This is almost three minutes long, just a sound clip of my kid, but it's so freaking adorable and hilarious that I had to share it. It's pretty much just Oliver (my 20-month-old son) and I reading a Richard Scarry book filled with illustrations of trucks, cars, buildings, cities and people, all in relatively equal distribution. Not that you'd get that impression from this clip.

Click here to listen

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

— Albert Einstein

For the next few weeks, I'm going to be rethinking this site, so things are going to be relatively quiet around here for a while. The main factors driving this redevelopment effort, in case you were wondering, are:

• Most of the stuff I post is really only interesting to friends and family anyway,
• I find myself wanting to post lots of geeky stuff related to my work, but I usually don't, for fear of boring the hell out of said friends and family, and
• I hate to say it, but as a new dad I'm becoming a bit more protective of my personal information in general.

So I'll be forking the site into two kinds of things, basically — one, a notebook of stuff I collect for friends and family (pictures of my kid, notes about what we're up to lately, etc.), and two, a notebook of stuff I collect that have more to do with work (technology stuff, software stuff, über-geeky industrial-design-type stuff, etc.). The latter will be completely public, whereas the former will be, alas, protected. I'm still trying to figure out how best to do that, since I'd rather folks not have to identify themselves every time they choose to stop by — but at the same time, I'd like to know I have at least some measure of control over who's checking out my house, my kid, my whereabouts from one day to the next, and so on.

Hopefully that'll make sense; we'll see. It's not a trivial undertaking, since I've got upwards of 15,000 or so pieces of content to get organized into one thing or another, and I'm also in the middle of a rather large project at work, but I'll get there. For you, for now, not much'll change — still the odd post here and there, but in general, fairly quiet.

I hope you enjoy the ultimate result(s). And of course, if you have any suggestions as to things you might appreciate my adding (or removing), please do consider dropping me a line. Thanks.

A couple of excerpts from a fine, brief piece about Christopher Hitchens, a writer whose work I've never been all that interested in digging into, to be honest. Until now, maybe.

As to the larger question of whether God exists, I would agree with Hitchens that we can't rule out the possibility of some indefinable first mover, although I'm sure he doesn't mean mover as a being but as a force. To hope we can learn how the universe came about is admirable; one might as well call that hope by any name. Whatever one calls it, it's by definition outside the reach not only of our knowledge, but of knowledge itself.

I was asked at lunch today who or what I worshipped. The question was asked sincerely, and in the same spirit I responded that I worshipped whatever there might be outside knowledge. I worship the void. The mystery. And the ability of our human minds to perceive an unanswerable mystery. To reduce such a thing to simplistic names is an insult to it, and to our intelligence.

What I will say is that my appreciation for Roger Ebert only deepens with time.

Here's the list Woody recently gave New York Magazine of his six best movies, presumably not in order:

• Purple Rose of Cairo
• Match Point
• Bullets Over Broadway
• Zelig
• Husbands and Wives, and
• Vicky Cristina Barcelona

And I have to agree with Ebert -- Woody's wrong. So wrong. (Although to be fair, I haven't seen Vicky Cristina , which I've heard is excellent. I'm pretty sure I've seen the rest of his filmography, though, minus a couple of new and very old ones.)

Here's what I'd submit, probably in order, if I were forced to choose only six:

1. Annie Hall
2. Husbands and Wives
3. Crimes and Misdemeanors
4. Manhattan
5. Hannah and Her Sisters
6. Stardust Memories

Honorable mentions, though, would have to go to Zelig (genius), Manhattan Murder Mystery (hilarious, very smart, perfectly paced, great performances), and Everyone Says I Love You (just awesome -- except for Edward Norton, who's really, really awful in it; but otherwise awesome).

Recently Fox reviewed our iPhone app, quite favorably in fact. Check it out:

I'd like to ask you to do me a favor: Watch this video, right now please. It's short, and quite well-produced. And by doing so, you'll bump the count ever so slightly, bringing us all a little closer to a celebratory afternoon of pizza and beer at the Rhapsody offices. (And if you happen to have an iPhone, by God, download and give it a try!)

