From the April 23 news conference.

THOMAS: Are you saying that we did not [torture anyone]?

PERINO: I am saying we did not, yes.

THOMAS: How can you when you have photographs and everything else? I mean, how can you say that when he admits that he knew about it?

[snip]

PERINO: And what I’m telling you is we have — torture has not occurred. And you can go back through all the public record. Just make sure — I would just respectfully ask you not to misconstrue what the President said.

THOMAS (incredulously): You’re denying, in this room, that we torture and we have tortured?

PERINO: Yes, I am denying that.

04/24/2008 - 7:46 A.M. - OUT FOR DELIVERY

The Wii comes tomorrow….

Meet the aforementioned Roger Byrd, pastor of the Jonesville Church of God in Jonesville, S.C. Pastor Byrd put a sign outside his church reading “Obama, Osama, hmm, are they brothers?”

Pastor Roger Byrd is an ignorant piece of redneck gutter trash.

He’s implying that Barack Obama is a Muslim, linking him to Osama bin Laden. Obama is a Christian and has said so many times; he attends Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and right-wing extremists like Byrd have complained enough about one of its leaders.

So that makes Byrd either uninformed or malicious. Or, more likely, both.

He told the local NBC affiliate that the message wasn’t meant to be racial or political. That makes him a liar, as anyone with a triple-digit IQ can obviously see.

And he said he was concerned about “what possibly could happen if we were to get someone in there that does not believe in Jesus Christ.” So that makes him a narrow-minded anti-Semite (and anti-Buddhist, anti-Hindu, anti-Taoist…).

And I can guarantee you that pastor Byrd not only thinks that only Christians should hold office in this country, but only his particular sect of Christianity. Catholics, Episcopalians, Unitarians — I bet he has a problem with them, too.

Bottom line: Byrd is a nasty, uniformed, intolerant, ignorant, anti-Semetic redneck preacher here, and he dares to think his opinion should count for anything? If anyone should be denied the rights of citizenship in this country, it’s un-American fools like Roger Byrd.

Huh?

But this bodes well:

Because back in Roanoke they have different taste:

The Scrapbook Firefox extension.

Everyone who uses Firefox has their favorite extensions, but this one has to be up there as one of the best pieces of software out there.

Simply: It lets you capture and save any part of a Web page, or the entire page, to your hard drive. When you do it, it saves everything locally you need to recreate the page — images, JavaScript, whatever. It can even go several layers deep to capture an entire site… if you have the hard drive space.

Scrapbook creates a straightforward, human-readable folder structure, and saves everything in the same format you found it — standard HTML with standard JPG and GIF images, and so on. So you’re not locked into in for the long term.

Your Scrapbook ‘collection’ is fully searchable, of course, so it’s a great way to capture stuff you find interesting but don’t know will be around forever (e.g., magazine articles).

Besides being a great tool for doing research and dumping what you find in a convenient place, it also lets you capture those transient pages. I’ve snagged some that I knew would be taken down (because of controversy, errors, etc.).

But wait, there’s more. You can edit what you capture to remove page elements you don’t want. For example, I used it to grab my clips from the Roanoke Times Web site, then removed all the crap on the page — the gadzillion ads, giant site-navigation boxes, etc. I printed the result to a PDF and presto: Clean, electronic clips.

So for doing research, preserving Web sites, or simply saving pages for offline viewing, Scrapbook is a kick-ass extension.

Scrapbook Firefox extension; free.

So the New York City Board of Education decided to buy a bunch of Macs for schools. Why not — the city has money to burn, and they’re such pretty computers. When the kids get into the real world they’ll have to switch to Windows like everyone else, but that’s a different story.

Most schools have WiFi, so networking isn’t a problem. Except that it is. Turns out that Mac OSX Leopard doesn’t quite do WiFi. There’s a significant bug, so the machines are pretty much useless for the schools.

So instead of giving the kids the computers, they’re all sitting in a warehouse collecting dust until Apple releases the next bug fix for OSX.

Next time, perhaps, the city will buy a bunch of HP’s. They can buy more computers for the same price so more kids can use ‘em, plus those kids won’t have to be embarrassed at job interviews when they say “I don’t know if I can use Windows.”

Windows Vista sucks on a lot of levels, for sure, but at least it can connect to the Internet wirelessly.

My evil cousin-in-law is in jail! He flashed dirty pics of himself on his cellphone to local cashiers. Can you say "sex offender"? Hee hee!

