I was thankful that I had alotted myself some extra time when I saw the four identical letters on the bottom right of my airline ticket: SSSS.

They are letters I have come to know quite well. Though I can't say for certain, I am increasingly convinced that I am on some sort of national list. Four of the last five times I've flown alone my ticket has been flagged with the SSSS. It's actually gotten to the point that it's the first place I look when I get my ticket, even before the gate or seat number.

The routine is pretty simple and it's seeming more and more silly. The person that checks my ID will get out a colored marker (usually a light color like neon green or yellow) and mark it up. When I hand the ticket to the person manning the metal detector, he or she will not say a word to me, turn around, hold the ticket in the air in order to flag down a security person. The security person asks me to step aside and waves the wand all over me. A couple times I got a pat-down. Once I had to open my pants to demonstrate that the the wand was going off because of a button on my boxer shorts.

I'm generally pretty laid back about it as there isn't much else to be. I was perhaps a little too familiar with it all this last time. I've found that the TSA people expect you to be a little nervous. My friendliness was met with a distrusting glare. In at least one case, I suspected that I let the TSA dude down by not being upset or nervous -- I think some people get a kick out of that.

I could say that it makes me feel better about our national security that they're flagging down potential troublemakers (even if they erroneously believe that I am one), but they have thus far followed such a strict pattern that there are holes in it the size on Montana. They only flag me on the first leg of my first flight. It's only when I fly alone. The only time I've not been flagged down was one of the times my flight didn't change and I wasn't flying one-way.

If this is their idea of security, I'm more than a bit disappointed.

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission has apparently found a new way to infringe on the rights of Texas citizens.

On the one hand, we have laws against drunk driving, which I think are sensible enough perhaps. Considering that the level of impairment of missing a night of sleep has been scientifically proven to be just as bad for your driving as having a BAC around the legal limit, I'd say that perhaps our ever-plummeting legal limits are making it into a bad case, but that's another discussion.

However, especially around Dallas, much of Texas was settled by alternating bands of drinking, and fervently non-drinking, religious and ethnic groups. As a result, the "blue laws" (e.g. laws governing the sale of alcoholic beverages) vary wildly and in very close quarters. My friend once took me on a "Tour" of Dallas which included, every few blocks, "and now we're crossing the line where you can/can't buy alcohol after X hour (if at all)".

And there are apparently a few old, old laws on the books similar to indecent exposure laws, that say it's illegal to be drunk in public.

Where does the TABC come in? Well, as they claim, a bar is a public place.

Therefore, the thing to do is send a swarm of officers in and arrest everyone - in a Bar - who happens to be drunk.

Their explanation - that they were trying to stop these people from doing harm to themselves or others - doesn't hold water. If it were a nightclub where police knew regular drug sales were going on, and they raided and grabbed everyone who had Pot or Ecstacy or some other illegal substance on them or in them, I'd not be sympathetic. But a bar is a public business, that pays the state for a liquor license already. It is an acknowledged business where proprietors are supposed to play by the rules, and where the rules are clearly laid out. And the rules say that they are allowed to sell adult alcoholic beverages there, and patrons are allowed to purchase and drink them.

The explanation from the TABC is that it's about "public safety."

The goal, she said, was to detain drunks before they leave a bar and go do something dangerous like drive a car.

"We feel that the only way we're going to get at the drunk driving problem and the problem of people hurting each other while drunk is by crackdowns like this," she said.

They might hide this one behind the guise of public safety, but face it, they sent officers in to raid a legal business and arrest patrons whose only crime was purchasing, and imbibing, substances they were legally allowed to purchase and imbibe. I can't see it as a public safety issue; far from it, it looks clearly to me like a campaign to harass the owners and patrons of a legal business that someone with a little too much power and a little too little common sense happens not to like.

Further, it's getting into a very dangerous realm. Now you're not arresting people for what they have done - because they haven't broken any laws, or if they've broken one, it's an outdated one that needs repeal. None of these patrons were arrested for fighting, or attempting to drive drunk.

No, they were arrested for the fear that they might do these things. Arrested for what they "might" do, rather than anything they had done already.

Alex and Camille are now officially Mr. and Mrs. R. Alex Whitlock.

Congratulations.

WHEREAS, it is 3:30 in the morning

WHEREAS, I am dead tired from moving stuff in the driving snow

WHEREAS, I have quite a bit on my mind

WHEREAS, I am getting married on Saturday

WHEREAS, I am leaving Thursday

WHEREAS, they're cutting off high-speed Internet tomorrow

WHEREAS, I do not expect to have much in the way of Internet access at all in Louisiana

RESOLVED, I will probably not be posting again for a spell.

I was kind of hoping that we'd get a good snow again before it started getting warmer.

However, I would have preferred it not come the day I am renting a UHaul without snow tires to move all my stuff against a tight deadline.