Gracious thanks in advance for your patronage.

From a user review of High Noon at Netflix.com:

Dismissed long ago as wooden and verbose, I had a complete reversal of opinion upon revisiting High Noon.

Giggle.

From the New York Times:

Overwhelmingly, Americans think the nation needs a fundamental overhaul of its energy policies, and most expect alternative forms to replace oil as a major source within 25 years. Yet a majority are unwilling to pay higher gasoline prices to help develop new fuel sources.

Now, I'm no economist or anything, but I'm pretty sure there's something wrong -- although somehow perfectly American -- with the math here somewhere.

Watch and drool.

A few of my own thoughts:

• FaceTime (the new video-calling feature) looks amazing. (And for best results, of course, be sure to get your whole family an iPhone and switch everyone over to AT&T.)
• I've already fallen in love with the beauty of the iPad display -- it's by far better than any monitor I've ever used (even the $900 LCD on my desk at home). That the iPhone's using the same technology makes me that much more interested in picking one up.
• Multitasking's long overdue -- we'll love that here at Rhapsody -- even if it does have a bit of a negative effect on battery life.
• The drag-and-drop-app-icons-to-create-app-folders feature -- also great, but made me chuckle: I immediately remembered sitting in a RealDVD product meeting, maybe a little over year ago, during which the topic was raised of how users might be allowed to create sets out of their individually saved DVDs. An "Edit" screen, containing a drop-down menu with which users could select an existing set or specify a new one, had been constructed by the PM, but it seemed exceedingly clunky to me. I suggested instead that we simply allow them to drag one video onto another and create sets implicitly -- click the cover of Disc 1 of X-Files Season 1, drag it onto Disc 2, drop, and boom, there's your new set -- precisely the same model Apple demonstrates in this video. Unsurprisingly, I was all but laughed out of the room. "Users will never be able to figure that out," the PM said. Uh-huh. Not that it matters anymore, but still. Yeah.
• Call me paranoid, but there's something about the steel frame serving as an antenna makes the brain cells behind my temples a little nervous.
• I want one. But I definitely do not want to switch to AT&T. Dammit.

More later. Curious as to whether we'll hear anything about Lala, too.

Thanks to a few lines of elementary JavaScript I've been meaning to write for the past few weeks, you can now view all of my videos in iPhone- and iPad-friendly HTML5. Enjoy.

One of the first things I did when I got this new iPad was check out the native YouTube app. I was immediately disappointed:  download performance seemed to be terrible, and on some nights, I could hardly get a Netflix stream to complete, much less browse any of my friends' high-resolution photos on Flickr or even download the odd app from the App Store.  Even my beloved Rhapsody client seemed to fail constantly in mid-track -- a huge disappointment considering I happen to work there.

Anyway, as it turns out, it was all my fault -- well, sort of.

I'm not entirely sure why, but it seems the iPad wasn't playing nicely with my Linksys wireless router's encryption settings for some reason.  If you're having what feels like a similar problem -- stuttering YouTube playback, dropped audio connections, an all 'round sense of downloads just taking way longer than they ought to -- try tweaking your router to use these settings:

• WAP Security (as opposed to WEP or WAP2) with AES encryption

• Forced Wireless-G Protocol (as opposed to automatic selection between B, G and N modes)

• Standard Channel 1 (again, as opposed to automatic selection)

I had been using WAP2 and the "automatic" options, and was getting a pathetic ~2 Mbps downstream.  Since making the switch, I'm now getting consistently closer to 20.  Huge difference.  Hope it helps someone else out there.    

Louis Woo, a Foxconn executive, on the recent spate of suicides at his company:

"There is a fine line between productivity and regimentation and inhumane treatment,” said Louis Woo, a Foxconn executive. “I hope we treat our workers with dignity and respect."

I'd say there's a pretty freaking fat line between them, actually.

Since my first interview with Rhapsody a few weeks ago, I've been hearing fairly constantly about, and seeing bazillions of references to (on covers of various magazines, on Web sites, etc.), someone by the curious name of Lady Gaga. To the amazement of almost everyone around me, I had no idea who this new and apparently ubiquitous person/brand/entity was, so today, finally, I decided to look her/it up on the site and give a listen.

