If you want to see some a crappy movie with outstanding special effects, set your TiVo for NBC at 9:02p.m. tommorow. Then you can catch 10.5, a movie about California falling into the ocean. No, I'm not kidding, somebody actually bought that line of tripe.

But do not, under any circumstances, watch it live. The camera operators are drunk and the director wouldn't know subtlety if it, err, politely coughed in front of him. (Somehow, "subtlety" doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would bite someone in the bum...) What skill the actors have is squandered in pursuit of cheap schmaltz. It would have to stretch itself to reach merely "trite and formulaic".

I may not technically have "a job", but if you saw me at home, you'd never realize I wasn't just working from home. I've been working with some former co-workers on a project that will hopefully become my next job.

For this project I've been developing in Mozilla. No, not "developing web applications", doing development in XUL, XBL, RDF, and a lot of other fun Mozilla-specific technologies.

Mozilla has a lot of astounding capabilities, as you can see in the book Creating Applications with Mozilla. Mozilla's "XUL" language can be thought of as an extension onto the HTML form elements, including things like menu elements or better layouts. CSS is used in conjunctions with this extension, and XBL allows you to package up various things you can create with the form elements and Javascript into a coherent single unit.

The Instapundit (left leaning readers need not leave; you may actually like the ending of this post) has an interesting story about President Bush's feelings on the press, referencing this essay; basically it boils down to this exchange with a reporter:

a reporter says to the president: is it really true you don't read us, don't even watch the news? Bush confirms it.

And the reporter then said: Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking? And Bush, without missing a beat said: You're making a powerful assumption, young man. You're assuming that you represent the public. I don't accept that.

Following up on this dangerousmeta! post, I looked up what "Haemochromatosis" was, and among other interesting details was this:

About 500ml of blood is removed (a procedure called "venesection") initially once a week to reduce iron levels by stimulating the body to make more red blood cells (which contain iron). Depending on the amount of iron in the body, the initial treatment may take one or two years. Once the excess iron has been removed, venesections are done about four times a year to prevent iron building up.

(This posting contains the full text of the linked article.)

California's Voting Systems Panel voted unanimously on April 22 to decertify use of the Diebold TSx paperless electronic voting system in California elections. Although the final decision is up to California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, he is expected to follow the recommendation of the board before April 30, 2004, and remove paperless Diebold electronic voting machines from California polling places in time for the November 2004 election.

The Voting Systems Panel did not recommend against continued use of the Diebold TS electronic voting machines or use of optical-scan voting machines. The GEMs software is also not affected by this decision.

There seems to be some buggy Spam software out there. There's this one spammer (or one spamming program) that is using my Michigan State University account, and many other MSU accounts as well. It's trying to "personalize" the spam by including the email address in the spam. In this case my email address is "bowersj2", so it's not particularly compelling, but hey, it's a fair try, right?

Thing is, I keep getting spam addressed to "bowman". It even says "bowman" on the To: line, so I'm not even sure how I'm getting it. (I must be bcc'ed or something.)

[The 9/11 commision's] mandate is "to provide a 'full and complete accounting' of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and recommendations as to how to prevent such attacks in the future."... It sounds uncontroversial, reasonable, even admirable, yet it contains at least three flaws that are common to most such inquiries into past events....

Consider: How would an understanding of the world on June 27, 1914, have helped anyone guess what was to happen next? The rise of Hitler, the demise of the Soviet bloc, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Internet bubble: not only were these events unpredictable, but anyone who correctly forecast any of them would have been deemed a lunatic (indeed, some were). This accusation of lunacy would have also applied to a correct prediction of the events of 9/11 — a black swan of the vicious variety.

"Caller ID for E-Mail: The Next Step to Deterring Spam" is the Microsoft draft specification to address the widespread problem of domain spoofing. Domain spoofing refers specifically to the use of someone else's domain name when sending a message, and is part of the larger spoofing problem, the practice of forging the sender's address on e-mail messages.

Caller ID for e-mail would verify that each e-mail message originates from the Internet domain it claims to come from. Eliminating domain spoofing will help legitimate senders protect their domain names and reputations, and help recipients more effectively identify and filter junk e-mail.

This is a solution to the spam problem of two years ago. Now that spammers control massive relay networks via the Windows viruses that are now literally pop up daily, and send their spam through those relays, source authentication is merely going to complete the push toward using relay networks.

Like many others in this country, I was pleasently surprised by the quality of The Apprentice, the show on NBC that if I have to explain, you will not want to read the rest of this post.

Considered as a game, Apprentice is almost identical to Survivor, with one major difference: The selection criterion for elimination. In Survivor, it is the majority vote of the rest of your tribe. In Apprentice, it is the selection of Donald Trump. Trump is a billionaire who has been to the brink and back, and whether I'd like him as a person or not, I do respect the results he has in the business arena.

This is a good text on the the impact that how we think of policing has on the real world.