That Deficit Commission

They have been getting some air time on TV. They want to do a tax hike by just eliminating deductions, mortgage interest is the big one. They claim to have some spending cuts.
Question: Are these real spending cuts, or fake spending cuts? Real spending cuts happen when the agency gets less money next year than it got last year. Real spending cuts are very rare. Fake spending cuts are when the agency gets less than it asked for. This game is really old, and the agencies always ask for much more than they expect to get, on the theory that what they do get will be enough so they don't have to do layoffs.

Big all day storm, but less than an inch of snow

Yesterday was wild up here. Wind gusts strong enough to shake the house. Big trees whipping back and forth. Plastic trash cans and empty drywall mud buckets flying thru the air. Nearly as bad as the April tornado three years ago. The lights stayed on, mostly. The power would occasionally die and confuse the computer and the Bose clock radio. Trees down on the roads, Town of Franconia trucks cutting them up. The show lasted for nearly 24 hours.
For all the fury, darn little snow.

Deathly Hallows

Of course I went and saw it. I've seen the previous ones, I have the books, alledgedly purchased for the children, but I read them too when no one was looking. It's all good fun.
It's a Harry Potter movie, pretty much like the others. The cast is a year or two older than the last time. Emma Watson / Hermione is very pretty. She has an interesting face that looks lovely when photographed from the right angle, but plain photographed from the wrong angle. For most of the movie they are wearing "urban grunge" the fashion statement of the ugh-oh's (2000-2010). The two boys just look baggy and wrinkled wearing this stuff, but Emma always looks slim and elegant. Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) has grown up to be fairly handsome, more so than Rupert Grint (Ron) has. Rupert's hairstyle did nothing for his appearance. He needs to find a better barber if he wants to stay in pictures, after the last Potter movie that is.
It's long, 2 1/2 hours. Even at that length, it would be hard to follow if you hadn't read the book, and in fact read it fairly recently. It follows the book quite closely, but there is little dialog to clue the unread into what is going on.
For one reason or another, my favorite scene from the book was omitted. Hagrid and Harry are airborne, in/on a motorcycle, with Death Eaters in hot pursuit. Hagrid pushes a button on the handlebars, the cycle emits a great flash and cloud of smoke from the exhaust. Right there, in mid air, the smoke solidifies into a stout brick wall, into which the Death Eaters crash at Mach 0.5.

Giving thanks for small favors

Broadband just got broad again. I'm on a Time Warner cable modem and band width sucked. I couldn't play a U-tube video with out constant pauses waiting for more video to trickle in from the cable.
Time Warner just fixed something. UTube now plays like a champ.

Three can keep a secret. If one of them is dead

The Great Wikileak has the TV news baying for the head of Julian Assange. Along with pseudo intellectual arguements about freedom of the press. Although hanging Mr. Assange out to dry isn't a bad idea, it's a side issue.
The real issue is the astounding foolishness of our government, putting zillions of secret documents on line, and allowing access by everyone in the government. Information sharing they called it. Classified is not information to be shared. That's why it's classified. The way you keep secrets secret is by not telling them to everyone. That's the "need to know" doctrine. And by not putting them on line in the first place. The real villains are the idiots who created the great classified database, and the Cabinet secretaries who signed off on permitting their department's secret documents going into the database.
With all the classified in the US government on line, one disgruntled PFC was able to carry a quarter million documents off base on a single CD. If all that classified had been real paper, locked in real safes, in secure locations, the PFC wouldn't have been able to move that much paper to the door, even with the aid of handtruck.
Let's see if the government is bright enough to do the right thing, namely destroy the classified database. Wipe all the disk drives, invalidate all the passwords, take the file pointers off the net. Classified should not be kept on computers, it is too easy to steal.
By the way, how long do you think your computerized medical records will stay confidential when the US State Dept cannot keep its classified off Wikileaks? Are we all looking forward to seeing our operations, prescriptions, X-rays, and doctor's opinions shared with our employers, our insurers, the media, and all the nosy neighbors?

Robin Hood with Errol Flynn

It surfaced in the $5 a DVD bin at Walmart. It's an antique, 1938. Talkies are only 10 years old. The Technicolor process was new that year. It's still entertaining. The colors have lasted, still bright. Lots of derring do, chases on horse back, sword fights, quarterstaff fights, non stop action. Characters are divided into good guys, bad guys, and love interest (Olivia deHaviland as Maid Marion). Claude Rains is a convincingly nasty Prince John. Basil Rathbone takes a week off from being Sherlock Holmes to be Guy of Gisborne.
Given the age of this flick, it's darn good. Better than the Kevin Costner version from a couple a years ago.

Computer security? do we have any?

US traitor Bradley Manning, while an Army private managed to access a zillion secret army documents and feed them to Wikileaks. Now it appears he was able to access 250,000 state department secret documents and they are appearing on Wikileaks at this very moment.
There are a few questions I'd like answered. Such as how does a low level Army enlisted man gain access to State Dept classified? And how does he gain access to so much of if? What ever happened to "need to know"?
Who issued this traitor a security clearance?
Why is all this classified on computers anyhow? It would be more secure if just one copy was hand typed using a manual Remington office typewriter. And the one copy kept in a safe somewhere.
As of this writing, the Wikileaks site is off the air due to a distributed denial of service attack, but the ever patriotic New York Times is going to publish the juicer items tommorrow.