Tracy posted a scary cat picture, which inspired me to post my own example of feline photography. In this case, the cat thinks I'm nuts.

On a totally unrelated note, there seems to be something malfunctioning badly with permalinks to blogspot blogs. This is the second time in the last day or two I've tried to use a permalink, only to have it not work. Very odd.

I can blog from my phone now -- expect an increased number of pointless posts from boring meetings. Like this one.

New Phone

Some of you may remember my little cell phone mishap back in October. Since then I've been lugging around a massive prehistoric phone that required an extra set of suspenders. I've had my eye on one phone in particular, and this week I finally broke down and bought it.

So my new Kyocera 7135 arrived today. It was hideously expensive, although I managed to get $130 in rebates from Verizon. But it will supposedly work as a phone, Palm, and MP3 player. So if it lives up to its billing, it should be worth it.

The phone does a million things and it's going to take some time to figure it all out. But I'm already comtemplating how to blog from the phone. And I've managed to hit 88 lines in Tetris.

Happy Blogday to Me

While republishing my archives after one of Blogger's periodic barfs, I realized that this blog just turned one year old on Monday.

Croatoan

Layne, of Plain Layne, has mysteriously evaporated from the Blogosphere, taking her entire site with her and leaving only the cryptic message "Take very good care of you." Layne is one of the most expressive writers out there. I've only been reading her blog for a few months, and our only direct contact has been to e-mail and comment back and forth a few times. Yet it's like a close friend has suddenly vanished.

Several people written about this, including Gudy and Daintily Dirty. DD's post is especially thoughtful, pondering on why we blog and the strangeness of feeling connected to someone you only know from a few electrons flying through the ether:

Maybe taking down her blog was what she needed to do. Does she owe us anything? Do we owe each other anything as bloggers? I guess that depends on what you want back from your readers. Are we friends? If so, I would never disappear without saying good-bye and letting people know why I was leaving. It feels like a betrayal of a friendship to do otherwise. If Layne comes back, I will be less likely to invest much of myself into that relationship, and maybe that's what she wants, readers less invested in her life.

[...]

Maybe I shouldn't care that a blogger I came to consider a friend has disappeared, but I do. I wish her well and hope the decision she's made is one that will bring her more happiness and a fulfilling life.

I'll add my voice to the chorus in wishing her well and hoping that she's ok.

I wonder what it would take to get 100%

We were trying to figure out how well the new spam filter on works on our office e-mail system. So my friend sent this message. Note that it only got a 73% spam rating.

-----Original Message-----
From: Some other guy
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 2:57 PM
To: A. Coworker
Subject: [SPAM: 73%] Herbal remedy

Hot sexy teen virgins loading inkjet cartridges just
for you.

Out inkjet cartridges have only the finest herbal
supplements that enhance and boost your printer's
natural tone.

Robin Hood, in reverse

The Washington Post reports on a study showing how Bush's tax cuts benefit the very rich the most, and the middle class the least.

Three successive tax cuts pushed by President Bush will leave middle-income taxpayers paying a greater share of all federal taxes by the end of the decade, according to new analyses of the Bush administration's tax policies.

[...]

Citizens for Tax Justice found that for the lowest fifth of taxpayers -- those earning below $16,000 -- federal taxes would fall 10 percent between now and 2010, while federal taxes for those in the second quintile -- earning between $16,000 to $28,000 -- would fall 12 percent. At the other end of the scale, the decline for the top 1 percent of taxpayers -- those making $337,000 and up -- would be 15 percent.

In contrast, for taxpayers earning between $45,000 and $337,000, the decline would be 7 percent, less than half the cut reaped by the very wealthy.

[...]

Figuring out whether tax policy benefits the wealthy or the poor is a hotly disputed subject. Liberals favor a progressive tax system in which households pay higher tax rates and a higher share of their total income as they climb up the income ladder. By that measure, the Bush tax cuts have made the tax code less progressive. By 2011, the poorest taxpayers' after-tax income will have risen only 0.3 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center, while household income for the richest 1 percent of taxpayers will have jumped 8.6 percent.

Strange box seen at work

Hmmm.... Don't break the box, keep the box dry, and whatever you do don't let gnomes with funny hats near the box!

A crack in the Redmond empire?

Munich, Germany's third-largest city, has announced that it will replace its 14,000 Windows NT desktop computers with systems running Linux and OpenOffice. IBM and SuSE helped prod the city into the move, while Microsoft exec Steve Ballmer reportedly interrupted his ski vacation in Switzerland to fly to the city and schmooze the Mayor. Evidently it didn't work.