Ed Stoffel

So I'm minding my own business shaving this morning when my wife says "Look at this". It seems that on the one morning that President Bush decided to surprise those in the White House briefing room with his appearance at the podium (he usually addresses them formally from the East Room)... on this very morning, a hanging camera came loose and nearly fell on the heads of the press. It belonged to some of the French media there:

- An Agence France Presse photographer's camera interrupted President Bush's press conference and entertained NBC viewers this morning. As Bush began to speak, the camera started to dangle above the heads of several reporters. As shown in the screen grabs above, it was clearly visible on NBC's camera shot. "For those of you watching, we seem to have a mechanical flaw," he said amid the laughter. He asked the journalists if they were wearing helmets. "Our friends at other networks, seeing our plight, noticing that our shot was blocked by the Offending French Camera, offered their 'clean' feed of the President at the lectern," Brian Williams notes on MSNBC.com.

 NBC Viewers Catch Dangling Camera, TV Newser

One of the best places online to jump in and begin playing with Ajax for free is Protopage. You don't even have to sign up to begin playing... just go to the front page and start dragging the boxes around. Type things into the various boxes, or change the wallpaper. To understand how to load the RSS feeds, it couldn't be easier than clicking the "ADD TO PROTOPAGE" button on this site. If you decide to register, you can get a permanent page there, for you to use publicly or privately. Some are using it as an extension of other pages, whether blogs or personal profiles. For my own uses, I just wish there was an easy way to import all my links from another page. I heard about the service from Amber McArthur's Inside the Net podcast.

If an email says "send this to everyone in your contact list", that's your first clue. It's a hoax, an urban myth or bad advise. Don't actually send that email to anyone. Instead, read about urban myths and hoaxes here, here, or here.

At Evangelical Outpost, Joe points out that everyone actually has religious beliefs... it's just that a lot of people don't realize it:

...everyone holds, consciously or unconsciously, a religious belief. For many of us, this will be as obvious as finding that our entire lives we've been speaking in prose. Others, though, will have a reaction similar to those who argue that while everyone else may speak with an accent, they themselves do not. Although it may be true that not everyone has a religion (a system of religious beliefs, practices, and rituals), it would be rather absurd to believe that there is anyone who does not have a religious belief. This can be shown by focusing on a theory or belief that many people mistakenly believe to be the reverse of religion: materialism. Although the idea of materialism has been around since at least the ancient Greeks, it has only recently been considered to be a non-religious idea. This is rather odd considering that it explicitly claims that matter (or some other physical entity) is unconditionally, nondependently real and draws conclusions about nature and humanity based on that belief.

 What is a Religious Belief?, Evangelical Outpost

I love the Yaesu FT-7800R, a programmable radio transceiver which lives in my trunk with a remote control head... handy because I use valet parking every day in the city. I've programmed lots of stuff to listen to.

121.5MHz has priority because that's where pilots would call for help unless they just do so on their last frequency. That's also where they try to reach pilots who have strayed into the Washington ADIZ... hoping they can reach them before it's time to shoot them down. If they can't get pilots to divert, they'll have to deal with Guard Dog very shortly.

Flight Service Stations talk with pilots about their flight plans, and Flight Watch is to give pilot's weather updates enroute.

Reagan National Airport (DCA) in Washington communicates with pilots flying in and out from their control tower frequency, while planes on the ground but off the runway coordinate movement with the ground frequency. Dulles Airport (IAD) in Virginia has the same division of communications, as do most all airport control towers in the U.S.

Unicom channels are used by pilots to communicate with uncontrolled airports... those so small, they do not have a control tower. Pilots also advise other pilots of their location and intention in the airport traffic pattern. There are a limited number of UNICOM frequencies available, so airports share frequencies. When in the air, pilots often hear communications from other airports, as well as their own. Unicom frequencies listed here include Winchester VA (OKV), Warrenton VA (W66), Cumberland MD (CBE), Luray VA (W45), Hagerstown MD (HGR), Leesburg VA (JYO), and Front Royal VA (FRR). Airports broadcasts updated weather and airport information on separate ATIS frequencies.

Pilot planning to land in the Washington area get in touch with Potomac Approach, and those flying through the area communicate with Washington Center.

If you use an image from someone else's site, should you link directly to it (to give credit where it comes from), or copy and use it, so you aren't using their bandwidth? I'd recommend putting the image on your server so that 1) you aren't continuing to pull bandwidth from the source site, and 2) you will always know what's being loaded on your site. Exceptions would be when you have an arrangement to load an image from somewhere else, and you trust the source.

In the very week when the Windows MetaFile crisis is here, you wouldn't want to give someone else the ability of putting a malformed image onto your website. Malformed images can contain executable code, which runs when your browser (or shell) can't display it normally, and that's a backdoor to anything invading your machine, as well as anyone who visits your website - yikes!

For more on the WMF issue, see Steve Gibson's Security Now, Episodes 20-21
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