Todd Bradley’s Galaxy

Am I hallucinating?  Did someone slip LSD into my iced tea?  I thought I just saw a news report that said Secretary of State Rice said, “…we must cut the Gordian knot of fossil fuels, carbon emissions and economic activity. This current system is no longer sustainable.”
Nations must fight climate change like terrorism, Rice says – CNN.com

Could someone please call 911 for me, before I start seeing bananas growing out my arms and eat my own elbows by accident?  Help!

I see a lot on line these days urging people to support “network neutrality“.  Maybe I don’t understand the arguments well enough, but I’ve read what the Save the Internet people have written, and I think I’m still against net neutrality.  Personally, I think differentiated services would be a good thing.  I think it’s perfectly reasonable that a movie I buy from iTunes or an email message from my mother should take priority on the network over some script kiddie’s DDOS attack or spam about the latest “hot stock”.  For that matter, my internet phone call should get a higher delivery priority than my email.

If you’re for (or even against) net neutrality, please help me understand why it’s such a big deal.

What’s the world coming to?  I’m definitely used to my family and friends mixing up “its” and “it’s” just as so many other Americans so.  But I was just reading this article from Reuters, the highly respected news organization.  The article is about the 82-year-old boxing ring at Madison Square Garden, and the author writes:

“It has begun to show it’s age. It became more difficult to maintain and set up. It was not an easy decision.”

Even Larry Fine of Reuters can’t get it right.  Shame on his proofreader and editor for not catching the mistake!

I went to yoga class this evening, for the first time in several years.  It was good; my flexibility sucks.  One benefit of our annual Broomfield Parks and Rec membership is we can just drop in on any yoga, spinning, or pilates class for free anytime we want.  I wonder how I’ll feel in the morning.  It was a tough class, and my knee started hurting during part of it.

In other news, I’m going to Israel for two weeks in October, for work.  My first time to the middle east.

At the moment, I’m listening to “The Best of Big Country.”  Remember that band?  I don’t own the CD, but thanks to Simplify Media, I’m listening to it over the internet from my friend’s iTunes library.  You can share your music, too.  And in exchange you get access to my 34 gigabyte iTunes library.  Just be my Simplify Media friend.

Last but not least, don’t you dare forget that tomorrow (Wednesday September 19) is Talk Like a Pirate Day.

xkcd is one of the funniest comics around. Unfortunately, I can’t share my glee with Beth. I don’t think she’d “get” any of them. Like this one.

Bin Laden Releases Video as C.I.A. Issues Warning – New York Times
A videotaped message by Osama bin Laden, the first in nearly three years, compares the Iraq war to American blunders in Vietnam, criticizes the Democratic Party for failing to pull American troops from Iraq, and urges Americans to embrace Islam.

I just can’t believe the Bush administration still hasn’t found this guy and brought him to justice.  Six years after 9/11 and who knows how many billions of dollars (most of it wasted on government contractors, we’re now learning)…and they still haven’t found Osama.

Here’s another example of why I’m happy to have moved to the Macintosh platform for all my home computing. Beth and I have Motorola RAZR phones we bought a few years back. I think it was after AT&T switched to Cingular, but before they switched back to AT&T (but that’s another story). Anyhow, this is the first phone I’ve had that had customized ring tones and a built-in camera. But there’s the question of how to get the photos off the phone without emailing them to someone and incurring a charge.

The original way I solved this was to buy some software from Motorola that allows you to transfer files to your phone over the USB connection. But when I got rid of my Windows desktop and switched to my Mac mini, I couldn’t find a Mac version of that software. I thought that was a bit strange, so I did some web searching to see how people transfer files on and off their cell phones.

And that’s when I found that the answer is so simple that I never would’ve even thought of it! It turns out that the Mac mini has built-in Bluetooth, too, just like the phone. So all you have to do is “register” the phone as a trusted Bluetooth device, and then you can just copy files to and from the phone over the wireless Bluetooth connection, just as if you were copying them to another computer or something. So that’s why I don’t need to buy any extra $40 software! The capability is built right into the Mac operating system. I guess I’m not the only one that found this so simple as to be non-obvious; some guy posted a video on YouTube that walks you through how to do it. I only had to watch the first 5 seconds or so before it hit me – ah, they both speak Bluetooth!

In other Mac news, I finally decided I like my Logitech rechargeable cordless laser mouse more than the Apple Mighty Mouse I bought a while back. I’m still using the cool new ultra-thin Apple keyboard, but Beth and I never could really get used to the Mighty Mouse. I like having a dedicated mouse button for “Back” and Beth hated the Might Mouse’s “scroll wheel” which is really a little roller ball that goes in all directions. Plus, cordless is nice – less clutter on the desk, and easier to use.

Beth and I turned our 3-day Labor Day weekend into a 5-day vacation, and went to Fort Lauderdale for our 5-year wedding anniversary. We did a bunch of diving and a bunch of eating, as well as a little shopping and one walk on the beach.

We dived with Pro Dive, which is one of the biggest training facilities for dive instructors nationally. They usually do two dives per day on a single boat trip. In the dive biz they call that a “two tank dive” which I’ve always thought is weird. You don’t actually take two tanks with you under the water. You take one tank on one dive, come back up, go to a different place, and then take the second tank. Anyhow, their regular pattern is to do one wreck dive and one reef dive on each outing.

Saturday, however, they have a night dive. So, on our first day back to diving after 7 months, we did 4 dives in one day! That was a long and tiring day. That was the most dives we’ve done in a single day, as well as our first night dive ever, so that was cool. Then, on Sunday and Monday we got in 2 dives each day, for a total of 8 tanks in 3 days. Not bad for a weekend jaunt. On Monday, we did our deepest dive so far without a dive master guide – 115 feet, to the wreck of the “RSB-1″.

The weather held up nicely for us, but I would call the visibility just “so so”. It wasn’t as nice as either Andros or Akumal, the other two places we’ve been. But it was a lot cheaper, so I guess you get what you pay for. We also saw our first shark, a nurse shark which looked like it just wanted to be left alone in its hidey hole under a coral ledge.

A few other general thoughts on Fort Lauderdale, now that we’ve been there 3 times:
Best restaurant: Coconuts – that’s next door to the dive shop, and they have really good food plus good happy hour prices

Best dessert: Galler – a Belgian chocolate store on Las Olas, which is one of the main shopping strips in town

Getting through the Fort Lauderdale airport was a whole lot easier this time than when we flew through last summer. Maybe we just hit the right time, or maybe they figured out how to run an airport security station finally.

I’d been having a craving to get some authentic Cuban food, so we tried a restaurant called Las Vegas Cuban Cuisine. According to the locals (including Cuban-Americans) it’s the best around. I enjoyed the food there, but I couldn’t say whether it’s really authentic or not. Not quite as upscale as I had thought, it’s located in a strip mall.

We stayed in a place called Vistamar Villas, which is an old motel built probably in the 40′s or 50′s. The owners/proprietors are very nice and seem to do most – if not all – of the work themselves. I read the suites are nicer, but we just had a regular room. Unfortunately, when we arrived the A/C had been off for quite a while and it was nearly unbearably hot in there. It took a full 12 hours (until 4 AM the next morning) before the room cooled to a comfortable temperature. After that, we just left the anemic window unit air conditioner on all the time whether we were there or not. And the room had two full size beds instead of a single queen (or king), which was a little strange but oh well. It was clean, though, and relatively convenient. Plus, with a package diving deal, the price was definitely right.