Check this one out: the White House has quite possibly the most idiotic transcript of a press briefing on its website that I’ve ever seen. In the first paragraph, White House spokesman Scott McClellan introduces everyone to the press corps, including someone who shouldn’t be identified by name, only “on background,” as “a White House official.” What’s the problem? Since the transcript is word-for-word, and McClellan introduced the man by name, his name is right there in the first paragraph. Even more idiotic, the rest of the transcript reverts to calling him a “White House official.” You have to see this one to fully appreciate it. (I grabbed a screenshot, in case the page gets “corrected.”)
Ooooh! How did I not know that Duke/UNC is tonight?
Since I always seem to get dinged when I point to a particular ego on the web, I’ll let others do it for me. (Of course, the comments that everyone is talking about have been deleted from the site in question, but luckily, there’s an archived XML file; just search for “we rarely got a mention”.)
MetaFilter has done its job today by pointing me to a hilarious “condemnation” of Microsoft’s Wingdings font. Being a New Yorker just makes this all the funnier.
Holy shit — Pyra is down to only Evan Williams. Wow. While I had some clue when they asked for money for new servers, I really didn’t realize the situation that Pyra faced. I’m sad for Meg, Matt, Jack, and pb — they were part of something great.
CNN hops onto the geocaching bandwagon; meanwhile, it appears that a slew of new caches have appeared near my apartment. Perhaps I’ve got a new task for this weekend…
From the too-much-time department comes Hasciicam, a utility that takes input from a webcam and turns it into an ASCII picture. Don’t know if this one needed to be written…
As a followup to yesterday’s bind security posting, there’s a new Linux Weekly News issue today with pointers to the fix for most major Linux distributions. If you run bind on Linux, you really need to upgrade.
Something to chew on while I’m waking up:
The WSJ reports that yesterday, without realizing that his remarks were being broadcast on a feed to some White House reporters, President Bush told the heads of some Catholic charities that his faith-based social services initiative was linked to his goal of curtailing abortions, a connection he did not make when he announced the initiative earlier this week. During the same meeting, reporters were also able to hear Bush say that his plans for federal funding for school vouchers may not succeed because a lot of Republicans don’t like them.
The Village Voice (admittedly not the most unbiased news source) has what seems to be a good rundown on what we can expect our soon-to-be-confirmed Attorney General to do to abortion laws in this country. (Update: Ashcroft’s been confirmed. Groan.)
A few weeks back, my Linux box died (or, more specifically, the power supply died), and it wasn’t until yesterday that I got around to installing its replacement. It wasn’t until today that I realized that the dead power supply took a hard disk with it, and it happened to be the hard disk that I installed in the new box. So here I am, reinstalling Linux again. Fun.