Turns out, yeah ... wasn't really my thing. But it did remind me of a clip I saw posted on Jason Kottke's site recently of a cover of Lady Gaga's "Telephone" by the duo Pomplamoose, so I went back to watch it, and loved it. Towers over the original, I think:

Enjoy. We don't (yet) carry the indy group's album at Rhapsody, but you can buy from them directly through iTunes, and view more of their excellent covers on YouTube.

Update: We actually do carry a few things by Pomplamoose on Rhapsody! Rebecca says they remind her of The Bird and the Bee. I'd agree.

Via Engadget (and by way of graphic artist Christoph Niemann's Twitter stream), here's a glimpse of a new handheld device from Microsoft, codenamed Courier:

I have to say -- I'm already in love with this thing. Just the other day I was remarking to a friend that while all these online task-management apps certainly work, nothing truly beats the feeling of crossing a task off on a sheet of paper with a pencil. It's cool someone -- Microsoft, even! -- decided to modeled a device around that particular idea, and went several steps beyond at that. When I said the iPad was on to something, this is what I meant.

More details (and better photos) on Gizmodo.

A look at HP's upcoming Slate, via Wired GadgetLab:

Now, I'm an avid Flash-platform developer, so it should come as no surprise that Apple's refusal to support Flash on its iPhone and iPad platforms frustrates me; it's largely why I've never picked up an iPhone, one of several reasons I've chosen not to wade into the waters of iPhone development, and primarily why you won't catch me buying an iPad next month. This Slate device interests me, though. Sure, it's an iPad clone, but the iPad, a tablet PC, doesn't really seem all that revolutionary, either. And of course, it (the Slate) runs Flash and AIR, which is great. But I'm not here to evangelize the Slate. I'm saying that I think the Slate, and devices like it, will push Apple to support Flash much sooner than it would have had it not decided to build the iPad.

Tablet PCs like the Slate and the iPad are, it seems, a good deal more PC-like than phone-like; using one feels considerably more like using one's laptop than cell phone. So it's no great leap of the imagination to presume, then, that users will probably expect their tablets (Slates, iPads, whatever) to behave more like their PCs -- to do as much, or nearly so, as their laptops or netbooks do now -- than their cells. Slate users, for their part (the Slate runs Windows 7, incidentally) are bound to be more satisfied with their experience in this respect.

But iPad users, I'm guessing, are going to feel the absence of Flash much more acutely than iPhone users do today -- and I think that'll actually put pressure on Apple to support Flash on the iPad, lest it be forced to continually explain its (primarily financial, and I think customer-antagonistic) reasons for not supporting Flash in the first place. The iPad already looks like a crippled, if quite pretty, netbook. Denying its users the option to run Flash only serves to cripple it more.

So it seems there are three possible outcomes to all this: (1) that users don't care -- they're so enamored with their iPads and iPhones that the Flash exclusion just doesn't matter to them enough to keep them from handing over their cash; (2) that users get wise and simply stop buying iPads and iPhones in response to Apple's rejection of Flash; or (3) Apple grudgingly concedes and begins to support Flash, first on the iPad, and then, ultimately -- in a great big blowback of irony -- on the iPhone. I don't usually go in for technology predictions, because I tend to suck at them, but in this case, if the tablet phenomenon catches on (and I actually think it will, thanks largely to the Kindle and the iPad), I'd bet on the third scenario -- at least the iPad part of it. If folks start buying tablets in good numbers, I do think we'll see Flash on the iPad relatively soon.

Place your bets....

Via Seattle Beer News, a look at one of several pub crawls within walking distance of our home here in the Greenwood/Phinney Ridge community of Seattle.

After about 6 or 7 hours of walking and drinking, the more intelligent members of the crawl convinced me that it was time to call it a night. We had tentative plans to include Pillager’s Pub, the Baranof (every crawl should have a dive), and even the Pub at Piper’s Creek if we wanted to add another longer walk. But, hopping on the #5 to head back home was the smart call, and I’ll live to crawl another day. The six bars we hit was really just about perfect, and with the 2 to 3 miles of walking our sobriety was still pretty well in check. Overall, these crawls are making me a bit jealous for the lucky people that get to live in these neighborhoods.

