This ranks right up there with tobacco subsidies for “most selfish, asinine government”.

Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) wants to prohibit the National Weather Service from releasing their weather data to the public. Note that the National Weather Service is paid for by public tax monies — that is, paid for by the people whose access Sen. Santorum wants to block.

So, why does Sen. Santorum want to ban the public release of taxpayer-funded weather data? Quoting the senator (as seen in, among other places, an article on the issue), he says:

“NOAA's actions threaten the continued success of the commercial weather industry,” Santorum said in a Senate session last week. “It's not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers, or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free.”

Of course, some of those companies are headquartered in his state, Pennsylvania. I heard on a TV news report the senator saying something along the lines of “these companies employ thousands of people”. Geez, should the government outlaw cars because of their threat to the horse-and-buggy industry? Considering the number of Amish in Pennsylvania, a call by Sen. Santorum to ban cars might not be unexpected.

What a moron.

Wikipedia entry on this subject

Update: Thankfully, the bill never made it beyond committee.

In a previous post I'd noted that something called “blue chux” (AKA “disposable pads”) are a wonderful gift for new parents, who despite being told numerous times do not fully appreciate how much and from how many places babies can leak and otherwise expel bodily fluids.

Recently, I'd sent a case of them to a friend who'd just had a baby, and a month later he wrote me:

By the way, the disposable waterproof sheets are, by far, the most useful baby gift. Thank you thank you for sending them. I didn't know that babies are capable of projectile pooping and mischievous peeing.

Projectile pooping and mischievous peeing – things that all parents become well aware of, but non-parents know little about. 🙂

We had a late-April snow storm which accumulated a few inches.

But by the afternoon it was virtually all gone.

By the next day we were already taking walks around the lake.

And by the next day, we were mowing the lawn....

Rummaging through some photos on my picture archive, I came across this picture, which I took with my cell phone this past January when I ran across some mugs for sale in my local grocery store.

There were various types of mugs, all of the “spring is full of flowers” and “happiness is a teddy bear” ilk, except this one, which said:

Men who call women “sweetheart”, “baby”, or “honey” should have their little tiny peckers cut off.

I thought it was sort of funny, as it was obvious that no one there knew what it meant.

Yesterday, I bought a Netgear wireless router (WGR614, 60% off at CompUSA, for $30). Rather than a printed manual, it comes with a one-page quick-start guide with instructions on how to view the manual on CD-ROM. It says "On computers not running the MS Windows operating system, double click on the index.htm on the CD." Okay, that's easy enough, except...

index.htm refers to one big image with an image map -- there is nothing else displayed by the page. This would not be a problem in and of itself except that they refer to the image as “setup/images/WGR614v5_EUinstallsc.gif”, but there is no setup directory. Thus, the page is blank except for the broken-image symbol.

It turns out that there's a Setup directory, which, of course, is the same as setup to a Windows box (is there any other modern OS whose filesystems by default ignore case?), but not to anyone else.

Shame on you, Netgear, for not testing on (even one!) non-MS OS.