Den Beste has a post up I have to point to, because as near as I can tell without somehow reaching into his mind, we share to a high degree the rare form of thinking he refers to.

It is peculiarly well-suited to software engineering (which I believe he has done some of, though I can't find a link quickly). You can never, ever, ever quash all bugs in advance, but this sort of thinking allows you to spot the fundamental architectural failings far enough in advance to be able to do something about it, and those are the hardest bugs to fix after the fact. Many is the time I would appear to be zoning out, or drawing random, barely-labelled squiggles on paper, and then pop out with something very near The Answer.

I didn't see all of the first part, so we confine this to the second part.

5. Oh, the clichés were out in full force today, but I think I'm going to pick the two contradictory clichés thrust together by the same character, no less: First, the President says, in response to an aide saying "Sir, there are some things we just must accept we have no control over.", "I don't accept that!". Later, the President gives us a nice stereotypical "This is Mother Earth and she shall do to us as she pleases" speech, with no indication that this is the result of learning or a new-found respect or anything... he's just preaching. (Hollywood, considering you just fell into the ocean, I don't think you're in a position to be preaching.)

This is not news.

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.