Indeed.

Of those mentioned, I'd say Naked City Taphouse is probably my favorite, mainly for the quality of the beers and the privileging of quality beers in general; when you sit down, you're handed a laser-printed beer menu indicating the selections currently on tap (generally 20 or so, if memory serves) and, in muted type beneath each line, which are queued up to replace them. Most of the selections are local, a few even brewed on-site. Always excellent. (Their home-brewed rauchbier is fantastic.) I had the pleasure recently of sitting down for a couple of drafts with the owner and his wife at a friend's get-together, after which he led us all on a brief tour of the newly built brewing facilities. A great place -- and easily the finest Web site I've ever seen representing a watering hole. (I mean come on: What other bars can you name that offer Twitter streams and RSS feeds of what's on tap and up next?)

I'd probably add Prost to the list as well -- many fine, fine Belgian and German beers to be had there, along with excellent sausages, sauerkrauts, cheeses and mustards; Rebecca and I love to pop in there from time to time -- and second the mentions of the Snowgoose, 74th St. and the Barking Dog, which is only about a hundred yards from our house, and which serves one of the best hamburgers I've ever had in my whole entire life.

Have I mentioned how much we love it here?

From Vimeo, via The Morning News -- a nice little documentary snapshot:

Nick Bilton, at the Times, addresses the question, with a little help from Tim O'Reilly. I like what O'Reilly (who recently ditched his iPhone for a Nexus One) has to say on the matter:

Ultimately, Mr. O’Reilly said he made the switch because he found the wireless service to be less expensive. And he liked that Google’s Android platform was more open to developers than Apple’s iPhone ecosystem.

That, my fellow Internauts, is what it's all about. The iPhone is a beautiful device, but it's too restrictive, plain and simple. The Nexus One has its problems, as Gen 1 devices so often do, but that's to be expected (and why I haven't bought one myself); what's important is that comparable alternatives are finally beginning to emerge, and that'll force Apple to either open up its platform and add a little transparency, or start ceding ground to the competition.

I've resisted the iPhone mainly for that reason -- because it offers pretty much no flexibility whatever. It's practically bound to a pricey AT&T contract, doesn't fully support Flash, doesn't support Java at all, and its app store requires me to pay Apple a hundred bucks just for the privilege of building apps in Objective-C -- a language almost nobody uses but Apple -- and then cross my fingers in hopes that my app, which could take months to build, might be so lucky as to be approved by the all-powerful App Store demigods. Oh, and I'd have to buy a Mac, too -- one can't develop iPhone apps (legally, anyway) on anything but a licensed Mac OS. Don't like it, Nunciato? Tough. Suck on that.

Android, on the other hand, is way more open: it runs plain ol' Java, which millions of developers (me included) already know, it builds nicely with Eclipse on all three major platforms, and developing for it doesn't cost me a penny. I can build and deploy apps to my heart's content, then reuse the knowledge I gain elsewhere. So, let's see: closed, expensive and risky, or open, free and predictable? Hmm. Lemme think....

Locking down the iPhone ecosystem will, I think ultimately, turn out to be a major mistake on Apple's part; it was only a matter of time until alternatives would begin to emerge, and folks would start realizing the hidden costs of carrying around such a pretty little device. Personally, I'm waiting -- not for Apple to change its ways, because I don't think that'll happen (although it'd be great if it did), but for the Nexus One to stabilize, and for the Android universe to expand a bit. Then, maybe, I'll bite. For now, though, I'll stick with my iPhone wanna-be. It's far from perfect, but it works, and it doesn't pretend to be more than it is.

I'm generally not a huge fan of DHH -- he's a brilliant guy, to be sure, but he's also arrogant as all get-out, and if you know me, you know I'm no fan of arrogance, particularly when it comes to my fellow programmers -- but on the subject of Web applications and their so-called "monetization," the 37Signals partner is dead-on as far as I'm concerned:

It's not rocket surgery. I mean it's really just that simple three-step idea: You have a great application, you ask money for it, if people like it, they'll pay, and you profit.

