Entering the world of 140 characters

I just joined Twitter, something I had sworn never to do.  Capper, this is all your fault.

@R3dacted, for those of you who care.

And no, the "abuse of Twitter" label is not a mistake, because I foresee Twitter becoming an easy outlet for the font of pithy one-liners in my head.

"America's Toughest Sheriff" has a problem

Looking at you, Joe Arpaio.

Authorities in Arizona have arrested three employees of a sheriff's office known for its tough stand on illegal immigration, accusing them of aiding human traffickers and drug smugglers.

Methinks Sheriff Joe has some 'splaining to do, as to exactly how his deputies were so deeply involved in cartel operations

Ad Agency Gaffe of the Century

First Prize: Placing a United Airlines ad reading "You're going to like where we land" at Ground Zero.

The stupid.  It burns.

"We are taking immediate steps to remove them and apologize for the error," a United spokesman said.

I should certainly hope so.

Well, that explains it

Arnold Schwarzenegger had a child out of wedlock.  Suddenly his separation from Maria Shriver right after their 25th anniversary makes a lot more sense.

Not a bright idea

Planting a bomb in Dublin right before the Queen visits - really stupid move.  I'm pretty sure if the thing had gone off anywhere in the vicinity of Her Majesty, the RAF would be carpet bombing the Emerald Isle as we speak.

If you want the Brits to go away, and I'm not unsympathetic to the complaints of the Irish (even though the awful history of the IRA hasn't done them any favors), I'm quite certain that attempting to assassinate the monarch isn't going to make your case stronger.

Blogger issues and other travails of networked life

That total outage late last week was frustrating.  And there've been ancillary effects too!  Specifically, random junk symbols got inserted into the labels of my posts from Thursday (the day of the outage), and my attempt to edit those bits of text out and restore legible labels has resulted in those posts being put up again with today as their publication date.

I noticed on Thursday that YouTube was having issues as well.  Are there broader problems for Google?

I only ask because I and every other Playstation owner in North America finally regained access to the Playstation Network for the first time since the attack by hackers on April 20.

And just in case someone from "hacktivist" group Anonymous happens to read this, a word of advice: Massively inconveniencing people and engaging in perhaps the most enormous act of identity theft in history are not ways to get people on your side, or draw positive attention to any cause.  They are, on the other hand, and excellent way to draw the ire of the cyber-crime folks at the Secret Service and the FBI and, eventually, a lengthy time-out in the federal slammer.*  Don't like that Sony sues people for going on Sony's proprietary Network with hacked software?  Write a letter.

There are times when I loathe the 21st Century.

*The Office Space description of federal prison still cracks me up.