illinois governor George Ryan was convicted on all counts of corruption in his Federal felony trial:

A federal jury convicted former Gov. George Ryan today on all charges that as secretary of state he steered state business to cronies in return for vacations, gifts and other benefits for himself and his family.

Lobbyist Lawrence Warner, a close Ryan friend, was also found guilty on all charges against him in the historic trial.

On their eleventh day of deliberations, the six-woman, six-man jury found Ryan, 72, guilty on 18 counts of racketeering, mail fraud, false statements and tax violations. Warner, 67, was convicted on 12 counts of racketeering, mail fraud, extortion, money laundering and evading cash-reporting requirements.

More later.

Economist Paul Krugman (sub.req.) in today's New York Times lays out exactly how Exxon-Mobil has tried to undermine climate research since the mid-1980s.

More fooling around with the Canon 20D Anne got me. I love that I can finally do available-light photos in almost all conditions, since the sensor can go up to ISO 3200.

Anne got a new job (details to follow), and to celebrate, she showed up in New Hampshire yesterday with a Canon 20D, the camera I've wanted since...well, since before I met her. What a great wife.

Now I can take photos like this, with actual control over the exposure, aperture, and focus:

TPM Muckraker reported today that the Dept. of Homeland Security has a new warning about radical animal-rights groups:

Such radical extremist groups may use several tactics—each devastating in its own way—including:

- "organizing protests"
- "flyer distribution"
- "inundating computers with e-mails"
- "tying up phone lines to prevent legitimate calls"
- "sending continuous faxes in order to drain the ink supply from company fax machines"

I particularly like the fourth item, since several Republicans have been convicted recently of doing just that in New Hampshire during the 2002 election.

The Chicago Tribune carried two Assoicated Press stories about religious fanatacism this morning. First, Christians were attacked at Mass in Egypt yesterday. When American Christians, who currently run the government, claim to be "persecuted," perhaps they should reflect on the Egyptian situation.

The second story, from Manila, Philippines, tells of Catholics voluntarily getting nailed to crosses to show their devotion. In a concession to the fact that we no longer live in ancient Roman times, the 10 cm (4 in.) nails pounded through their hands and feet—in one man's case, for the 20th time—were "soaked in alcohol to prevent infection."

Happy Easter!

My cousin sent this one to me ages ago:

This bloke's in bed with his missus when there's a rat-a-tat-tat on the door.

Because Passover begins at sundown. Use the Weather Now sunrise calculator to figure out exactly when that is. (It's 7:25pm in Nashua, 7:29pm in Chicago, and 7:39pm in Monterey, Calif., for those keeping score at home.)

It's chilling, actually, but if you read Seymour Hersh's latest column in the New Yorker closely you get the impression that Bush is planning yet another disastrous war. Even Vizzini knew not to get involved in a land war in Asia; the President (1,014 days and 4 hours to go) is contemplating his third.

My project manager sent around this link to Joel Spolsky's rules for software management:

I've come up with my own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team. The great part about it is that it takes about 3 minutes. The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. You don't have to figure out lines-of-code-per-day or average-bugs-per-inflection-point.

I totally agree with Spolsky's list. I have never been on a project that scored better than 7 until now (which scores 9, IMO, but we're moving toward 11), and only one, ever, has answered "yes" to #8 (quiet working conditions).

The latest campaign of the Christian right is to get colleges to grant them exceptions to their broad anti-harrassment policies. The L.A. Times reports on a suit against the Georgia Institute of Technology:

Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.

It's opening day at Fenway Park today, and several of my cow-orkers are going. Fortunately, Anne gave me a perfect gift before I left for New Hampshire, so I fit right in.

I promised earlier to discuss the joys and sorrows of traveling for business. I had some time this morning in the airplane to do so.

One of my favorites:

Old man Moskowitz was getting along in years. He decided to retire and let his 3 sons run the company (which manufactured a wide variety of nails). The sons thought they could increase market-share with some judicious billboard advertising.