A great little video (~30 minutes) lifted from YCombinator's 2008 Startup School. I attended in '06, myself -- fantastic learning experience.

But I do wholeheartedly agree: I pay happily for a number of Web applications that add value to my life: Flickr ($25 annually), Vimeo ($65 annually), Mozy ($20 monthly) -- it's not a huge list by any means, but it's something, and I've bought a number of software applications in my day, too, ranging everywhere from twenty bucks to several thousand. If you build something worth paying for, people will pay for it. Simple as that, really.

And as an aside, I love that he compares the odds of any one of the event's attendees creating The Next Facebook (as opposed creating to a modest, profitable business) to being victimized by airline terrorism. It's a tad crass -- what else would you from DHH? -- but also statistically sound.

Anil Dash on Facebook and the social Web, from a recent interview in The Morning News:

I think the most practical and pragmatic first step is for people to get educated. If I said, “I’m going to come by your house, survey all of your personal data, rifle through your files, and share some parts of what I’ve learned with whomever pays me the most money, under terms that can change at any time to be even more in my favor,” you’d kick me out without even thinking twice. If I said, “But wait! If you let me do this, I’ll reintroduce you to people you hated in high school, and let you play with virtual farm animals!” you’d probably be beating me while I was on the way out. But that’s the exchange we make with Facebook every day.

I’m not saying there’s no value in it, I’m saying there are 350 million people who don’t understand how much they’ve given up control over the most valuable part of their identities, and they’ve sold short their futures online without even getting paid.

Once you get educated, get your own web site and your own email with your own name on it, that you own. Someday very soon you’ll be able to be just as connected as you can be with Facebook and Twitter, but on your own terms, and that’s when we’ll see the real value of today’s real-time social networks. Right now we’re all constrained by the fact that we’re sharecroppers.

For me, aside from the exceedingly rare gem (to wit: a recent video clip posted by a gradeschool pal, in which all of us gradeschoolers sang songs and played ukeleles -- that was quite a find, indeed), or the odd status update announcing the birth of a new baby, or colorful sociopolitical rant, Facebook has become a gigantic waste of time and energy. Like Anil, I'm not saying it has no value, because it does have some -- but I am saying it has very limited value, and probably costs us all a lot more, in a number of ways, than it gives back.

Nick Carr elaborates on the idea here.

I have to apologize in advance for this, for it might make you out-and-out gag, but as a little experiment of sorts, I've decided to start a new series: Olliesounds (or, if you like, Sounds of My Son -- a bit more fitfully cheesy, I think). Since we all seem to spend so much time taking pictures of our kids, or videos, imagery basically, I thought I might try something a little different: audio clips.

We spend a lot of time using our eyes -- looking, watching, scanning, snapping -- but we don't spend all that much time really listening anymore, and the sounds babies make in particular can be pretty awesome, to say nothing of the sounds of the rest of our mundane lives. So I plan to record more of both of them, and to share a few as well, just to see where it leads.

So, as they say, without further ado, here we go -- installment one: a one-and-a-half minute clip of my kid taking a snooze. Enjoy.

Olliesounds I: Napping (~1:30)

Today's New York Times reports on a question that's been bopping around in my head lately:

The chief executives of several major airlines said this week that they have been in constant contact with officials of the Transportation Security Administration, which oversees security at the nation’s airports, discussing the best ways to provide more safety on planes while keeping passengers’ comfort in mind.

They acknowledge that the procedures have to be unpredictable to be effective. But they also say that the unpredictability could push travelers to avoid airports at all costs.

They say consumers’ perception of the inconvenience while traveling may even hurt the industry more than travelers’ worries about another bombing attempt.

“I don’t think people book away because of fear,” said one executive, who agreed to speak candidly about the industry’s concerns only if he was not quoted by name. “I think they book away because of inconvenience. If it means three hours in line at an airport, they aren’t going to take their trips.”

