Kid Nation – Episode 7
Oct 31, 2007 That's Hot
Check it out! A somewhat close-to-live blog of the episode!
Erie County’s answer to driver’s licenses for illegals
Oct 30, 2007 In The News, Politics
Understandably, New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s plan to issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens has ruffled a few feathers. One local columnist (I’m still looking for a linkable source) puts statewide opposition to the plan at 72%. I’m liking Erie County’s response, myself:
Erie County Clerk Kathy Hochul, who was appointed by Spitzer but is against the rule, has a card up her sleeve if the policy does go into effect this December.
She says she’ll follow the state rule by allowing illegals to apply for a license without the use of a social security card.
But if they do, she’ll call the sheriff’s office, and the illegal immigrants might end up getting kicked out of the country.
Erie County Sheriff Tim Howard is on-board with the plan. He says he’ll send his deputies, or call police who are close to the suburban DMV sites, to bring the illegal immigrant in for questioning.
“It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me that if a person is in the country illegally we would allow them to legally operate a motor vehicle in a country that they shouldn’t even be in legally,” says Sheriff Howard.
Hochul goes into further detail on her reelection campaign page. It’s nice to see someone, especially a member of Spitzer’s party, standing up to his farcical idea with actual immigration enforcement. I doubt I have many (if any) readers in Erie County, but I’m thinking you’d do well to reelect Ms. Hochul next Tuesday.
Fitzgerald Vows to Find Who Outed Dumbledore
Oct 22, 2007 Brainwaves
As usual, Scott Ott brings the funny on ScrappleFace today:
Just days after author J.K. Rowling publicly revealed that a fictional character in her Harry Potter series was secretly a homosexual, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald today empaneled a grand jury and vowed to find out who ‘outed’ Dumbledore, the imaginary headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Mr. Fitzgerald is best known as the prosecutor who spent two and a half years, and millions of dollars, failing to identify who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA spy, although he knew the names of columnist Robert Novak’s sources before the probe began.
Let the Tea Leaf Reading Begin
Oct 19, 2007 Geek, In The News
Sorry, I’m going to babble about my iPhone some more. 
John Gruber has an in-depth article this week about what third-party applications might mean on the iPhone. Of course, as he says in the article, there’s a lot of Kremlinology involved, but it’s still an interesting read.
Canadian elections likely avoided
Oct 19, 2007 Politics
The Bloc Quebequois amendment to the Conservatives’ Speech from the Throne was defeated today by all three other parties, allowing the government to stand for now. The Liberal Party will propose an amendment on Monday, which could still bring down the government if it passes, but Liberal leader Stéphane Dion has indicated that if it fails, his party will abstain from the vote on the Conservative speech next Wednesday, allowing it to pass and maintaining the current government.
Back to watching the inner workings (or lack there of) in our own government for a while.
Kid Nation – Episode 5
Oct 19, 2007 That's Hot
Election day, election day! I don’t see Taylor staying in her Council seat past the end of this episode. On to the observations:
Canadian election season may soon be nigh
Oct 16, 2007 Politics
Seeing how other countries’ governments function in comparison to our own here in the United States intrigues me. Combining that with dating a Canadian and spending time there, leads me to try to follow Canadian politics fairly closely.
Canada’s Conservative Party, led by Stephen Harper, currently commands a minority government in Ottawa, and will deliver the government’s “speech from the throne” Tuesday night at 6:30 PM ET. It’s kinda similar to the State of the Union address given by the president here in the States, only in Canada, a vote is then held to determine whether they accept the speech. A failed vote is considered a no-confidence vote, and the government could fall. And a failed vote is just what the Liberal Party’s Stéphane Dion is threatening.
So, yeah, I’ll be watching for online streams of Canadian news Tuesday night. Yes, I watch politics on TV. Yes, I occasionally turn on C-SPAN on lunch hour. Yes, I’m probably in need of psychiatric help.
EDIT: See, not being familar with the system, I thought it sounded a little weird that Harper would be doing anything from the throne. I come to read later that, while the Conservative government will prepare the speech, it is indeed read by the Governor General on the Queen’s behalf. That makes a little more sense.
iPhone SDK: Still Safari-based, but offline?
Oct 4, 2007 Geek
ArsTechnica is reporting on sources inside Apple that the iPhone will not plan to support native code on the iPhone “for the foreseeable future,” although they are working on adding additional capabilities to WebKit and Safari for iPhone, including offline storage, enhanced connections from JavaScript to iPhone functions, and potentially, the ability to have Home Screen icons point to offline web applications on the device.
This sounds to me like an interesting best-of-both-worlds compromise, particularly offline storage: web-based applications remain sandboxed in Safari, while allowing the ability to store data for faster access/offline access. Optimally, such web pages could be locally stored to run completely on the device, not needing to hit the web at all.
Ultimately, the question at this point is, when might something like this appear? Says Ars, “Apple is currently aiming for an unspecified ‘January’ deadline on these updates, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it will likely be announced at Macworld 2008.”
