guapacha.com

I was reading today about the pledges of aid for victims in the Indian Ocean earthquake and it frankly strikes me as pathetic.

• EU $44m
• US: $35m
• Canada: $33m
• Japan: $30m
• UK: $28.9m
• Australia: $27m
• France: $20.4m
• Denmark: $15.6m
• Saudi Arabia: $10m
• Norway: $6.6m

Mozambique, one of the poorest countries in the world, has offered $100,000; even the despicable Pfizer has given $35m.

More money was spent by many of the presidential nomination candidates than is being offered up by these governments. The scale of the disaster is impossible to comprehend, not just in deaths but in how to clean up the areas and let alone how to rebuild them. It will take a lot more money than is being offered to make even a dent in the problem. People and governments need to start coughing up to help these people.

With that said, I wish you all a Happy New Year.

I saw this sign in Fry’s last night and it got me thinking about whether anyone offers cheap DVDs but doesn’t let you choose ?

Listening to a co-worker giving us a lecture on how to solve the world’s problems (I am lucky to have such an expert on world policy so close by) I am struggling to keep quiet. Why do so many Americans insist on making the vowel at the beginning of country names their own syllable? They don’t say A-merica so why do they insist on saying I-raq ? Argh, and now she is saying A-zores!

One of the more cool Christmas gifts was a copy of the brilliant album A Grand Don’t Come for Free by The Streets. Maybe not quite single of the year but check out the video for (and most importantly the lyrics) to Fit But You Know It

It used to be that just mean people suck but I think the Christmas season shows that all people suck when placed in amongst their fellows. I am tired of searching the mall for a parking spot, finding a gap and then finding that some ignoramus has parked so far over the lines I can’t even get the MINI in the space. I’m tired of being near beaten to death in stores whilst waiting in line to pay, I had to stand here for 20 minutes, you can !&@!ing do the same. And the line won’t move any faster with you stepping on my heels or pushing your boxes into my back. There are no manners anywhere, no courtesy, just selfish arrogance. One really does start to understand why people go live in the hills – give me internet and satellite TV and I am so there.

Google have published their 2004 Year-End Google Zeitgeist , a summary of search activity for the year. A few highlights:

• Most searched term: Britney Spears
• Most popular man: Orlando Bloom
• Most popular sport/hobby: Poker Chips
• Most popular cuisine: Pizza

Go check it out for yourself.

I do. I think it would be a cool, mental challenge to sequence planes so that everyone gets where they are going without making that horrible screeching noise when metal rubs on metal. There is currently a shortage of ATCs, which is predicted to be a major shortage in a few years time. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association says about staffing levels in SoCal.

Los Angeles Traffic Control: 310 positions authorised to work at facility, 272 actually employed, only 217 fully trained and working. This number will drop to 206 by end 2005.
SoCal Radar Approach: 260 positions authorised to work at facility, 248 actually employed, 241 fully trained and working. A shortage of 106 controllers is predicted next year.

This week the FAA announced a scheme to aggressively hire new ATCs and to extend the mandatory retirement age for some, so if you want to be an ATC get your applications in (but expect a 1 in 4 failure rate on the course). But I won’t be sending in my application, there is a maximum age of 30 for applications so I am too over the hill for this ‘dream job’. Was that a sigh of relief I hear??

I need a distributed bookmark management system. I have bookmarks on my home computer, another set on my laptop which I bring with me to San Diego each week, and my desktop PC here at work. I add to the bookmarks on each machine but almost always forget to spread them to the other machines, so I want a way to do it automatically. Except that the work PC shouldn’t get the, er, non-work safe items.

Anyone have any recommendations? If it was integrated into Firefox, that would be a major win but it doesn’t have to be. I’ll do some research over the weekend and post what I find but please leave me a comment if you know some good solutions.

More interesting that I thought it would be, here is a blog for Elyse Sewell, one of the America’s Next Top Model contestents. She has some interesting items about modelling in Japan, and about Tyra Banks.

This looks cool for organising photos, both digi and cam-phone stylee: Flickr. Recommended ‘to’ me by one of the developers of Yahoo Photos in their blog it looks pretty good. I may convert my photo website to it. Talking of which, I need to update that site some time.

And here is the Apple store of the future??

Today the new alien flight training rule goes into effect which means that all non-US citizens taking any kind of flight training have to get pre-approval from the TSA before they start. Further, flight instructors now have to verify the citizenship of US student pilots before they are allowed to start training.

According to this AOPA article the TSA refused to let resident aliens (green card holders like myself) be exempt. Apparantly they don’t trust that the INS is weeding out terrorists; all those background checks, FBI-vetting etc doesn’t mean squat to them. On the other hand, they have trust that (a possibly resident alien) flight instructor can verify that a US citizen’s papers are the real deal. Pathetic.

And its all pointless anyway. If terrorists want to learn to fly they’ll forge a US birth certificate – could you spot a fake? – or learn to fly elsewhere. Its just another government public relations exercise with no real value. So, rest easy dear readers in the knowledge that this terrorist-until-proven-innocent won’t be doing any more flight training after I finish my commercial rating.

In the spirit of the season, this week’s single of the week is the Barenaked Ladies and their rendition of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen/We Three Kings. And check out their recently released holiday compilation Barenaked for the Holidays