On a private online community somone posted a picture of his going-on 91 year old grandmother, who recently flew to visit her sister and her friends. She is hard of hearing, and didn’t hear the instructions of whatever she was supposed to be doing passing through the metal detectors. She was immediately manhandled by a TSA flunky, sent to the ground, hitting her head and face on a metal chair, with additional bruising across her chest and up and down both legs. The picture taken was 2-weeks after the incident and it looks bad. Apparently, she didn’t even tell anyone what happened because she was embarassed and “did not want to be a bother.”

I’m embarassed as well. Appalled, and filled with apoleptic rage are two other emotional states that crossed my mind as I was reading this. We’ve given a lot up for this type of security theater in our Airports. When I fly out most airports, I think about the dystopic nation that we are today, the antithesis of the vision of our founding fathers… I don’t have anything really insightful to say about this. Just that when you think you’ve found some level of acceptance, or limits (this can’t get any more ridiculous, any more wrong…), well, human stupidity never ceases to rise to the challenge.

This TSA flunky came close to killing this person (a 90yo little old lady). What was the motivation, the though process here? Was she really a security risk or was this some sort of authoritarian reaction (“how dare you defy me, I will take you down”). Obviously it wasn’t the former, but I ask how these people can sleep at night? And whether they’ve lost sight of the intent of these procedures, or that they’ve never cared in the first place?

What you feel is more of a threat: terrorists or a government that tramples over and completely disregards the founding principles of our nation, and enforces ineffective policies with mindless, out of control, oppressive bullies? I think you know where I stand.

I tried out my new PPC-6700 as a BT modem w/ my Powerbook on the Caltrin in and was pleasantly surprised by the speed of the new Sprint’s 3G EVDO network and (more impressively), the latency:

PING www.usc.edu (128.125.253.146): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 128.125.253.146: icmp_seq=0 ttl=231 time=790.626 ms
64 bytes from 128.125.253.146: icmp_seq=1 ttl=231 time=276.552 ms
64 bytes from 128.125.253.146: icmp_seq=2 ttl=231 time=272.030 ms
64 bytes from 128.125.253.146: icmp_seq=3 ttl=231 time=268.766 ms
^C
--- www.usc.edu ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 268.766/401.993/790.626/224.394 ms

That’s 2-3x better than the ping I got on Sprint’s Rx1TT network with my old Treo 600.

Also, a couple days ago I switched the linklog feed from del.icio.us to My Web 2.0. I admit that I checked it out in the interest of dogfood, but I was amazed to discover that myweb completely kicks delicious’s ass. Beyond having decent performance, it also: caches pages, doesn’t cut off my long rambling descriptions (but still doesn’t allow any HTML), and has a great tag filter-stacking UI, and has privacy options (I’ve waited so long for delicious to support that). The delicious import worked flawlessly (tags, dates, everything), and I can now easily search through these, and the fact that these show up in my general search results is sometimes even getting me to switch off of Google. Sometimes. 🙂

Hooray Caterina and the My Web team for building something I’m actually excited to use!

Of course I have an improvements hitlist, the big ones for me: support for via (relationships/sourcing) and comments/annotation, both of which lead back to pre-web hypertext systems, I guess. Worse gets there eventually, which is better than never.

Between the general craziness of the move up here and the simultaneous casualty of my laptop, and an incredibly busy time at the new j-o-b, things have been incredibly quiet around here. I’m planning on trying to get settled into a normal schedule soon, as my current one isn’t really sustainable. It’s a bit on the early to burn out, even if it’s from over-excitement.

I’ve started my sublet in SOMA, but I fear that the commute may be too much for me. About half of it I can be productive during (baby-bullet on the Caltrain is about 45m), but still, it’s a real shock to the system to be commuting for so much time and on that sort of schedule (I lived close to work in LA, so most of my traffic time was discretionary).

The idea is if I do stuff in the city it’ll be worth it, but this week has mostly been taking forever and a day to get home and falling asleep dead tired.

I’ll hold back on my further thoughts until I have time to totally crystalize, but I think that my hopes for the stream-based reader of my dreams have yet to been actualized. The lens gets closer than anything else so far though, so who knows what the future will bring.

• TechCrunch: Google Reader – Was I Too Quick to Criticize?
• The Social Software Weblog: Google Reader web-based RSS aggregator launches
• Kevin Burton’s Feed Blog: Google Reader.. Like it?

I caught a matinee of Serenity, and I can see why it’s #114 and climbing on the IMDB Top 250. The movie is astoundingly good. I don’t think it misses a beat. Regardless of whether you’ve seen the television series or not, if you love film, you’ll definitely want to catch this in the theaters.

Finally getting a chance to play with a build of Flock and I’m digging it. Very shiny.

• del.icio.us integration KICKS ASS. Here’s hoping that tags/descriptions are handled in a good way. I’m looking forward to being able to del a page completely from the keyboard (like alt-b to bookmark which then focuses a sidebar/panel thing that autofills some stuff. If it has DOM-based point-and-click copying of elements, then I think I can scratch a project off my todo list 🙂
• The shelf is nice. I’m hoping for user assignable hot keys for everything.
• I haven’t played much with the blogging/Flickr extensions, but drag-and-drop and all the other desktop niceties definitely changes things.

Huzzah to Flock, shaping up to be not just a ‘social’ browser, but the best read-write web browser around. Or, to quote Mark Pilgrim:

Or do you just use your browser to browse? That’s so 20th century.

One of the things about piping tail -f is that it goes into buffered mode and needs to be specifically disabled (which on is available on specific tools). Here’s a little one-liner to look at our referers coming in that was good fun:

tail -f access.log | grep -v --line-
buffered '"-"' | grep -v --line-buffered 'upcoming\.org' | awk -W interactive '{
print $11}'