I'm not saying the weather got nasty, but I will say that when I was lugging a matress, the wind literally knocked me down.

It's 3:30 in the morning. What am I doing posting? I don't even post in non-obscene hours these days...

US, UAE postpone trade talks after DP World furore

A day after Dubai Ports World said it would cede control of the six ports, sparing the Bush administration a showdown with Congress, officials said the trade negotiations with the Gulf state had been postponed.

No date has been set for the next round of talks, which had been scheduled for next week in the UAE, said Neena Moorjani, spokeswoman for the office of the US Trade Representative. [...]

House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert said the postponement was wise coming just a day after DP World's pullout.

"Probably it would be a good time for both countries to kind of step back and evaluate a little bit. We'll move on from there," he said.

Burning Allies -- and Ourselves

The ports deal was part of the UAE's embrace of things Western. Wednesday night, I traveled with the minister of higher education, Sheik Nahayan bin Mubarak, to the dusty city of Al Ain to attend a Mozart festival at which the Vienna Chamber Orchestra performed. And I visited the American University of Sharjah, created nine years ago as a beacon of liberal arts education. On a wall next to the chancellor's office is a photo of the twin towers in New York, taken by one of the students on June 8, 2001. "There are no words strong enough to express how we feel today," reads a statement signed by UAE students. [...]

Arab radicals will be gloating, admonishing the UAE leaders, "We told you so." But officials here recognize that they're in a common fight with us against al-Qaeda. And unlike some Arab nations, the UAE really is fighting -- reforming its education system to block Islamic zealots and taking public stands with the United States despite terrorist threats. They have created one of the best intelligence services in the Arab world, and their special forces will be fighting quietly alongside the United States in Afghanistan tomorrow, and the day after.

President Bush tried to do the right thing on the Dubai ports deal, but he got rolled by a runaway Congress. The collapse of the deal was a measure of Bush's political weakness -- but even more, of America's traumatized post-Sept. 11 politics. The ironic fact is that the UAE is precisely the kind of Arab ally the United States needs most now. But that clearly didn't matter to an election-year Congress, which responded to the Dubai deal with a frenzy of Muslim-bashing disguised as concern about terrorism. And we wonder why the rest of the world doesn't like us.

Arab Firms May Reconsider U.S. Investments

Neena Moorjani, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative said Friday in Washington that both sides in the free trade talks needed more time to prepare and she refused to say whether the postponement was related to the ports issue.

UAE government officials could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday, a weekend day in the Mideast. But UAE Central Bank Governor Sultan Bin Nasser Al Suwaidi was quoted Friday as saying the move by U.S. lawmakers to block DP World's port takeover could harm chances of resolving final issues holding up the pact.

"It is something that doesn't reflect well," Al Suwaidi said of the controversy, according to the local paper Gulf Today.

In Dubai and elsewhere in the Gulf, the controversy was largely seen as reflecting an anti-Arab bias. DP World's concession was likely to solidify that belief. [...]

"It's a sobering moment," said Eddie O'Sullivan, Dubai-based editorial director of the Middle East Economic Digest. "People are going to have to be much more careful. There's a fear they (members of Congress) may move on to other targets in the Arab world. If it happened once it can happen again."

Investors and businesses in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia will be reviewing portfolios for U.S. holdings that could spark a similar uproar in Congress, O'Sullivan said.

"Most of (the holdings) are in dollar-denominated assets. They'll want to see how vulnerable it is to the U.S. Congress," O'Sullivan said. "It'll be more difficult to finalize an investment proposal that involves an American bank or an American asset."

Considering how effective the UAE's embrace of trade was in winning us over, no one can particularly blame them for their sudden lack of enthusiasm for trade, much less assisting our armed forces and helping us track down terrorists.

Such an amazing victory for national security this is.

Continued:

Port Deal's Collapse Stirs Fears of Repercussions in Mideast Ties

"I think we are all very grateful that the government of U.A.E. has taken this statesmanlike step," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters on her plane traveling to Chile.

The United States will now do "everything that we can to continue to strengthen" ties to the United Arab Emirates, Ms. Rice added.

But even Mr. Bush could not completely dismiss concerns that there could be repercussions in the United Arab Emirates and other Middle East countries over widespread suspicion that anti-Arab bias lay at the center of the Congressional opposition to the ports deal. In a speech to newspaper executives in Washington, he said he was "concerned about a broader message this issue could send to our friends and allies around the world, especially in the Middle East."

Business leaders decry Dubai decision

On Thursday, The Hill, a newspaper that closely covers Congress, quoted "a source close to the deal" who described members of Dubai's royal family as furious — "They're saying, 'All we've done for you guys, all our purchases, we'll stop it, we'll just yank it,' " the source said.

