<politics>
With its decision in “Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld,” delivered by veteran justice John Paul Stevens yesterday, the Supreme Court has made it clear that the U.S. President must obey the international laws and treaties that the United States has signed. You know, messy little things like the Geneva Convention.
Here’s a column in the Nation about it.
Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly has a slightly different take, of course.
On a lighter note, here’s a nice Jon Stewart piece about Rumsfeld handling a testy question from former CIA employee Ray McGovern.
And, finally, a video of the President that may provide some insight into how those illegal tribunals came to be: delegation. Good managers don’t get bogged down in ethical and legal details.
Isn’t YouTube fun?
</politics>
Megan went to work in Redmond, but I worked from home today. I’m playing around with Visual Studio, writing some code and preparing for a presentation next week.
The cats have been lounging around outside in the yard. Fish is down the block looking for trouble, but Murg and Ike are content to lay inside the front gate, listening to the neighbor kids ride their bikes up and down the street, just waiting for Megan and Fish to come home.
Remember the Origami? It got a lot of attention back in March, and I happened to sit next to Origami GM Otto Berkes on a flight from Amsterdam to Sea-Tac, so I got to play with one for a couple hours.
Now they’re starting to hit the market from various manufacturers. Here’s an on-line demo of Sony’s Vaio model. It’s all in Japanese, but it’s fun even if you don’t know what the words are saying. Think of it as an abstract interactive game.
My alma mater, Mount Rainier High School in Des Moines, was demolished this summer. They’re building a new one on the same site, to be finished in time for the 2007/2008 school year. During the upcoming year the students will be attending my former junior high, Olympic, over on North Hill. (Here’s a tip for you relocated kids: you won’t be able to sneak across the street for a smoke between classes at Olympic, since there’s houses over there, but you can go down the hill behind the track and the teachers will never know what you’re up to. Or so I’ve heard.)
I snuck in and snapped a couple of photos of the construction last night, before some crabby guy came out of a trailer and told me “it’s a construction site, that’s why there are KEEP OUT signs here!” He closed the gate after we left, which was probably even more effective than those cute signs.
Here are the construction photos …
And here’s a photo of the planned new school …
(Click the photo for more info from the architects who designed the new version.)
We went out to dinner with Mom tonight. Man, Anthony’s is getting popular. Or it’s just that time of year for a restaurant at a marina.
Mom told some funny stories of what’s been going on at work, but the investigation is ongoing (literally) so I shouldn’t talk about it. But as you can see from her face below, she found it sort of amusing.
Megan is amused, too, having worked on WinFS for years.
The “net neutrality” debate has been a hot topic today, now that a Senate committee has approved a bill to allow the telcos to compete aggressively with the cable companies. An amendment to prohibit internet service providers from limiting access based on site content or other criteria was proposed but rejected. Here’s the Forbes Magazine article.
The fear from many people (including most everyone currently creating any type of content for the internet) is that this will allow ISPs to provide premium bandwidth and services to high-paying business customers, while mere individuals only have access to more limited connections.
Chris Pirillo has a good summary here, and it includes links to Todd Cochrane’s sky-is-falling reaction and the perspective of Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the internet. (He later changed his name to Al Gore, of course.)
It was a scorching hot weekend by Seattle standards: 88 degrees on Sunday, a record for June 25.
We took the ferry to Bainbridge Island, where we rode our bikes around for a couple of hours. It was better exercise than I expected. The roads are level along the shore, but in the middle of the island there are some very steep hills.
Here’s something new when you ride the ferry: they have an armed escort. A little Coast Guard boat rides alongside the ferry, with a guy up front manning a machine gun. Well, most of the time: he didn’t actually bother to get up on the bow with the gun until we were halfway across the Sound, and they did a little 360 maneuver once too. I feel so safe.
Edited: I edited this post Monday evening, after Tom told me about a rendering problem in Firefox for the way I was doing hover effects with CSS on thumbnail images. So I yanked that stuff out, and to make up for it I added a photo of Big Al’s ‘46 Ford that I took out in front of Isla Bonita in Winslow, while waiting for the ferry line to shrink late Sunday afternoon.
I’m wandering home across the USA this evening. First stop was in Memphis, where I had less than 30 minutes between flights but made the connection and still had time to listen to a great young singer at an airport bar. Here he is doing “What’s Goin’ On” by Marvin Gaye.
On the flight out of Memphis I talked to the lady next to me for a while, an elderly Jewish woman from Miami going to visit her daughter and grandkids in Winnipeg. She had this book by Bob Greene called “For Your Children’s Children” or something like that: it has a question at the top of each page like “What’s your favorite time of day?” or “Describe your first day at school,” and she had filled in dozens of pages with her tiny shaky handwriting, stories of things like crying the first day of school. It was a gift she’s going to give to her granddaughter Miranda.
Then here in Minneapolis I’m sitting at the bar, and the airport is deserted. The bartender explained to me the difference between Seattle and Minneapolis: “see, they’re about the same size, same cost of living, same quality of life, but Seattle’s summers suck because it rains so much and Minneapolis’s winters suck because it’s so cold. So it’s just a matter of when it sucks, that’s the difference.”
Man, a Kahlua and coffee is $10.35 here! Well, they’re doubles, but still … can I expense these?
See you soon, Megan, one more flight to go.
OK, so I’m in Tallahassee. Working on a really fun project with some hot developers (that is, really good at software design and programming, not, well, that kind of hot) who have built a system for tracking how bills get made into law in the Florida House of Representatives.
I’ll put some of the techy details on my Microsoft blog later. You know the old joke about making laws and making sausage? It’s true.
Below are a few shots of/from the capitol building today …
