Category: Miscellaneous

Less than two weeks have passed since Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza strip and the Islamic terrorist faction known as Hamas has launched rocket attacks against Israel. Although I can’t say I never expected there would be attacks from the Palestinian controlled Gaza – there always have been, it just surprises me how quickly the terrorists are back at it again.

In a retaliatory response Israel launched air strikes early Sunday morning and gathered troops outside of Gaza.

I have a strong suspicion that this is exactly why the Sharon Government wanted to leave Gaza. Now that Gaza is somewhat autonomous Israel can make good on its promise to take a more serious stance.

(From the New York Times):

“Hamas and other Palestinian factions have fired hundreds of rockets from northern Gaza in recent years, prompting periodic Israeli military incursions. The Israeli troops usually pulled back after a few days, and the rocket fire would subsequently resume.

But Israel has warned for months that if the rocket fire continued after its withdrawal from Gaza, it was prepared to hit back much harder than it had in the past.”

Hamas’s claim for launching its attack came after a truck carrying rockets exploded killing 15 Palestinians and wounding more than 80. The say the blast was caused by an Israeli attack.

[Both t]he Palestinian Authority and Israel said the blast was caused by Hamas explosives that went off accidentally, and they dismissed Hamas’s allegation that an Israeli airstrike caused the explosion.

The Palestinian Interior Ministry said Hamas should take responsibility for the blast “instead of making accusations against others.”

I think it’s important to note that it’s the terrorist causing the trouble, not the Palestinian Authority.

I also wanted to note that the Times article makes me even more hopeful for the Palestinian people because of the comment by Mahmoud Abbas, a Palestinian leader, who said, “We must stop parading our weapons and stop using guns among the people.”

Clearly he see what is wrong with parading Ak-47’s in the street and wants to try and make them a more civilized people.

I hope this so called “war on terror” sorts itself out. I wish people could just get along.

I just finished up another vector illustration this morning. I tried something new by adding more blur on the background layers of the image as they go further away from the viewer. I like the effect, but I wonder if it’s too distracting?

I’ve been doing some New Media work / art lately, mostly in Photoshop, and recently I discovered some very handy cheat sheets that have great shortcuts and reminders for:

• Photoshop CS2
• Dreamweaver MX
• CSS
• PHP
• Adobe Illustrator CS2
• MySQL
• mod_rewrite
• .htaccess
• Hex Color
• Javascript

The psychologist Carl Jung introduced the term introvert to describe a person whose motives and actions are directed inward. Introverts tend to be preoccupied with their own thoughts and feelings and minimize their contact with other people.

I’m not sure it’s a black & white situation where either you are or are not an introvert, but I did enjoy reading Caring for Your Introvert. I can’t help but relate this back to why things didn’t work out, and maybe the article offers some clues about why I am the way I am.

Even if I am a bit of an introvert – I try to fight it. (Not very well considering it’s Friday night and I’m not at “Ice” or “The Corn Maze” – two places I was invited to go tonight.)

Interesting Wikipedia article on Godwin’s Law.

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

Apparently Google has come up with a way to use the power of “crowd wisdom” to predict market events of importance to Google within the company. Amazing stuff.

The markets were designed to forecast product launch dates, new office openings, and many other things of strategic importance to Google. So far, more than a thousand Googlers have bid on 146 events in 43 different subject areas (no payment is required to play).

I found a link at Sourceforge that appears to be a similar (or the identical?) program.

Take pictures; win awards!

I’m entering this image I took last March (on my birthday) into the People / Portraits category of the Everyman Photo Contest.

A summary of all the myths busted and confirmed by the MythBusters.

Update: That link doesn’t seem to work anymore. Try this one: http://mythbustersresults.com/

Well I feel at ease posting a link to this Not-To-Do list because I’ve spent the morning working on a project. But truth be told, I probably did more than a couple of these things that may have distracted me momentarily. At least my (now empty) garbage doesn’t smell!

If you ever have to walk the plank, you might want to use some of the swimming tips here. Many of the concepts I’ve learned over the years swimming at the University, but it’s a nice refresher to see them printed here.