THE ARRIVAL OF SECRET LAW
If this doesn’t give you the creeps – it should.
Remember the American Revolution some 200-odd years ago? The Founding Fathers of this country believed in individual rights, freedom, liberty, due process, and in limiting the power of the government. Hopefully this all sounds very familiar if you are an American.
Now our government is making secrets laws. WHAT!!!
This is evil. There is no other word for it. No wait – there is another word that fits – subversive. The making of secret laws subverts the founding principles of this country. In a response to a limited threat from the outside, folks inside the government are destroying from within the country founded on the principles of the American Revolution.
There is NO excuse that can possibly justify the making of secret laws in this country.
A friend goes to retrieve his elderly parents from South Africa from the aftermath of the end of apartheid.
Zak’s RSA Saga
The guy who took the photo says the critter in this picture is in fact a dolphin (though widely mis-identified as a shark).
Funny thing is I found the picture on a weblog of a South African website where the subject was shark encounters. Turns out the photo was taken in Malibu, California – a short drive from here (in fact drove through Malibu this last weekend).
Looking at the photo, the blurred outline distorted by the water looks a bit “pointed” – more like a shark than a dolphin.
Just me and the kids this Thanksgiving.
We decided on yams (with butter, cream, cinnamon, nutmeg, and topped with melted marshmellows), corn bread (using the excellent sweet canned corn from Trader Joe’s), and a roast turkey. Got a 20lb turkey (why not?) and marinated overnight. Made the marinade out of equal parts lemon juice, olive oil, light soy sauce, and packet of dried oregano. The marinade tasted really good – might use this for other things, in fact this might even make a good salad dressing. Rubbed the turkey with olive oil, and popped into a 450 degree oven until browned (about 25 minutes). Dropped the temperature to 350 degrees, stuck in the temperature probe, poured some water into the bottom of the roasting pan (to raise the humidity), and covered with aluminum foil.
The yams and corn bread are done. Hopefully in about 3 to 5 hours we will have turkey…
I think she’s got the meaningless nature of much travel right in Helicopter versus airplane noise
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We had a bit a of rain in the last few weeks. In fact, for southern California we got quite a lot of rain. A bit of before and after…
September 12 – lunch?
September 25 – Small brush fire off Santiago Canyon Road.
November 1st – even the trail is turning green.
November 1st – distressed cactus.
Note the bit of green near the bottom of the picture. Weeks after the rain the cactus is still recovering from the dry spell.
November 15th – Catalina Island outlined against the setting sun.
In the “how not to miss the point” column…
John Battelle writes about: Can We Please Bury the Netscape Metaphor? and I am in complete agreement with the points he makes.
Netscape as a phenomena was built on a small clever idea and a massive, insane over-reaction by the stock market. The company itself had very little depth outside the one clever but not original idea. If you want a model for what Netscape could have been, look at the outfit that sells the Opera web browser – a small company with a respectible product that is both competitive and steadily evolving. There is no way Netscape could ever have met the expectations set by the stock market. They had to take the money from the stock market and try to build a company to match the stock price. In the end they failed – not for lack of trying, but simply because building a successful large company from scratch is quite difficult.
Google is almost exactly the opposite of Netscape. They started with one small clever idea (an unusually effective search engire) and spent years building steadily on this base. Google also built something more valuable – customer trust – by clearly putting the interests of the customer first. In the years before going to the stock market Google made a series of very smart, largely incremental improvements to their collection of offerings. As a user I am continually pleased with the service they provide. As a software developer I am repeatedly impressed by their choices both in enhancing their existing services, and in their amazing good taste in acquisitions.
Google is much more likely to succeed that Netscape in that they earn their position everyday. Google is also more likely to succeed against Microsoft for essentially the same reason the makers of large computers could not succeed against the makers of small computers – the new approach is fundamentally different, and the older company cannot compete without largely abandoning their existing business model.
