More news from here, 6-15-06

• Bloglines is having issues right now. It's kind of surprising how quickly you come to depend on a service like that being available all the time. My precious RSS feeds are nowhere to be seen. Even this blog's mini-sibling, cyclotram2, is unavailable right now. Last time Blogger was down, I popped over to the other blog and whined about it. So I figure it's only fair to do the same thing now that the reverse situation's occurred. Once the thing comes back up, I think I'll need to use Bloglines' "export as OPML" feature just so I'll have an offline backup around somewhere.
  
• I've gotten a lot of search hits in the last couple of days because of a brief reference (towards the end of the post) to a Portuguese celebrity named Merche Romero. I'm not sure why. But she does figure in this juicy British tabloid story. I don't actually care about any of this stuff even a tiny bit, but it seems to be driving page views at the moment, so I may as well milk it while I can. I guess I'm just cynical that way. Here's a photo of Ms. Romero, if you're curious. Probably safe for work.
  
• Our Glorious Leader has done an unusual thing, bestowing national monument status on a huge, uninhabited chunk of the Hawaiian Islands. It's one of those things presidents are allowed to do by unilateral executive order, without consulting Congress (which may explain his attraction to the idea). It's worth noting that the R's freaked out when Clinton used this power to create vastly smaller monuments out of unhabited chunks of southwestern desert. But as usual it's ok when Bush does it.
  
• Yet another testimonial about why Windows Mobile / PocketPC / Windows CE is teh sux0r. I've had three or four WinCE PDAs dumped on me over the years, by vendors who I guess hoped I'd write some useful code for 'em. I got them all for free, and I still felt I overpaid. They were all useless junk, not worth the rather generous amounts of electricity I lavished on keeping them charged up. The hardware itself is often pretty impressive, but then they stick this nightmarish botch of an OS on top, and the result is always so slow it's practically unusable. It's a sad fact about the tech industry that while Moore's Law gives a fairly good idea of how quickly processor power is likely to increase, there's no equivalent law that places an upper bound on the speed of software bloat. The more money you've got to play with, the faster it happens, and MS has a lot of money.
  
• Now that Zarqawi's out of the picture, Congress is finally going to have a "debate" about Iraq. Well, it's actually just a political stunt, like everything else they do anymore. They may complain a lot about Bush usurping their authority with his "signing statements", but their actions suggest they've accepted their new role as a toothless debating society with barely a whimper. I can understand their feelings of relief -- knowing that nothing you do or say matters really takes the pressure off. We already know the end result of this pointless debate: This time it's Congress's turn to haul up the big "Mission Accomplished" sign, and it's bound to work out just as well now as it did the first time around.
  
• A NewScientist article about Neptune's family of Trojan asteroids. Only four have actually been found so far, but researchers are estimating there must be a huge number of them out there. More info plus images here.
  
• This was probably accidental, but a brand new form of graffiti has been invented. Check out this pic from Google Maps. This area is a fenced-off former industrial site south of downtown Portland, and in all likelihood nobody would've ever seen this if it wasn't for the magic of Google. So I'd just like to say hello and congratulations to the mysterious "GPK". You're way more famous than any of those small-timers who go around tagging dumpsters and abandoned buildings. If Google can see this, the aliens probably can too. Someday maybe they'll probably up at your door looking for an autograph, or maybe a tissue sample, or whatever it is they do.
  
• Two referrer pages from folks Blogger sent my way when I posted this baby: Walaykinha and Dysdiadokinesis & Mosaicism. FWIW.