I’ve been going the freelance route, doing work for Computerworld, some trade pubs, Kiplingers, even Women’s Day (!).

A couple of weeks ago, though, our Realtor in Roanoke called. “I was in a car with some people I work with,” she explained. “And one of them said, ‘I just lost my writer. Anyone know any writers?’ And I told him yes, I did. ‘In Richmond?’ Yep, in Richmond.”

So I called, had a couple of interviews, and now I’ve got a job. And it’s not just as a writer — despite the title, it’s really an editor-in-chief position at a trade magazine, something I’ve done before.

The great thing about it: At the moment it’s long-term freelance, which gives them a chance to try me out, gives me a chance to see if I like being an editor again (I suspect I will), and can eventually lead to a full- or part-time office position.

Right now we’re still undecided whether I should be working full-time or not, so this is the perfect way to test out the work/Sam balancing act.

And the icing on the cake: These folks are very, very into new media. And they don’t just pay it lip service, or think that throwing a few videos on a Web site makes them cutting edge. They’re experimenting with member-driven blogs, Webcasts, message boards, a strong print-Web connection, Twitter and Facebook, and anything else they can think of.

In other words, they aren’t (like some places) doing “new media” because someone told them “this is the future.” They’re doing it because they see it as a great tool for connecting to their members. And when your attitude is “media as a tool” you do a lot better than when your attitude is “media for media’s sake.”

I start next week, and I’m looking forward to working with a company that really gets the whole Internet/social media thing.

Yes, you can put an entire apple or pear into a garbage disposal.

My block and my house are on Google Street View! W00t!

I just found this among my notes from April, 2004:

IDC: Consolidation to Windows won’t happen

Windows’ share of the client OS market will fall from 90 percent today to 58 percent by 2007

By David Legard, IDG News Service
April 23, 2004

Microsoft Corp.’s domination of the client operating systems market will fade over the next few years, according to Avneesh Saxena, vice-president for Asia-Pacific computing systems research at IDC.

Microsoft currently has around 90 percent share of the client operating system market with Windows, and while its dominance of the desktop client OS market is expected to continue, the proliferation of new client devices such as smart phones and PDAs means that its share of the overall client OS market will fall to 58 percent by 2007, Saxena said at the IDC Directions conference here Thursday.

“Operating systems are not going away and we’re not going to one single platform,” he said. “Different workloads tend to have a strong affinity to different platforms and while there will be swaps among the operating systems, no one OS will dominate completely.”

By 2007, Windows on PCs will account for 58 percent of the client operating system market, with the Symbian OS for communication devices taking 17 percent, according to IDC figures. Only smart mobile phones with the ability to run applications are considered to have true operating systems, in IDC’s definition. Windows for communication devices will account for 6 percent of the market and Linux for digital video recorders will account for 5 percent, Saxena said.

Back to Firefox 2 until all my ’stensions work.

Twitterbar, which integrates with Firefox, doesn’t work with FF 3. Grr.

Organized my music collection, such as it is. All files named the same way, all ID3 and FLAC tags set. Er… now what?

Check out the link on the left.

Every Windows user should get this thing.

If you’ve ever uninstalled software, you probably know that many programs leave crap behind; that’s why there are registry cleaners and unnecessary-file finders and so on. Sometimes it’s just a small entry in the Registry. Sometimes its an entire folder, or more.

It doesn’t matter whether you use Windows’ built-in Add/Remove Programs or the individual application’s uninstaller — junk gets left behind.

This becomes especially apparent when you use the wonderful freeware tool Revo Uninstaller. It finds the crap and removes it. Period.

I won’t go near Add/Remove Programs anymore. Instead, I have Revo on my Start menu and use it instead.

Start the program and you see icons for all your installed software. Double-click whatever you want to remove and Revo gives you four options. I always choose the last: “Advanced,” which “performs a deep and thorough scan to find all of the application’s leftover information in the Registry and on the hard drive.”

And boy, does it. I’ve removed maybe a dozen things since I got Revo, and every one has left a bunch of junk in the Registry, on the drive, or both.

Here are the Registry entries and leftover files it found when I uninstalled BlogDesk, for example:

Why software makers can’t get their products to uninstall properly, I don’t know. But I do know that I’m glad to have found Revo Uninstaller.

(Note: If you have TweakUI, you can use it to remove the Add/Remove Programs icon from the Control Panel completely, so you don’t forget to use Revo instead.)

