Miscellany

• The city of San Francisco has 23,000 coin fed parking meters. They were wondering why their parking meter revenue was so small. It turns out they have 92,000 people in the city with handicap placards. My question is this: What is it about being handicapped that should exempt someone from sticking a few coins in the meter?

• I'm sure they won't abuse it but it appears that the government wants to put x-ray cameras in lamp posts and other "street furniture" in order to seek out terrorists, people carrying guns, etc. They also want to give the police a database of all citizens matched to phone and travel records, etc. But really, it's just for their own good.

• It irritates me when people say "supposebly" instead of "supposedly." There are a number of other words people butcher also, but I just heard someone say it so I thought I'd pass it on.

• Hillary made a not-so-subtle reference to Bill being evil at a town hall meeting. Some one in the audience asked her a question about how she would be able to deal with evil men. Her response was, "The question is, we face a lot of dangers in the world and, in the gentleman's words, we face a lot of evil men and what in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men," There was about 30 seconds of laughter and applause from the audience.

• How is this a crime? - Actress & singer Brandy (whom I've never heard of before now) may possibly be charged with misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter for starting an accident that killed a woman on a California freeway. There were no drugs involved, no alcohol and she was not talking on her cell phone at the time of the crash. Apparently, traffic slowed down and she rear-ended the victims vehicle which caused it to hit another vehicle when then sent it crashing in to the center divider where it was struck by yet another vehicle. The victim died of blunt force trauma. But why prosecute her? It was clearly an accident with no criminal intent. It's bad enough that someone died accidentally, it doesn't mean that someone has to be criminally punished. The family can already sue her for civil damages.

• At midnight tonight, Microsoft Windows Vista will officially be on sale. I am not looking forward to another piece of bloatware from Microsoft. I will likely install it on a virtual machine some time in the near future but I currently don't have a machine powerful enough to run it. As a stated a few posts back, my next laptop is going to be a Mac so I won't have to deal with Microsoft's failures full time.