Here’s a disturbing trend, and something to add to the long list of things that this country will have to undo when Bush is finally out of office: International travelers are looking for ways to avoid stopovers in the U.S. because of the frustrating, belittling, and bully-like treatment they receive at the hands of Homeland Security officials looking for possible "terrorists" (i.e., any kind of potential criminal).

Wikitravel even has a page devoted to the topic. An excerpt:

Anyone arriving into the United States or one of its territories (like Puerto Rico) and not covered by the Visa Waiver Program requires at least a C1 transit visa to transit the airport. This can be expensive and time-consuming to obtain, and you can be denied the visa: the requirements are the same as the full B-2 tourist visa. If you arrive without this visa and aren’t eligible for a waiver, even for a fuel stop or transit, you will be sent home and recorded as having been denied entry to the US.

The United States does not allow sterile transit, which means that even if you have an immediate connecting flight, you have to pass through Customs and Immigration. This is time-consuming and tedious (4 hours or more is recommended to be safe), and all travellers transiting in the USA using either a transit visa or the Visa Waiver Program will be photographed and fingerprinted.

You can see why people would want to avoid an episode of US Security Theater. Boing Boing had a story the other day about a Finnish folk band that was detained for the crime of having flown in from Amsterdam. From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune comes the details:

Erkki Maattanen, a filmmaker for Finnish Public Television who accompanied the musicians on the September trip, said his questioners seemed to think the entourage was smuggling drugs or intending to work without a permit. "I kept trying to tell them why we were here, but they’d just yell, ‘Shut up!"’ he said.

and

"They threatened us with severe punishments if we talk to each other," according to the complaint signed by musicians Ninni Poijärvi and Mika Kuokkanen, "Through the walls, I can hear officers yelling, screaming. They ask about the purpose of our trip — except we are only allowed to give yes-or-no answers. I try to talk about our plans to meet with Finnish-American folk musicians. Nobody listens. They interrupt me constantly and they yell, ‘You are a liar!"’

The sad thing is, none of these tactics help keep anyone more secure. All it does is tick people off, hurt business here, and make things tougher for everyone. Soon after 9/11 I flew. We all looked at the extra security measures as something understandable and appropriate. But now I realize how foolish and wasteful they are.

The fact is, if terrorists wanted to hit us again, it’s not going to be that hard. Heck, drive a small car bomb through the doors of a mall. Or open up with a hail of bullets outside an airport terminal.

The key point to remember is that the aim of terrorism isn’t to kill people — that’s just icing on the cake. The aim is to scare people. And it’s working.

My friend’s father used to sing this on occasion. It inserted itself in my head, so I looked it up. Not a lot of places have the lyrics, so I figured I’d include them here.

The Old Family Toothbrush
(to the tune of "The Old Oaken Bucket")

How dear to my heart is the old family toothbrush
The old family toothbrush that hung by the sink
The old family toothbrush, the moss-covered toothbrush
The old family toothbrush that hung by the sink.

First it was white, then it was yellow,
Now it’s just dirty and covered with slime.
First it was father’s, then it was mother’s,
Then it was brother’s, and soon `twill be mine.

How dear to my heart is the old family toothbrush
The old family toothbrush that hung by the sink
The old family toothbrush, the moss-covered toothbrush
The old family toothbrush that hung by the sink.

And click here to download it as an MP3.

There are some jobs out there that I wouldn’t apply for, but that I’d love to see the résumés of those who did. A perfect example (and what prompted me to post this) comes from About.com:

Cheese Guide

QUALIFICATIONS: Our ideal candidate is someone with professional experience in a cheese-related field.

I could, of course, insert some snarky comment here, but there’s no need. The ad speaks for itself. And I trust my commenters to carry the ball, anyway.

Any other DirecTV users out there? Did you notice a software upgrade overnight? (That is, the night of Oct. 24-25?)

The company doesn’t often announce these things, so it’s hard to find out what the changes are.

The bang (exclamation point to some of you) is because I’ve been working on the photos section for quite a while. That’s because I was on a quest for the best photo-album software I could fine — or at least one that met my specs.

I went back and forth between photoblog software (geared toward new and unrelated photos being added daily), and photo album software (geared toward groups of related images).

I settled on photo album software, as I tend to think in categories.

Then I needed to find one that A) was free, 2) was templatable, and iii) had support for IPTC data.

IPTC, for those of you who haven’t read about it here or elsewhere, is the standard used by the world’s photojournalists to embed information about an image within the image. You don’t need a separate database holding things like the title and caption.

