Snozberry

Flying out of Austin this morning, the TSA decided to exercise its pathetic powers to steal a little cup of yogurt and a cup of fruit from me. Prior to the screening, I decided that there wouldn't be any trouble with a little breakfast making it through a screening at 6:45 in the morning. So I did the upright thing and put the little fruit and yogurt in the tray with my laptop (the alternate plan would have been to conceal it inside my bag and take the good gample that operator overload/fatigue/inexperience would allow it through unmolested).

After passing through the x-ray, the operator called over a second screener and whispered in low tones that the food looked clean, but were both probably larger than 3 ounces. The screener then approached me an informed me that he was going to let my little fruit cup through (only 3.4 oz), but had to confiscate my yogurt (a whopping 4 oz). I protested a little and was closing up my bag in haste (yes, I was pissed) and the screener said "Wait a second" and then snatched (yes, literally SNATCHED!) the fruit out of my bag citing that it was above the 3 ounce minimum. I asked him why he was now taking the fruit, after telling me that it was okay and he said "I was going to be nice and let it through, but you annoyed me and technically it's too big" or something similar.

Anyhow, now I'm sitting here without any breakfast. Poopers.

The TSA stole my breakfast and absolutely no good came out of it. The passengers of flight 1786 are no safer, a perfectly good yogurt and fruit cup have been thrown away, I made some TSA lackey's day marginally worse, and I have no breakfast.

Why the fuck do we have to abide by stupid rules and regulations that have no bearing on security. Why have we trained our TSA agents to look for harmless shampoo, mouthwash, toenail clippers, and pen knives? Humans can realistically only look for several items at once... shouldn't we be training them to look for real weapons, like guns and knives? Or maybe we go one step further and train them to look for anything unusual, whatever that may be?

Either way, the TSA is nothing more than a stupid organization of ineffectiveness, contributing nothing of value to our nation (but managing to cost us a great deal). It seems like they were created for the sole purpose of instilling fear in a populace that appears to have lost the ability to think for itself.

A note to my local representative regarding Pennsylvania House Bill 1827.

Back when I was at RAND I had the privilege of hearing Donald Shoup talk about parking. It was a truly fascinating talk about a seemingly minor thing -- free parking. At first somewhat surprising, logically considering the ramifications of free parking reveals massive environmental costs, increased traffic congestion, and wasted time.

Recently, the Montreal Apple store made a move to promote free parking downtown. This is a preposterous position to take given Apple's stated environmental goals and a consideration of Dr. Shoup's research.

Check out articles on the subject in the SFGate, NYTimes, and Slate, or take a look right in the horse's mouth.

It's official, Jenny's pregnant. She's 21 weeks in, due on Jan 21. There's not really much more to say about this, except that it was unexpected good news!

Of course, when you think about it for a second you realize that this means that I'll be a dad soon. Obvious, but still rather freaky to think about when it's you. It's hard to grasp all of the life altering ramifications of this baby, but I've been developing a taste by doing the unthinkable -- reading about diapers. I've been reading about other things, too, but poop and pee catching devices really brings home the point.

If you'd like to see a video of the little guy (we're actually not sure what the gender is, but are told that it's likely a girl) in full action, check out the digitized 19 week ultrasound (204MB H.264 MP4) of Jenny Jr. ®.

To all who may try to call me, my phone has died. It simply won't power on anymore.

Over the last couple of years I have grown to strongly dislike my Motorola E815 - the interface, the size, the flip. Recently it's started dropping calls like an un-watered Christmas tree trying to hold its needles in February. And I guess that whatever was causing the drops finally took down the rest of the phone.

Any good recommendations on a Verizon Wireless phone? I'm also thinking of switching (Cingular/AT&T or T-Mobile).

Cheerio.

I am. Check out my profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/beefstew.

Everyone seems to know that Firefox can be set to automatically restore your session after a crash. And in the way the feature is presented, you would think that this option will also restore session if you manually quit or exit out of the program. But you'd be wrong.

Ever since FireFox 2 came out (and broke my beloved SessionSaver) I couldn't figure out why my sessions weren't being restored after I manually quit the browser. In fact, I've been "Force Quit"ing Firefox for months as a workaround to the problem.

Well, today I finally got around to investigating and found the culprit. What I needed was another entry in my about:config section: browser.sessionstore.resume_session.

Adding this key with a value of "true" fixed my problem. Now, whenever I start Firefox it brings up all my tabs from last time - even if Firefox exited normally.

Reality sucks a lot of the time.