For my part, I can say that's definitely true: I won't fly anymore unless I absolutely have to, and the primary reason is the TSA. Last year, Rebecca and I took the Pacific Surfliner down to Orange County to be with my family for Thanksgiving. It took two full days to get there, then two full days to get back, but there was almost no security whatever (which I found, paradoxically, both relieving and irksome), and it gave us a far different experience of travel: you take your time, you read a couple of books, you sleep in, watch a few movies, meet new and interesting people at the table three times a day, and watch the world go by as you do it. Air travel, by comparison, becomes stressful the moment you set foot in the terminal, and doesn't let up until you come out the other end. But it wasn't always that way: you used to be able to walk into a terminal, walk onto a plane, meet your family at the gate, and actually enjoy yourself for a while. Air travel used to be almost luxurious. Not anymore. Now, it's a fucking privilege, pal, and if you're going to give anyone any lip about having to take off your shoes, ditch that bottle of "non-secure" water, or drag your out-of-shape ass through the full-body scanner, well, you'd better be prepared to tell it to the judge. Sir.

Salon's been reporting on the lunacy of the TSA for some time now -- as with this little gem of a tale, told by a pilot, about the hassle he endured while trying to smuggle a life-threatening butterknife through a TSA checkpoint:

So, together with a throng of exhausted passengers, most of whom are rushing to catch connections, I'm funneled into the grimy, dimly lit checkpoint. I hoist my luggage -- my black flight case, my backpack and a roll-aboard suitcase -- onto the X-ray belt, then pass through the metal detector. Once on the other side, I'm waiting for my stuff to reappear when suddenly the belt comes to a stop. "Bag check!" shouts the guard behind the monitor.

The bag she's talking about turns out to be my roll-aboard. A second guard, a mean-looking woman whose girth is exceeded only by the weight of the chip on her shoulder, comes over and yanks it from the machine.

"Is this yours?" she wants to know.

"Yes, it's mine."

"You got a knife in here?"

"A knife?"

"A knife," she barks. "Some silverware."

Indeed I do. Indeed I always do. Inside my roll-aboard I carry a spare set of airline-issue cutlery -- a spoon, a fork and a knife. Along with packets of noodles and other small snacks, this is part of my hotel survival kit, useful in the event of short layovers or other situations when food isn't available. Borrowed from my collection of airline silverware (some of us really have such things), it's the exact cutlery that accompanies your meal on a long-haul flight. The pieces are stainless steel, about 5 inches long. The knife has a rounded end and a short row of teeth -- I would call them "serrations," but that's too strong a word. For all intents and purposes, it's a miniature butter knife.

"Yes," I tell the guard, "in the side pocket. There's a metal knife in there -- a butter knife."

She seems to ignore me, then clumsily unzips the main compartment of the suitcase and begins rifling violently through my things.

"No, not there," I tell her. "It's in the side pocket."

"I know what I'm looking for."

"But if you're looking for the knife, it's not in there. I told you, it's in the side pocket."

"Show me!" she orders.

I pause for a second, allowing a small, potentially explosive nugget of annoyance to fizzle out before proceeding. Then I show her the correct zipper. "In here."

She opens the compartment and takes out a small vinyl case containing the three pieces. After removing the knife, she holds it upward with two fingers and stares at me coldly. Her pose is like that of an angry schoolteacher about to berate a child for bringing some forbidden object to class.

"You ain't takin' this through," she says. "No knives. You can't bring a knife through here."

It takes a moment for me to realize that she's serious. "I'm ... but ... it's ..."

"Sorry." She throws it into a bin and starts to walk away.

"Wait a minute," I say. "That's airline silverware."

"Don't matter what it is. You can't bring knives through here."

"Ma'am, that's an airline knife. It's the knife they give you on the plane."

"No knives. Have a good afternoon, sir."

"You can't be serious. This is the craziest thing I've ever heard of. Besides, I carry that knife with me all the time."

With that, she grabs the knife out of the bin and walks over to one of her colleagues, a portly fellow with a mustache seated at the end of the checkpoint in a folding chair. I follow her over.

"This guy wants to bring this through."