There are lots of galleries that let you add titles and captions, but most store that in a separate database, meaning you’re married to it if you want to keep your captions. So IPTC was a must.

The end result: zenphoto. (Had I gone the photoblog route, the clear winner was Pixelpost.)

While the "official" build doesn’t support IPTC, the community build does. "Huh?" you say? Zenphoto started as the work of one guy, but has been picked up by a community of coders. They’re working on the next version, and meanwhile you can get in-between versions that support IPTC from the nightly-build page.

I considered both Gallery and Coppermine, which I had experience with, but both were overloaded with features I didn’t need. (Further still, zenphoto integrates nicely with WordPress, which powers my site.)

So I installed zenphoto (10 minutes’ work), then set to creating a template that would keep the site’s look. That done, I went through all my photos, picked a bunch to put online, and uploaded them.

Zenphoto is great in that you can create a new album, say "dogs," by simply using FTP to upload a folder called "dogs" to the albums directory. The rest is automatic. So once my template was done, it was just a matter of uploading and going to get some dinner while 400MB of files were copied.

There’s still much more to do. While I might demand IPTC support, I haven’t added IPTC titles and captions to many of my photos. That’s a long-term job. But now, if I scan 50 old family photos, I can have them on display in a nice format in the time it takes to upload.

I love automation.

So thanks for reading all this. Now go take a gander at the unfinished gallery.

As we don’t have an address (nor do I have an official job title) in Richmond yet, but I like to have personal cards to give out, I came up with this:

I almost added “Certified.” 

AKA, reason #1737:

A seven year old boy at Dennis Township Primary School in Cape May County, N.J., was suspended for a day for drawing this picture:

The ACLU spokeswoman said it best: "What are they accomplishing by keeping that child home?"

Amusingly, the AP took it seriously enough that it wouldn’t mention the name of the other boy in the picture ("david").

I’m kinda wondering that. I have a MySpace page (I try to have one on most popular networks), and it’s come in useful several times. But that’s the exception.

I’ve begun to realize that all I get out having a MySpace account are 1) Spam friend requests to get me to visit porn sites, and 2) MySpace junk mail. At this point I delete anything that comes from myspace.com because it’s invariably useless.

On the other hand, both LinkedIn and Facebook seem to be where the action is. I get plenty of real messages on my Facebook page (although I don’t visit that often), and very little if any spam.

And while Facebook pages have evolved to the point of being way too busy and filled with all sorts of flotsam (zombies, vampires, pets, etc.), at least they’re note as ugly as some of MySpace’s.

Schools banning tag.

Yes, sure, on rare occasions kids can get hurt. So? It’s certainly not life-threatening, and if you banned every activity in which kids could get hurt you’d end up having them sit quietly in a dimly lit padded room.

Kids do get hurt. They skin knees, bark shins, loosen teeth, bleed and cry. And then the play some more. They win games and they lose games. They try and fail; they try again and sometimes succeed. They fall. They get up.

This is childhood. This is learning that the world is not a dimly-lit cushioned room.

An $8.5 million NASA study of aviation safety consisting of detailed interviews with thousands of pilots found that commercial air travel is so unsafe it is refusing to release the results.

Doing so "could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots participated in the survey," the agency told the Associated Press.

Pilot interviews lasted about 30 minutes, with standardized questions about how frequently they encountered equipment problems, smoke or fire, engine failure, passenger disturbances, severe turbulence, collisions with birds or inadequate tower communication, according to documents obtained by the AP.

and

Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near mid-air collisions and runway incursions as other government monitoring systems show, according to a person familiar with the results who was not authorized to discuss them publicly.

Nice to see that the Bush Administration is more interested in protecting the "commercial welfare of the air carriers" than in telling the people who paid for the survey how safe it is to fly.

Schools’ (and others’) like to tout their "zero tolerance" policies for drugs, weapons, bullying, and so forth; it’s supposed to sound strong and tough and all those good things.

In reality, though, if a school district has a zero tolerance policy, what it means is "we don’t trust our teachers and administrators."

Zero tolerance is like the beepers on McDonalds’ fry vats. It’s there because you don’t believe the people in charge are smart enough to make their own decisions.

That’s why you end up with students suspended, expelled, or arrested over stupid things — pointing a finger the wrong way, or sketching the wrong thing, or having a butter knife in your locker.

School administrators defend these decisions by pointing to Columbine or Virginia Tech and saying that zero tolerance is the only way to avoid another one. The girl with the butter knife today could be toting an AK-47 and an attitude tomorrow, you see.

