Events

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. Every week, I fly back and forth between Boston and Chicago. This morning I caught the bleary-eyed special leaving Chicago before 7, and I still missed my 11:30 Scrum. Between that, having to get out of bed slightly before 5am, and a general feeling of lethargy that no amount of coffee can cure, not to mention the lost billable hours, I'm going to start returning to Boston...

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. Only a week later the old man was taking his usual Sunday drive in the country when he saw the first billboard ad. There it was—a picture of Jesus on the Cross, with the caption: "Nails for Every Purpose. Use Moskowitz Nails." The old man...

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...

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...

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...

My old personal site, www.braverman.org, has seen better days. It's creaky, it hasn't been maintained, and I think this blog has mostly supplanted it. It does, however, have a library of hundreds of jokes, all dying to be read again. So starting today, I'm adding a new category: Jokes. (No, I'm not changing the name to the "Waspj Blog.") Here's the first one, from an anonymous fan: Eulogy for a Dog Morris in Brooklyn lived in a big home with his pet dog that he loved for 12 years. His best and only...

First, the House last night passed a campaign-finance package last night on a strict 218-209 party-line vote: The House approved campaign finance legislation last night that would benefit Republicans by placing strict caps on contributions to nonprofit committees that spent heavily in the last election while removing limits on political parties' spending coordinated with candidates. Lifting party spending limits would aid Republican candidates because the GOP has consistently raised far more money than...

Anne brought to my attention the security practices at a medium-sized company in Chicago that make security nearly impossible: the company's IT department assigns Windows domain passwords to the users. In a recent communication, IT said this practice made the domain more secure. It actually made me mad to hear about this practice. They're not only wrong, they're wrong in a particularly ignorant and incompetent manner, and someday they're going to have a significant security incident. Secure log-ins...

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.