The President's approval rating has fallen to 36%, its lowest ever, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll out today:

• Just 36 percent of the public approves of Bush’s job performance, his lowest-ever rating in AP-Ipsos polling. By contrast, the president’s job approval rating was 47 percent among likely voters just before Election Day 2004 and a whopping 64 percent among registered voters in October 2002.
• Only 40 percent of the public approves of Bush’s performance on foreign policy and the war on terror, another low-water mark for his presidency. That’s down 9 points from a year ago. Just before the 2002 election, 64 percent of registered voters backed Bush on terror and foreign policy.
• Just 35 percent of the public approves of Bush’s handling of Iraq, his lowest in AP-Ipsos polling.
• Just 30 percent of the public approves of the GOP-led Congress’ job performance, and Republicans seem to be shouldering the blame.

The MSNBC report includes a quote from a Republican pollster repeating the canard that it's not as bad as it seems because the Democrats don't have much of a plan. But we do have a plan. Our plan is to fix the enormous damage to our international reputation, our economy, and our political institutions that the GOP has perpetrated on us. It would appear that 64% of the public think that's plan enough.

We spent two hours yesterday debugging some code that kept firing early. It wasn't clear to anyone, including the people who wrote it, why this happened. We patched it with the C# equivalent of duck tape, but really, it still doesn't work right.

This incident shows how important it is to know what your code is supposed to do, and not to accept the code if it doesn't. Many tools exist to help—most notably, unit-testing tools like NUnit—but they have trouble with the specific problem that we encountered: events fired from black-box controls.

I will have more to say about this later.

Before nodding off to bed tonight, on a whim I searched Google for a funny story I remembered hearing on WFMT-Chicago's Midnight Special many years ago.

The New Year's Eve Midnight Special always ran long, and always played a bit called "Moose Turd Pie." Thanks to Google, I finally found out where it came from: U. Utah Phillips, who even has a link to the bit on his site.

This is what the Internet is all about.

The New York Sun is reporting that President Bush authorized leaking Plame's identity, at least implicitly, according to the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby:

A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case.

The court papers from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, do not suggest that Mr. Bush violated any law or rule. However, the new disclosure could be awkward for the president because it places him, for the first time, directly in a chain of events that led to a meeting where prosecutors contend the identity of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame, was provided to a reporter.

Whether or not this is true, it's interesting to watch the administration's in-fighting get to this level. One hopes the electorate remembers, and understands, in November.

Experts say the Enron executives' testimony is extremely risky for the pair.

They will have to overcome the obvious conclusion that they knew they were robbing hundreds of employees and thousands of investors before company collapsed. Stay tuned.

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay is not seeking re-election. This is the best political news I've heard in days.

I'm going to bed as happy as I can be back in Nashua.

I mentioned Friday that I've completely refactored the section of the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™—the Idea™—that handles quantitative functions. (I've also decided to make some SDK documentation available.) The actual design of the IMeasurable classes—Length, Speed and the like—bears more discussion.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has a new column today reminiscing about the hype of 1997 because it's back in vogue:

The fads and big deals that get the press coverage are not important for running a workhorse website. To serve your customers, it's far better to emphasize simplicity and quality than to chase buzzwords.

There is endless coverage of a few atypical stories in the trade press, mainstream media, and even on specialized Internet-focused websites. Once again, it's worth remembering: your site is different from the ones in big stories. Focus on fixing the basics to get a simple and communicative website. Simple steps don't get hyped, but they drive much more business value for the average site than the issues that everyone writes about.

He includes a sidebar about the fads of 1997 and how they're doing today.

Krugman weighs in (sub.req.) on the immigration debate roiling the GOP:

For now, at least, the immigration issue is mainly hurting the Republican Party, which is divided between those who want to expel immigrants and those who want to exploit them. The only thing the two factions seem to have in common is mean-spiritedness.

Nicely put.

Appyhay Aprilhay Oolsfay Aday!

(Evenhay ymay eatherway itesay ishay inhay hetay piritsay.)