Translation: We don’t trust our staff to differentiate between a real threat (e.g., the kids who post on Facebook their detailed plans of how and who they’re going to kill) and innocuous mistakes (e.g., the kid who left a Swiss Army Knife in his glove compartment.).

The thing is, anyone with an ounce of intelligence can tell the difference. So putting zero tolerance policies in place says the school districts don’t think the teachers are that smart.

And what does that tell us?

South Carolina teen accidentally brings butter knife (!) to school. Teacher sees it when it falls from her locker. Student expelled.

Welcome to Goose Creek High School, and it’s idiot principal, one Jimmy Huskey. (I’m not being snide. He really is listed as "Jimmy" on the site.)

I wonder what lesson he thinks he’s teaching. I wonder what good he thinks he’s doing. Maybe he like the idea of screwing up a kid’s life over a small, harmless mistake; maybe it’s a power trip.

Or maybe he’s just an idiot.

The Berkeley County school district lists on its Web page that it believes in "staff members who are highly qualified and effective." How, I wonder, do they explain this genius? (Answer: It also believes in "A safe learning environment As evidenced by… security procedures that are followed."

Bottom line is that it’s more proof that the best and brightest aren’t leading our public schools.

For no good reason other than I wanted to put it on “paper,” here’s the laundry guide for people who still think you wash light colors in warm water….

I hope if when I’m arrested, I have a bit more dignity.

So Matthew Jones was arrested in New York for a rather heinous crime: standing around when other people were walking.

Seriously.

Per the New York Times:

According to the original complaint against Mr. Jones, the officer “observed defendant along with a number of other individuals standing around” on a public sidewalk in June 2004.

[snip]

Mr. Jones’s reckless intent, [assistant district attorney Paula Rose-]Stark said, was evident from the fact that his behavior was noticeable in the first place “amid the inevitable hustle and bustle of Times Square…"

Bottom line: It is apparently a crime to do something out of the ordinary. That brings up some scary possibilities, especially for a guy like me who often does things out of the ordinary.

Maybe I’ll wear one green contact lens and one clear one. Or maybe I’ll make a full circuit through a revolving door before entering. Or who knows what. But I guess I won’t dare to stop on the streets of New York.

* * *

An amusing note about sourcing. I heard about this story by reading Radley Balko’s column in Reason. But I chose to link directly to the Times because Balko’s blog entry consists of large chunks of the Times story with only a few lines of commentary.

In fact, it has 338 words from the Times compared to 73 from Balko — 103 if you count his 30-word title. Nice work if you can get it.

Answer: It doesn’t matter what you think. It’s kinda obvious.

I wonder if Xenu ordered them to do it.

So it’s official: We’re moving to Richmond. Roanoke’s economy is just not very good, and, as our neighbor pointed out, finding a decent job that pays more than $8.00 an hour isn’t easy.

In Richmond, though, we have the lowest unemployment rate in the state (3.2 percent, I think), plus the whole state-government thing. And a good job. :)

This time we’re gonna save a lot on the move by A) tossing a lot of stuff, and B) packing a POD ourselves so we can save the big and burly men for the big and burly stuff.

There is something incredibly satisfying about tossing stuff. These are things we’ve had in boxes in the attic but haven’t used in three years, so it’s time for them to meet the trash heap (or the Freecycle list).

So for the next six weeks it’s Land o’ Boxes for us. More on stuff — if you care — as it happens.

If you want to check out an awful, awful Web site, go to Adidas. Wow.

I saw an Adidas backpack that I wanted more info on, so I hit the site. I left without getting the info because the site was so bad.

• You can’t skip the opening Flash animation.
• The links are all but useless — “Originals” doesn’t tell me a damn thing. How about “Men’s shoes,” “Women’s shoes,” etc.?
• Every page is a Flash page that isn’t always quick to load. All I want is some info on one of your frakking backpacks!

Wake up, guys. People aren’t coming to your site to be dazzled. They’re coming to get product information. You wasted a ton of time and money creating a flashy site that prevents people from doing that.

Blech.

The good folks at Appalachian Power (”Our name says it all”) have told us we’re losing power from 9:00 to 3:00 today. Doing the math, that means I won’t have power between 8:45 and 6:00 or 7:00 tonight.

[sigh]

(I’m saying this for the benefit of those who might try to e-mail and not get a response.)

Meanwhile I sit and wait for the p

I like using Wikipedia’s “Random article” link; I invariably learn something interesting.

Sometimes it takes a few tries. That’s because sometimes it takes me to a particularly odd article.