Josh's Weblog: September 2006 Archives

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Style changes

Yes, I changed the style of pun.org again. I am trying to keep the main articles from being more than three alphabets wide. Since I let people scale fonts it's been a bit of a challenge. Here's a guideline:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

As you can see, I actually went a little wider than this at “60em” for a entry.

Update: 60em was still too wide, so I went to 50. Feels a little funny to me, but I surf at 1600x1200.

Another update: Yes, I know the CSS property “max-width” doesn't work with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Standards compatibility is not something I expect from that browser. The hard part was making sure my style changes degraded gracefully for “differently abled” browsers.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Saturday, Sep 30 2006 12:07 PM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks

Thailand Coup

Thai military officials loyal to King Adulyadej have seized power in a coup in Thailand. This is not the first we've heard of trouble in Thailand this year:

Massive rallies earlier this year forced Thaksin to dissolve Parliament and call an election in April, three years ahead of schedule. The poll was boycotted by opposition parties and later annulled by Thailand's top courts, leaving the country without a working legislature.

Prime Minister Thaksin is central to the conflagration:

Opposition to Thaksin gained momentum in January when his family announced it had sold its controlling stake in telecommunications company Shin Corp. to Singapore's state-owned Temasek Holdings for a tax-free $1.9 billion. Critics allege the sale involved insider trading and complain a key national asset is now in foreign hands.

Thaksin also has been accused of stifling the media and mishandling a Muslim insurgency in southern Thailand that flared under his rule.

The Muslim unrest in southern Thailand is especially concerning because of long-standing friction between them and the Buddhists, who control the government. Coups and other non-democratic means of government tend to foster civil war. Will there be two Thailands in the world's future? globalsecurity.org is especially dour on conditions in the south:

Historically, this region, consisting of the provinces of Satun, Songkhla, Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat, has served as a dumping ground for corrupt and/or incompetent civilian and military officials. This has been further aggravated by the population's ethnic make-up, predominantly Thai Muslims, which has produced a major degree of alienation intensified by government misadministration. Additionally, daily life there, particularly in urban areas, is continually plagued by a higher level of common banditry and lawlessness, more so than in the kingdom's other regions, making it very difficult for authorities to differentiate between criminal lawlessness and terrorist acts commissioned by domestic Thai terrorist or Muslim Separatist groups.

You may ask yourself what else is down there in the southern part of Asia with strong Muslim influences? Next door in Malaysia is Kuala Lampur and Singapore. Also there's the strongly Muslim island nation of Indonesia.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Terrorism” Tuesday, Sep 19 2006 09:53 AM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks

Have You Been Practicing Your Trick Shots?

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “General” Monday, Sep 18 2006 09:35 AM | Permalink | No comments | No trackbacks

September 11, 2006

Many are posting retrospectives and memorials about the terrorist attack five years ago. I do not need to rehash what happened, but I may as well indicate how I feel about it all. I wrote the following two years ago, and it still applies to how I feel about 9/11.

A lot of blogs are remembering 9/11 today. I suppose I should do my part.

I awoke to a phone call on 9/11/01, a little after 6am. The gal on the phone was telling me that a jet plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I was still trying to wake up when I heard her exclamations on the phone as the second plane crashed into the south tower. It was an agonizing experience.

I watched a little of what I could find on the web. I didn't have cable service at home. At that point I had given up television for a couple years already. I wandered into work where I found out about the third crash at the Pentagon.

It was an eerie time. Internet news sites were slammed and very little information was available. The weird story of the fourth flight took hours to play out. Rumors flew fast and furious.

However, my most painful moment related to 9/11 was hearing, a lot later, the tape of the stewardess on the second plane talking on her cell phone as they went into the south tower.

I don't like reality shows where people get hurt. I'm too empathetic. I absolutely hated that tape. I didn't like watching video of people jumping from the towers.

Two and a half years later I got the 9/11 Commission Report from audible.com and listened to it on the drive to and from work. Even in two-hour-a-day chunks, parts of the report are hard to listen to. Recounting the story of people falling from the building and emergency workers dodging these people as they tried to escape the doomed buildings were particularly hard for me.

9/11 has been referred to as a day of reverence, or reflection, or anger, or other emotions. For me it is a reminder of the need for proactive, not reactive, measures to handle our own safety.

In real life I work on building software products. Proactive rather than reactive measures rule the day there as well. Even so, most of the engineers around me support Kerry/Edwards. It appalls me that to them the proactive measure of fighting an enemy before he can effectively deliver his blows is “aggression.”

To me it is getting inside the enemy's OODA loop.

This enemy declared war against us a long long time ago. It took nearly three thousand deaths for us to react.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Terrorism” Monday, Sep 11 2006 06:36 AM | Permalink | 2 comments | No trackbacks

Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica Season 3 is coming October 6th, and the folks at the SciFi channel are giving us a preview (and backstory) via video from their web site until then.

So far we have just the first installment. We get new ones every Tuesday and Thursday for the next month.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “General” Tuesday, Sep 5 2006 12:05 PM | Permalink | 1 comment | No trackbacks