The UAE's main trading relationship with the United States is the purchase of Boeing airplanes.

Last year Emirates Airlines of Dubai ordered 42 long-range 777 wide-body jets, worth $9.7 billion. Boeing is pitching Emirates to order 50 of its new 787s and also its enlarged 747-8 jumbo. Etihad Airways of neighboring emirate Abu Dhabi ordered five 777s the previous year.

Boeing said its orders aren't threatened. "Nothing has been done or said since the ports controversy erupted that would indicate to us that our relationships with customers in the UAE have been damaged," said Boeing spokesman Tim Neale.

The important thing to remember in all this, though, is that we got to stick it to a country that doesn't like the western world as much as we would like it to!

Yay!

Considering I am one week and two days away from getting married, you would think that I would have more pressing concerns on my mind.

I'm not sure how, but the thought occured to me at work today that I haven't collected my mail in a little while. The truth is that most of my personal mail and deliveries are sent to Camille's place because I trust the mail to get there and stay there more than I do here. All of my bills but my power bill are paid automatically.

But if I haven't checked my mail in a while, it means I haven't paid my power bill in a while. I tried to remember the last time I actually collected my mail and I could not remember a time this year. Could I be over two months behind? I was at work at the time and I tried to get back to work and wait until I got off work, but it became all-consuming. I just had to exactly how far behind I was on the power bill.

Breath-bated, I checked.

I apparently paid my power bill within the last month.

Sure enough, I get home and there is only one power bill in my mailbox, due a week from now for the usual amount, give or take.

I'm thinking I should have some sort of calendar program remind me to check the mail once a week or so.

The strangest thing has been happening on one of my computers. The other day I was listening to Rhapsody and I heard an advertisement for "Omega 3 Iceland Health." At first I thought it was a really weird Eels or They Might Be Giants track or something. But there wasn't even music in the background and it had nothing to do with anything. Was Rhapsody selling ads? That would really have irked me, but I couldn't imagine that they would do that. But I couldn't find another explanation for the fact that Rhapsody stopped playing so that this thing could play.

I chalked it up to a freak thing.

But twice over the past week the ad has started playing in the middle of the night. I will awaken at 3 in the morning to the sound of a bunch of people shilling for Iceland Health. Other than the first time, though, I've never really been in a position to see if maybe there is some sort of ad coming from my browser or something (mystery sounds in the past have come from aggravating Flash ads, for instance) that interrupted Rhapsody (Rhapsody sometimes doesn't get along with other audio programs such as WinAmp).

I don't know. I haven't had the chance yet to check the computer for spyware. If it is spyware, it's the first audio spyware I have ever run across. For now I just turn the speakers off before I go to bed.

There's apparently a new study out that suggests that universal daycare may not be all its cracked up to be:

The growing labor force participation of women with small children in both the U.S. and Canada has led to calls for increased public financing for childcare. The optimality of public financing depends on a host of factors, such as the “crowd-out” of existing childcare arrangements, the impact on female labor supply, and the effects on child well-being. The introduction of universal, highly-subsidized childcare in Quebec in the late 1990s provides an opportunity to address these issues. We carefully analyze the impacts of Quebec’s “$5 per day childcare” program on childcare utilization, labor supply, and child (and parent) outcomes in two parent families. We find strong evidence of a shift into new childcare use, although approximately one third of the newly reported use appears to come from women who previously worked and had informal arrangements. The labor supply impact is highly significant, and our measured elasticity of 0.236 is slightly smaller than previous credible estimates. Finally, we uncover striking evidence that children are worse off in a variety of behavioral and health dimensions, ranging from aggression to motor-social skills to illness. Our analysis also suggests that the new childcare program led to more hostile, less consistent parenting, worse parental health, and lower-quality parental relationships.

I think daycare, pre-school, and so on can be quite beneficial to youngsters. However, the results of this study don't particularly surprise me. One of the greatest problems I see in young people being raised is too much exposure to their peers. A kid who spends most of his time with kids will learn much of his value system from other kids. A kid who spends most of his time with adults will learn the value system of adults.

Universal daycare is an extention of our education system, which is very much geared towards kids spending most of their waking hours surrounded by other children. It doesn't have to be Lord of the Flies to have a deleterious effect.

This brings up a couple of issues, most of all the question of what we can do about it. Homeschooling is an option for some, though I fear that can swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. It's also infeasible for a lot of households that simply cannot afford a parent to stay home and others that are not in a position to teach their children.

The other problem (well... maybe a problem) is The Cult of School. Kids not only spend in excess of 30 hours a week in school, but are actively encouraged to spend more time with social clubs, athletics, and so on. More and more, a child's social environment doesn't revolve around the household but around the schoolhouse. Then again, who does want to spend more time with your parents at that age?

