My son started making these really odd noises today. You have to watch the video to understand, but it’s like something out of the Excorcist. You half expect his head to rotate a full 360 degrees halfway through this. It’s that creepy.
Gallery2 doesn’t support emailing photos to it by default, so I had to make alot of changes to get it working. Look behind the cut if you’re interested in how I did it.
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This morning I was reading this article about the Litvinenko murder in Britain. As horrible as the whole situation is, I noted this brief statement in the article:
The Government’s Cobra special emergencies committee met every few hours to discuss the crisis.
Why would you give a “special emergencies committee” the same name as a fictional terrorist organization?
It’s actually an acronym that stands for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, and as far as I can tell they didn’t start using that acronym until the late 90’s. In other words, way after G.I. Joe. They should have known better.
A related thing that’s always been a mystery to me. How come the payments you make to maintain your health insurance when you change jobs are called COBRA payments? Turns out that they are named after the law that compels insurance companies and employers to offer that service, the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985. In a typical display of congressional pace, the law itself wasn’t passed until April of 1986. But that still doesn’t get our government off the hook. The Cobra Commander action figure was released in 1982. Four years is plenty of time for someone to point out the relationship between the name of the bill, and the name of the villains in a popular comic book and cartoon series.
Zark came to town this weekend to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family. He also intended to use this break from school to study for his upcoming finals. Subsequently, I kidnapped him this afternoon and took him to have lunch with Dan. Probably the most interesting thing that I learned this afternoon was Zark’s unique study technique. Basically, and you’ll totally get this if you know Zark, he associates the stuff he needs to memorize in class with Disney trivia.
I was reading this article the other day, “Every Time You Vote against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf.” I know that I am in the minority thinking like this, but our government doesn’t exactly have a sterling record when it comes to the types of regulation that these guys advocate. I’m reminded of the businesses of James J. Hill. He built the first privately funded transcontinental railroad in the U.S. He was able to do this without government subsidies because he built farms and industry along the route to ensure the success of his railroad. One of the companies that he started, a steamship company that opened up east Asian markets to U.S. cotton and wheat, relied on the railroad to move export goods at a reduced rate to the ports.
The other three transcontinental railroads had been heavily subsidized by the government, and farmers in the west complained to Congress about the economic power that these railroads were exerting. As a result the government created the Interstate Commerce Commission and granted them vast regulatory powers restricting who could own or operate railroads, and the maximum or minimum rates that they could charge for shipping. James J. Hill was forced to shutdown his steamship company because he was no longer allowed to offer discounts on getting products to the port. On the other hand, the companies that Congress was seeking to regulate were the ones that benefited the most from the regulation.
Fast forward to the present. You have giant cable and telecommunications companies that have been expanding and improving their infrastructure, hoping to earn a return on their investment by offering VOIP and IPTV services in the future. You have companies who rely on this infrastructure, but who haven’t been forced to invest in it, and in some cases are already offering VOIP or IPTV services. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see a parallel between what is happening here and what happened a hundred years ago. I also don’t think that I’m going out on a limb by suggesting that any attempt by the government to legislate the same kinds of regulations into the ISP industry that they legislated into the railroad industry a century ago would likely backfire the same way it did then.
For several minutes now I’ve been arguing with my daughter. She’s convinced that she should be able to fast forward through the commercials. I know that it’s live television, so there’s nothing to fast forward through. I get bonus points though because I never used the phrase, “when I was your age.”
I’m thankful for:
I borrowed a co-workers badge this morning to get my car into the parking garage. I think I looked down and just assumed that I didn’t have my badge on me. I’ve been working the entire day on the assumption that I left my badge at home. A few minutes ago I suddenly came to the realization that I had my badge on me the entire day. I just never checked.
Mark mentioned how two companies selling gasoline in Colorado were sued by their competitors because their prices were two low. In a similar vein, the mayor of Boston intends to bill Sony “for the chaos that swirled around the release of its PlayStation 3 machine after Boston police had to quell crowds grown frenzied and unruly by the hype surrounding the coveted consoles.“