Revo Uninstaller: Freeware

Kudos, props, etc., to the staff of the Washington Post for winning the 2008 Pulitzer Prize “for its exceptional, multi-faceted coverage of the deadly shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, telling the developing story in print and online.”

The Post also won the Virginia Press Association’s awards for its coverage of the shooting for both “Spot news writing” and “General news writing,” and scored a “Best in show” for is coverage as well: “Clearly the best writing over the entire event. A model of breadth, depth, clarity and sensitivity. This story was a local one for The Post and every other newspaper in Virginia. It was beautifully done.”

But extra kudos go to the Christiansburg-Blacksburg News-Messenger. The tiny, local paper took both first and second place in the VPA’s “Special sections or special editions” category for its extended coverage of the Tech tragedy. (Let’s get some names in here: Tonya Hall Bowyer, Amanda Bolen, and Lawson Koeppel.)

And finally, Alan Kim of the Roanoke Times — whom I’ve worked with and I know to be an absolutely terrific guy — took the VPA’s Best in Show award for this shot (at least I think it’s this shot) in the aftermath of the shooting.

I have to say, though, that I’m disappointed that the single best source of breaking news during the shooting — I was in the Roanoke Times newsroom at the time — was omitted. that was Planet Blacksburg, a student-run news site. It was where we turned to find out what was happening because it had all the information first.

The site got new media — it understood that it’s not about having photos and video and multimedia fluff, but it’s being willing to report rumor and unverified information as such. In a situation like that, waiting for confirmation on every piece of data would have been the wrong move — the old media move.

As long as readers knew the information was unconfirmed and may be revised, during chaos like that it’s best to get everything out there. Detailed, confirmed reporting could wait for the next day’s papers or for the evening news. But the Web can’t work like that, and the folks at Planet Blacksburg knew it. Bravo to them.

No, I don’t mean “security theater” (doing things that look like they make us safer but really don’t). I mean security as theater.

In this case, it was the History Channel and its program “Cities of the Underworld,” in which host Don Wildman tours what’s underneath various, er, cities. In this episode, it was Washington, D.C.

Boy did he lay the whole “security” thing on thick as he talked about and showed us the underground sewers and other tunnels beneath Washington, “one of the most secured cities in the world.” Many shots of cops and Secret Service people, helicopters, etc.

And it was so incredibly, undeniably obviously a load of crap.

The sewer system goes beneath a lot of government buildings, Wildman explained, and thus it’s heavily guarded. (Makes sense.) In fact, he said, the location of the entrance to the sewers that he used was classified after 9/11.

1. You can’t classify a location after it’s been revealed. Think about it.

2. Even if you somehow could, that statement implies that all the sewer workers in D.C. are cleared to know classified info. I have doubts. More likely the correct statement is, “D.C. authorities don’t like to reveal the location of the entrance,” but that doesn’t sound as cool.

3. Wildman and his crew are shown outside this “classified” manhole, with the camera giving a clear view of the building behind him (which was definitely distinctive) as well as up and down the street. Anyone who wanted to know the location of the secret entrance would need to do about 10 minutes of work.

Going on about this secret network of tunnels, the good producers at the History Channel provide a very nice animation showing a map of the tunnels with a diagram of the city superimposed on it. It’s hard to take someone seriously when he talks about how secret something is and then draws you a map.

But my favorite moment of hyperbole came as they walked in the sewers. One sewer, Wildman explains, goes “under the Capitol and several other government buildings the names of which cannot be disclosed.”

And then they show us a map of said tunnel.

I actually snorted at this point. “Shhhhhhh. Don’t tell anyone the names of these buildings.”

“But, Don, they can just look at any map…”

“No! They can’t! The names of the buildings on this street are secret!”

Someone should probably tell the people at the Map Network, who provide this useful terrorist tool:

It shows the FBI building, Department of Commerce building, General Services Administration, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Federal Reserve… you get the idea.

Maps not good enough? Heck, zoom in with Microsoft’s better-than-Google mapping tool and get a good look at, say, the State Department (click to enlarge, of course):

Let’s see, from the size of each satellite dish we can determine the wavelength, and it’s easy enough to see the direction and angle they’re pointing…

Anyway, while I’m sure the sewers and tunnels beneath Washington are closely guarded — well, guarded — trying to make the whole thing sound cloak and dagger is just embarrassing.