The man in the chair looks up lazily. "Is it serrated?" he asks.

She hands it to him. He looks at it quickly, then addresses me.

"No, this is no good. You can't take this."

"Why not?"

"It's serrated." He is talking about the little row of teeth along the edge. Truth be told, the knife in question, which I've had for years, is actually smaller and less sharp than the knives currently handed out by my airline to its first- and business-class customers. You'd be hard-pressed to cut a slice of toast with it.

"Oh, come on. It is not."

"What do you call these?" He runs his finger along the minuscule serrations.

"Those ... but ... they ... it ..."

"No serrated knives. You can't take this."

"But sir, how can it not be allowed when it's the same knife they give you on the plane!"

"Those are the rules."

"That's impossible. Can I please speak to a supervisor?"

"I am the supervisor."

It's not even surprising -- we've all been there; I once lost a cherished cigar lighter myself, on a flight to Phoenix, because some TSA lackey, upon clicking it several times in an unsuccessful attempt to light it, confiscated and discarded it (fucker) because he couldn't determine -- since it wouldn't light -- that it wasn't one of the kind not allowed on board. "Wait," I said. "Let me get this straight. You're throwing it away because it doesn't work?" Indeed he was, and there it went, into the trash with all the others. Nevermind the logic -- logic's got no place in the TSA. Only rules. Rules, and the mechanized, uniform application of them.

I could rant for hours on this subject -- my poor wife can attest to that. And while I'm definitely not the activist sort (I talk, sometimes shout, but then I generally just cast my vote -- flyers, etc., aren't really my thing), I did mention to someone recently that if there were one political cause I could actually get behind and spend my personal time and emotional energy pursuing, it'd be for the flat-out dismantling of the TSA. Why? Because in a word, it's stupid. It's broken, I hate paying for it, and it's never worked, anyway. Indeed, I'm of the opinion that it couldn't work, even if it were somehow "overhauled," because its entire existence is based on bad, GeorgeBushian logic, and has nothing whatever to do with security, anyway.

The TSA has always been a political, not practical, response to 9/11. It hassles us at checkpoints not because of penetrating insights on security or some brilliant breakthrough, but because politicians handed it power. Specialists in security didn't invent the TSA; the Bush administration imposed it on us. So we might hope the incoming president would abolish this absurd agency.

Yes, absurd. And incompetent -- so astonishingly incompetent, in fact, as to have failed to counteract precisely the sort of terrorist act that gave birth to it in the first place.

[Amy B. Zegart], author of “Spying Blind: The C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the Origins of 9/11,” said she was especially disheartened that the near-miss last week was, once again, on an airplane.

“This is textbook Al Qaeda 2001,” she said. “They tried to hit the hardest target we have, the one on which the most money and attention has been spent since 2001. And yet we didn’t prevent it.”

The moment we plug one hole, terrorism can simply push through another; buses, subways, trains, as I mentioned, cruise ships -- none of them are guarded with anywhere near the zealousness of our precious airplanes. Most, indeed, aren't guarded at all. (And why is it that an air-traveling citizen is so much more valuable than a train-traveling one? Hm?) Nevermind that little notion about what terrorism is intended to do -- namely to alter the behavior of its target. In our case, quite clearly, it's already done so: the TSA's mere existence, not to mention our paying for it, both with our taxpaying wallets and with the trying of our patience, in seven hundred million installments annually, is evidence enough of that.

But I don't have to rant, because unless you're insane, or an aerophobe, you agree -- at least in part. You hate taking off your shoes, too. And your belt. And toss your keys into the dog-food bowl, please. And your cell phone, yeah. And don't forget to remove your laptop (sometimes, not always -- but yes, today) so it can be examined by one of our trained professionals with absolutely no idea how it works, anyway. And please, ladies and gentlemen, please remember to take out your little Ziploc bag containing your one-dollar toothpastes, mouthwashes and shampoos, which you all so kindly purchased effectively by government mandate, so we can glance briefly at the labels to determine they're not filled with explosive materials, which we've all been trained to identify by sight. Yes, if you're like me, which is to say at least partly human and generally accustomed to living in a free-ish society, you hate having to pack all this shit so strategically the night before in order to get through the line as expediently as possible, only to fail, spectacularly, once you actually get there. Maybe you don't hate it quite as much as I do, but you hate it -- at least a little. You hate it because you know how worthless it really is. Because you know the TSA's never actually caught a would-be terrorist in a security line. You know quite well that the TSA, which costs all of us, you included, billions of dollars annually, you know all it's ever really done is stand there, obstructively, waving its white-gloved hand, between you and your final destination.