[via Douthat]

I'm a O65-C2-E7-A22-N76 Big Five!!

Little indication as to what this means, but there ya go.

You know, unlike Blockbuster, I don't dislike Best Buy enough to stop shopping there. Mostly because Best Buy doesn't have the competition that Blockbuster has. But Best Buy is rapidly approaching crossing that line.

My parents were kind enough to get me a gift certificate for Christmas. I used it to purchase a Divx/DVD player and Quake 4. Because they didn't have the Divx player at their Idaho Falls location (there is no Pocatello store, sadly), I decided to order everything online. The problem is that instead of shipping Quake 4 ($40), they shipped The Sims 2 ($25). At first I thought that I had screwed up and ordered the wrong game, but the receipt said Quake 4. Of course, I was a bit worried in that I had no proof that they had sent me The Simms and for all they know I am trying to rip them off.

When I went to the Idaho Falls store to make a return. Sure enough, they wanted to charge me the $15 for the "exchange." Eventually, though, because I was armed with a receipt for Quake 4 they decided to give me the benefit of the doubt.

At least that's how it seemed.

Because I was exchanging products of unequal value, I had to "return" Quake 4 (The Simms 2, but they wrote it down as Quake 4), and then "buy" Quake 4 again. I had to pay for the new Quake 4 up front, but she sent the information for the return while I stood there and I even got a receipt for it.

At least that's how it seemed.

Flash forward a couple days and I look at my bank statement and they only refunded $12.31. I looked at the receipt again, and sure enough it said $44.48 total, $12.31 to to my credit card and the other $32.17 to my gift card.

So I called Best Buy to get this straightened out. Apparently, since the original copy of the game I bought was on the gift card, they refund had to go to the gift card (the $12.31 is now much I went over the gift card expense for both the game and the player). When I explained that this was an exchange and that I had re-purchased the game (and offered her the store number and transaction number on my receipt), she said that as far as she was concerned this was a return and all returns must go back to the card so that people don't turn the card in to cash.

I told them that this was all addressing their error to begin with, but she said that if I wanted an exhange I should have sent it back to them by mail to deal with their online arm. I told her that the site explicitly states that I can take it to the store. Furthermore, it was that claim that made me feel comfortable buying it online to begin with. Having a store to take it back to if there is a problem was a big selling point with me.

To no avail.

So all their screwups have resulted in forced extra business from me.

I got a wonderful gift certificate from Best Buy from my folks for Christmas. The first portion of which I spent on a Divx-playing DVD player. I still had $40 left over so I decided to get the special DVD version of Quake 4 because it has Quake II attached to it. I have a copy of Quake II, but unfortunately for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, it doesn't work on Winston, my newest computer. Since Winston is the first computer I've had that could play Q2 to its fullest potential (max resolution and so on), I found that to be quite a shame. I figured that whatever problem they had with it (like it being DOS-based, for instance) they would fix for the re-release. On top of that, I would get Quake 4. Even though I wouldn't be able to play that at full potential, I specifically eyed the requirements when I bought the components for my computer to make sure that it would play comfortably. Even if there was a problem with one Quake or the other, it would still be bad-ass worth it.

Unfortunately, there were problems with both.

Quake II exhibited most of the same problems as before. Though it would at least install (the previous one I had to move the files off the file-server), it had the same problem of randomly closing. Whatever problem it has with newer components were not apparently addressed for the new release as I might have figured. Nothing on the computer is off-brand or cheap. AMD and ATI chips in both. It does seem to crash less frequently, but random crashes are random crashes.

Quake 4 is apparently not compatible with my sound card. If Q4 were more like Q2 then this would not be an issue. This is particularly true since I don't even know what Q2 sounds like. I've always listened to music while playing. In fact, there are certain Cowboy Mouth and Robert Earl Keen songs I will always associate Quake 2. And if you have never tried it, playing Erasure's "Always" while blasting the heads off aliens is an unexpectedly beautiful experience. Unfortunately, in Quake 4 there are various characters that are talking to you and telling you what to do. Unfortunately, I cannot read CG lips. Unbelievably, there is no subtitle option. Seriously, how hard would that be to add? Are there no deaf people anywhere wanting to play this game? Do the game developers even care?

The other, slightly more surprising problem with Quake 4 is the speed of play. It feels like my character is walking through molasses. To "run" in Quake 4 is the same speed as "walking" in Quake 2. I would contribute this to hardware limitations, but (a) the resolution and quality of video seem to make little difference, so it's unlikely the computer is overwhelmed, and (b) everything except me is moving really quickly. In fact, even I can move quickly as long as I am not walking forwards or backwards.

I'm not sure, but I think this is the first PC game that I have ever actually purchased. The previous Quake was a gift and I don't play much in the way of computer games (save abandonware). I guess it figures that once I take the initiative to buy something, it'd suck.