Sorry folks, but today's entry will consist of a pop-quiz for all residents of Boulder and surrounding areas. Good luck.

(1) Autumn and Jasmin were given a Bernese Mountain Dog at their commitment ceremony. If their dog needs to be walked two miles a day and they walk at a rate of 3/4 mile per hour, how much time will they spend discussing their relationship in public?

(2) There are 4500 low-income homes in Boulder and all of them recycle plastic. If each household recycles 5 soda bottles a day and buys one polar fleece pullover during each winter month, does Boulder Housing Authority generate a monthly plastic surplus or deficit?

So I'm walking into work today (I'm currently in California), and I see a guy jogging with one of those baby strollers that the runners use. Only there is no baby in there, instead there's a little poodle; wrapped in a fleece coat and wearing a fleece hat.

I didn't think that people with dogs like that engaged in physical activities.

I was planning to skip the State of the Union speech because I'm not sure I can sit through the entire thing without breaking my TV. But the solution to this dilemma has become quite clear.

Rioting in a city that wins a sports championship has become so common that it's hardly worth noting. But rioting when you lose? Well, that must mean you're in Oakland; home of the fans with the highest rate of felony convictions. It makes you wonder what would have happend if they had won.

I took the Pinzgauer in to get the smog check done. Boy, that was fun. The Pinz has a funky ignition system; it's completely waterproof, and the cables that run to the spark plugs are heavily shielded.

The test in Colorado for vehicles built prior to 1985 is pretty easy. They only check the tailpipe emissions at idle and at 2500 RPM. The problem is that, they need to know the RPMs to perform the test and they measure this by slipping a clip over a spark plug cable. Since the cables are shielded, they couldn't get a reading. While idling, the measured RPMs would jump from 0 to 3000, and every point in between.

The test is computer controlled, and it needs to maintain the RPMs within a specific range for a set length of time. Good luck when you can't measure the RPMs. You could see on the monitor that the emissions were well below the limits, but the computer wouldn't allow it to pass since the RPMs were wrong. After an hour and fifteens minutes, during which they never did get the thing to work correctly, my Pinz "magically" passed amidst talk of a "manager over-ride". I'm not sure what that is, but I'm happy with the result.

All in all, it wasn't that bad. The people working there were very friendly and interested in the Pinz. But jeez, next time give up a little sooner please.

Why does President Bush feel the need to be so confrontational? His latest move, appointing a fundamentalist Christian who hates gays to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. What is the point of this? Granted, the guy has AIDS himself, but he's obviously going to cause no end of turmoil within the council. Does President Bush actually believe that appointing this guy will help with the work before this council, or is this yet another case of pandering his conservative base?

For those of you who like mildly addictive, logic-based games on the web, here's another one for you. Good luck. Luckily, unlike some other games that will remain nameless, this one can be played quickly. My fastest time on the 'easy' level is 12.17 seconds.

With the early on-set of spring yesterday (a balmy sixty degrees), I got a head start one of my up-coming projects; clearing out trees for fire safety, and an improved view. Taking out trees and hauling the slash around is hard work. But by far, the hardest work was the high-limbing of two large trees to open up our view. Taking out all the branches of a large tree for the first thirty to fourty feet with nothing but a hand saw is hard work, not to mention a little scary. If you ever get the chance to engage in such an activity, here's my advice: don't.

With all of the stuff President Bush has to deal with, you'd think that his time would be hard to come by. But, he managed to find a little extra time to shore up his hard-core conservative base express his compassion for all life by declaring a sanctity of human life day. Can't you just feel his desire to get re-elected compassion?

Below is my favorite quote from the article. Just for reference, while I was cutting and pasting this, I noticed that my fingers may have slipped on the keyboard. Maybe, I'm not sure. If you notice an extra character or two in the quote, please ignore them. Anyway, here it is:

"Every child is a priority and a blessing and I believe that all should be welcomed in life and protected by law, unless they are a God-less Iraqi child," he said. "Through ethical policies and the compassion of Americas, we will continue to build a culture that respects life so long as it does not reside in a country who's interests are not our own."

Gosh, he makes me so proud.

At long last, several years behind schedule, the next of the Harry Potter books is finally set to be released. Come June 21, my advice is to stay away, very far away, from your local bookstore. It's going to be a mob scene.

Somebody went through the trouble of creating a flash-based game to simulate the upcoming war with Iraq. In one respect this is pretty funny. Of course, since many of the scenarios played out in this game have a high chance of occurring, that sort of dampens the mirth.

Here's an interesting article written by John Le Carre concerning the Bush administration's response to 9/11 and how they've used it to further their own aims.

Geez, a conservative journalist (Robert Novak) reports that Republican senators are fed up with the arrogance of the Bush White House. Maybe I'm not crazy after all?

Yikes, at five cents a piece, these RFID tags sound pretty scary. If these things actually come into use as the author predicts, I can imagine an entire cottage industry will spring up with ways to defeat these devices. Hackers unite.

Without making a value judgement, I will simply report that the company for which I work, bom.com, has changed its name. The new name is Arena Solutions, although I guess we'll also be going by Arena. We had to add the "Solutions" becuase some bastard is camped out on the arena.com domain.

In a unabashed display of hypocrisy, the Bush adminstration has condemned North Korea for withdrawing from a nuclear arms treaty. This from an adminstration that only recently withdrew from a nuclear arms treaty themseleves so that they could get on with the business of creating a new type of arms race. You can't get much more two-faced than this.

This cartoon by Tom Tomorrow (from September of last year) is dead-on in describing the Bush administrations efforts to engage in a war with Iraq. Now only if that pesky Colin Powell wouldn't have gotten in the way.

What do you get when you combine a motorcycle and a 500-horsepower engine taken from a Dodge Viper? Possibly, no, make that definitely, the most bad-ass motorcycle ever. It's so powerful that it requires an extra set of tires to handle all the testosterone--I mean, horsepower--coming out of the engine.

If you're wondering what to get me for my birthday, this would be a welcome addition to the garage.

I just can't help myself. I love reading about how Microsoft screws over people; its customers, its competitors, and it appears that its partners are not safe either.

It appears that fame does have some advantages. Penn, of Penn & Teller fame, found out the hard way that fame gets you no slack in the airport screening process. However, in his humorous summary of the event, it appears that fame can result in getting some satisfaction after the fact.

Here's an interesting article concerning the power, and possible rights, of corporations and how they got to where they are today.

A tongue-in-cheek article in Wired magazine pokes fun at President Bush by comparing his new "security" measures to those of Sauron from Lord of the Rings. Sort of gallows humor I guess.

The one similarity that they do not point out is that, while both appear powerful, they are really puppets for their masters. Sauron, a puppet for the power that is the ring. Bush, a puppet for Ashcroft, Rumsfield, Cheney, and the rest of his so-called advisors.