I have a book on my bookshelf at home called in search of deep throat. It looks like I may be able to skip right to the final chapter now.

This is the most interesting quote in the article:

“I don’t think (being Deep Throat) was anything to be proud of,” Felt indicated to his son,

It’s interesting to see that he comes from such a strong “no-snitching” point of view that he now feels guilty for what he did. I am of the opinion (as I believe are most people, including, apparently, his family), that he did the right thing. The president was committing a crime and there were very few people who had detailed knowledge of it. As an FBI agent he had taken an oath to defend the constitution of the United states from all enemies, both foreign and domestic. Although he may have betrayed the president’s trust, it is clear that Nixon was not, at that time, deserving of such trust. Mr. Felt was doing nothing more than his sworn duty as an agent of the United States to defend the country.

Today is a beautiful day. The sun is out, the weather is nice, the sky is blue, the birds are singing, and it’s a good day to be alive. Want to know why? Because after several weeks of agony, it appears that there is more star trek coming. Everyone assumed that after Nemesis bombed at the box office there would be no movie sequels, and Enterprise was canceled after only four seasons (the last episode aired a few weeks ago). I assumed after watching the last episode of Enterprise that I was in fact never going to see another new episode of star trek again. (A fact which had me thoroughly depressed). Now if I can just manage to wait a few years there should be a full length feature film coming out. There is of course the issue of what to do for the next few years, but thankfully there is enough star trek already in existence (almost all of which I already have on DVD) that if I watched one episode per night every night, it would take about 2 years to go through all the star trek episodes I already have. I will of course be skipping the worst episode of all time (regeneration) lest watching it contaminate my mind.

I got a new computer about a week ago, and since then I’ve been getting a lot of spam because I haven’t fully configured my spam filter. There’s one piece of spam I’ve gotten a few times, and the top of it reads as follows:

Good afternoon ;D. I am Julie. I live in Texas and I am eighteen years old.
Cheerleading is my life. I love my pompons all the way down to my skirt.

Putting aside for the moment the obvious attempts at playing to the sterotypical male cheerleader fantasy, what the heck does “I love pompons all the way down to my skirt” mean? I’m assuming it should be pompoms (which any real chearleader would be able to spell), but even with that I still have no idea what the heck it means. Anyone know?

It finally happened today. Someone emailed me to ask me a question that I really don’t know how to answer politely. The worst part is that I saw this question coming at least 6 months in advance, and in those 6 months I still haven’t thought up a good way to answer it. (I also can’t reveal what the question is or who asked it in such a public forum, sorry).

So now the dilemma arises: how do I answer this question honestly in a way that won’t offend anyone?

Then the answer becomes clear – I’ll call Rebecca and have her do it. :-)

This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while. It combines the listings from craigslist and the power of google maps so that you can look at a given city and see where various houses and apartments for for sale/rent on a fully interactive google map. It’s very very cool. Even if you’re not looking for a place to live, you should still check it out.

The housing map is even cooler than the Chicago Crime map, which let’s you see crime in any given hour of any given day.

I came accross this last night while catching up on my shiur which I missed while I was in Miami.

Rava bar Mechasya said in the name of Rav Chama bar Gurya who said in the name of Rav: If all the seas were black ink, and the marshes were quills, and the heavens were parchments, and all the people were scribes, they would not suffice to record the depth of the mind of the government.

It’s interesting to see how our opinions of government have changed over time isn’t it?

I’m currently in Miami. I was going to post this rant before I went and title it “welcome to Miami/Bienvenido a Miami”, which is a lyric from the Will Smith song Miami, but alas it is too late. This rant is also a little dated too, but I’m going to run with it anyway.

I’ve been in Miami all week for our All hands conference. The entire NASA IG is here – the auditors, the investigators, the administrative assitants, the IT people, the HR people, etc. It totals about 250 people in all. I was warned before going that this might in fact be the most boring week of my life. I have to say, I think they were right. I tried to do what I usually do when I go to boring and stupid conferences, which is record all the stupid and inane things speakers say, but this time I couldn’t actually write fast enough to keep up. (I’ll have more on this later once I’m sure it won’t get me fired).