There are, of course, two fundamental flaws in TSA's screening philosophy: The first is that it considers everybody who flies -- the old and young, fit and infirm, domestic and foreign, pilot and passenger -- a potential terrorist. The second is a foolish fixation with the tactics used by the terrorists on Sept. 11, and the subsequent fixation with weapons -- particularly knives and other sharp objects -- rather than the people who might use them. TSA will not acknowledge that the success of the 2001 attacks had nothing to do with the hijackers' ability to sneak weapons past airport security. For one thing, even a child knows that a sharp object as lethal as a box cutter can be fashioned from virtually anything. But more to the point, the attackers were exploiting a weakness in our mind-set -- that is, our expectations of how a hijacking would unfold, based on numerous earlier incidents -- rather than any weakness in airport security. The element of surprise, not box cutters, is what took control of those four aircraft. And even before the first of the twin towers had fallen to the ground, that element of surprise -- as well as the box cutters that went with it -- was no longer a useful tool. Paradigm over.

So I choose not to. When I can, anyway. Sometimes, of course, you have to. But flying, for me, has become a necessary evil. All because of the TSA.

And it's a shame, really. Because in trying to look like what a good president's apparently supposed to look like, by setting up the TSA as a reflex action to 9/11 sans long-term consideration, George Bush essentially stabbed the global airline industry squarely in the chest, and not with a butterknife, either -- with an axe. It'll survive, of course -- we all gotta fly sometime -- but not without a long, serious, painful rehab. And not without our collectively having at least something to say about it, which I'm pleased to see happening, in little rants and choosings-not-to like this one, and others like it, finally, now.

Doh! In working on a few photo-related enhancements to the site yesterday afternoon, I seem to have overlooked my RSS feeds, which appear to be suddenly clogged with gunk resulting from various loadings and reloadings of test data. Apologies for the confusion. I'll try to get things cleaned back up this morning....

Articles like this one always get under my skin.

On the rumors of Microsoft forging an exclusive deal with News Corp., the writers deduce the following, prejudging the concept of a deal as though it stood somehow in violation of the principles responsible for making the Web what it is today (thanks, presumably, to Google):

The Web’s explosive growth has been driven, in part, by the open playing field it represents for consumers and businesses. These discussions could encourage major technology and media companies to start picking sides — essentially applying the cable TV model to the Web.

A deal on a large scale would create a new set of barriers for users to navigate and would represent an enormous risk for the News Corporation or any news site. More than 65 percent of all search inquiries in the United States are made on Google, and removing links from there would lead to a big drop in traffic. Bing handles 9.9 percent of domestic searches, according to comScore.

That's just ridiculous. It's called network neutrality, kiddies -- not site neutrality. Exclusive deals abound, everywhere, on the Web as well as off. What's being discussed between Microsoft and News Corp., to the extent anything really is being discussed, is surely nothing more than an agreement preventing Google from displaying News Corp. content on its News microsite, in exchange for displaying it on Bing's. Users would, I'm sure, continue to be able to access News Corp.'s deliciously fair-and-balanced content on any number of News Corp.'s sites.

Google's dominance in the search-advertising market isn't good for anyone but Google, and Murdoch, much as I happen despise the guy as a political force, is actually right to complain about Google stealing his company's original content. It absolutely does. It steals news content and then muscles that content's creators into taking it and liking it, lest they lose the referral traffic Google sends them by linking to that content in its original form.

Fight on, Microsoft! Make 'em work for it, I say.

From The Economist: an interesting few minutes charting fertility rates and population trends, over the past several decades, among countries of various economic profiles.