What made me sad was coming back from vacation, turning on my home computer, and discovering all the browser tabs left open from my vacation planning process. All the flight tracking pages, the restaurant reviews, the hotel booking information and the maps to dungeon locations. That last one is probably pretty specific to my vacation planning, but you get the general idea. It’s like a little window in time back to the day before I traveled, when everything was exciting and waiting to unfold. Now there’s just a pile of dirty laundry and a groove worn in my credit card’s magnetic strip.
As you can probably guess from that introduction, I’m back in Seattle. The vacation was great but work now awaits. I’ve got some interesting photographs to share, as well as a couple of short videos. They’ll appear in posts later this week, when I’ve had chance to sort through them.
In the meantime, I’ll temporarily change direction, and point to a short news story that bemused me on the plane on the way home. US public officials often get criticized (quite rightly) for saying stupid things. The British are apparently seeing this as a competition and appear determined to out-stupid them. In this case by suggesting that conventional internet pornography sites are a key routes to child abuse images. And that the solution for this is for search engines to force users to register as 18 before allowing them to adjust their search settings from ‘disney’ mode to ‘normal internet’. It’s quite hard to sum up just how much stupidity gets crammed into this single article. The British official manages to get the problem wrong, the solution wrong and screw over normal internet users all at the same time.
What blows my mind is that the moron in question – John Carr – is a government adviser. He’s not some idiot politician elected to a safe seat. This is someone paid by the quality of their advice. It’s how he earns his living. Truly amazing.
No doubt Divine Bitches would be a site high on his list of ‘gateway’ sites. However, I’m not lose to much sleep over linking to both it and excellent images like this one.
I found this image via the Felm Cyber tumblr.