Southern Florida is apparently home to the highest number of Jews as an overall percentage of the population of anywhere outside of Israel. They have dozens of kosher retaurants, and plenty of shuls. Normally I would love to travel to a place like this. The conference doesn’t start till 8:30 each morning. I could stay near a shul, go to shachrit every morning before the conference, go to good kosher restaurants in the evening, and probably even find a daf yomi shir somewhere in the area so I wouldn’t fall behind while I was away. Unfortunately most of that won’t happen. The whole idea of the conference is that they put us in a hotel which has multiple restaurants in the hotel so we don’t have to go anywhere, and they won’t give any of us a car. I tried desperately to find a shul near the hotel, but unfortunately we’re staying in the one part of Miami that doesn’t have Jews. The closest thing I could find was a chabad a mile away that didn’t have services this week. Miami also has no public transit. It drives me nuts. Ironically I didn’t feel this bad when I went to Huntsville Alabama, but this is much worse. I’m so close, and yet so far.

On the plus side, the view out of my hotel window is spectacular:

Last week was Yom Hashoah, Holocaust remembrance day. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon visited Auschwitz and put up a mezuzah. This apparently sparked some controversey in the Israeli media, some of whom said that a mezuzah doesn’t belong there. A debate followed over at blog head, a Jewish interest blog that is fast becoming one of my favorites. I’m reposting my comments from bloghead here because I think they’re worthwhile.

Auschwitz is not just a symbol of the persecution and murder of countless Jews – it is also a symbol of resilience. No matter how hard the Nazis tried to exterminate our bodies, they could not exterminate our souls. In every generation someone may try to kill us, but in every generation we will persevere. The mezuzah is a sign of life. A symbol that even in the face of the worst atrocities in human history, our spirit lives on. Neither the Nazis nor anyone else can exterminate the words of G-d, and the mezuzah is a reminder of the difference between that which the Nazis could control, and that which is beyond control.

Am Yisroel Chai.

I’m trying a new form of comment filtering called mt-blacklist to block out blog spam (I spent another few hours the other night deleting comment spam). If anyone has any of their legitimate comments filtered please let me know. (It is all logged, but I can’t guarantee I’ll check the logs that often, so if anything happens please let me know).

A new form of spam has crept into my world. It wasn’t bad enough that spammers kept spamming the comments in the blog (I usually responded by deleting the comments, banning the offending IPs, and eventualy, closing all old posts to comments to avoid having to dig through hundreds of spam comments when a spam bot got lose on the site). Today I discovered a new scourge – trackback spam. Trackback is the little-used feature I used to have wherein other people could link to posts here via the trackback link at the bottom of each post, and the link would then reflect the number of people who had linked back. In other words if two people linked to a given post I made, I would see “Trackback (2)” at the bottom of the post, and clicking on it would give a list of the two URL’s that had linked to that given post. For the most part it was a completely unused feature, and over the last few days a few spam bots have managed to fill my trackback links with spam links for everything from viagra websites to group homes for people with ADD. To combat this I have simply disabled the trackback feature. If you want to link to a specific post, just use the archive (the “recent posts” section on the right is probably the easiest way to do it). It bothers me though that one stupid spammer has once again ruined a cool piece of technology for everyone else.

A few blog worthy things have ben going through my head lately, I’ll see if I can get one of them down now and the rest in the next few days.

Of all the things that could scare me about married life (living together, children, making decisions as a couple, having to share an apartment, etc.) the thing that scares me the most is wearing a wedding ring. I’ve never worn anything on my hand, not even a watch. I also hate carrying things in my hands. I still use a backpack over a briefcase even though it looks childish because I hate having things in my hand. At work last week they gave out one of those stupid plastic bracelets that Lance Armstrong made so hip for NASA’s upcoming return to flight. I decided to wear it and see how long it lasted. WIthin five minutes I had to take it off. It’s not that it was too tight or anything, it was just the presence of something on my wrist while I was trying to use my hands was disconcerting. The extra weight of two ounces of plastic on my wrist was throwing me off and making it hard to type.

Beyond that there’s the second problem with a wedding ring – what if I lose it? I’m a fidgeter and I’m sure I’ll be fidgeting with my ring for at least the first few months constantly, and I’ll have to take it off every morning when I put on tefillin. What if I forget it? What if I lose it? What if it falls off my finger and rolls under a radiator? Will it get damaged when I go to the gym?

On the other hand, if this is the biggest thing I have to worry about, then I guess I don’t have so many problems after all.

Apparently many of the British political ads aren’t the sleazy slasher style commercials we have here designed to scare you into action. This one is, at the very least, funny, creative, and clever. (Although I have no idea who those people are or if they’re supposed to be anyone in particular).