Dispatch

TNT.  It is explosive stuff.  It’s also the name of the courier that has lost a CD with information on approximately one million UK citizens.  If I’m not wrong, they were associated with several breaches in the past year as well.  For a courier company, they sure appear in the news a lot over losing packages.  One wonders how they’re still in business?  I mean,

Not just the editorials… but front page, sports, business, metro… all a soggy mess. All hung out to dry. It may not dry out until Monday.   It was in it’s bag. The bag was full of water.   What a storm. It’s a good thing the Columbus Dispatch has an online version.

Surviving the islandDispatch Online, South Africa - 25 minutes agoTo top it off, the folks at PCF are set on recruiting me into WoW (World of Warcraft) and I am pretty certain they’ll succeed eventually. … Written by Google Inc. and Powered by WordPress

Disney pulls plug on virtual worldSt. Louis Post-Dispatch,  United States - 24 minutes agoIn them, large numbers of players — the current king is World of Warcraft, with more than 10 million subscribers — gather in virtual worlds to adventure and … Written by Google Inc. and Powered by WordPress

Before anyone asks, “Haz-Mat” is short for “Hazardous Materials.” This means anything from radioactive waste to enriched uranium cores used to make atomic bombs. One must wear a Haz-Mat suit to work with such deadly substances, much like my colleague in theoretical physics Dr. Gordon Freeman did in Half-Life and Half-Life 2. And it [...]

Since there's no one left in real life who wants to listen to me whine, I thought I'd tell you guys that I'm sick. Wah. I did have to rise from my death bed in order to purchase requisite Easter Bunny stuff, and the skank-girly ringing up my purchases says, "Oh, getting things for the grandbabies?" Bitch. OK, I look pretty rough today. But, still... *examines self more closely in mirror, make hair coloring appointment* It's happened to me before when I was with Busy D., but without kids, this was a first. In what I guess was an attempt to recover, she proceeded to get out the latest US magazine with J-Lo's twins and describe every picture in the story to me while she repeatedly insisted, "There's no way those pictures could be 'real'." I thought for sure I was on Candid Camera, b

In this installment of The Doom Dispatch, Dr. Royce sacrifices his St. Patrick's Day to suffer through ABC's Dancing with the Stars, then offers up eight amusing ways to make the show watchable.

Dispatch: Zimbabwe - Live at Madison Square Garden (Blu-ray)By Dispatch Buy new: $19.95 First tagged “ps3″ by K. Overholt Customer tags: playstation 3, high definition, ps3, blu-ray (more…) Technorati Tags: playstation 3, high definition, ps3, blu-ray

Mainstream object-oriented languages, such as C++and Java1, provide only a restricted form of polymor-phic methods, namely uni-receiver dispatch. In com-mon programming situations, developers must workaround this limitation. We describe how to extend theJava Virtual Machine to support multi-dispatch and ex-amine the complications that Java imposes on multi-dispatch in practice. Our technique avoids changes tothe Java programming language itself, maintains sourcecode and library compatibility, and isolates the perfor-mance penalty and semantic changes of multi-methoddispatch to the program sections which use it. We havemicro-benchmark and application-level performance re-sults for a dynamic Most Specific Applicable (MSA)dispatcher, a framework-based Single Receiver Projec-tions (SRP) dispatcher, and a tuned SRP dispatcher. Ourgeneral-purpose technique provides smaller dispatch la-tency than programmer-written double-dispatch codewith equivalent functionality.1 IntroductionObject-oriente

Elvis Presley established himself as an American musical icon with hits such as “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock.” Davison client Joe Milliker is hoping for his own hit with a phone designed to resemble Elvis. Read Greg Edwards’ article on “The King” telephone, published yesterday in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.view article

Our excursion for Tuesday took us to Genoa, which has had several "golden ages" in its long history. It was a shipping town, a banking town and of course the home of Christopher Columbus. Today it has more than 600,000 residents -- and more than 100,000 motor scooters! We saw large parking lots filled with nothing but scooters. Our bus driver told us that he, like many local residents, doesn't own a car -- just a scooter.One of the highlights of Genoa was a walk down the Via Garibaldi, a street of palazzi, or mansions, dating to the 1500s.

On Oct. 18th, the transportation convoy of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was attacked by two suicide bombers in Karachi, killing nearly 140 people and marking the assault as the bloodiest of its kind in the history of the country.  In the aftermath of the bombings, the world's second most populated city (over 12 million and counting) has found itself centered in the global media spotlight due to the return of the popular Bhutto.  Ms. Bhutto has returned to Pakistan after years of self-imposed exile due to corruption allegations during two different terms and administrations in the late '80s and early 90s to discuss a possible power-sharing agreement with Pakistan's current leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.  Rant/Rave interviewed Diwal Sachanand, a resident of Karachi and an agricultural landlord in the Sindh province, in order to share the perspective of a native Karachiite.   Mr. Sachanand is a member of a prominent Hindu family in the area wi

This past Friday me and a friend of mine joined some 20,000 plus college kids to watch history being made as Dispatch, my all time favorite band during my university days, became the first unsigned band to ever sell out Madison Square Garden. And they did it for three nights! (Rolling Stone put this into perspective best by pointing out that next weeks White Stripes concert isn’t even sold out yet.)But seating capacity wasn’t the only reason this concert was important. It was the first time in three years that the Boston based jam band, made up of Braddigan (whose solo work is amazing), Chad Urmstom, and Peter Heimbold, have played a concert together and all of the proceeds are being donated to help Zimbabwe, a country plaqued by aids and hunger. Between sets, imagery ran on the big screen displaying graphic images and facts such as the shockingly low average life span.To drive the point home even further, the three piece band was joined on stage for the song “Out Loud,” by an

Day one.  We arrived 7am on our overnight flight from Denver.  The arrivals area in the gleaming Munich airport was almost empty, and exiting customs was a breeze.   We wandered over to the SBahn station to catch the S8 into town.  I couldn’t figure out the ticket machine, so we just bought something for 8 Euro - which I read was the fare amount to the city center.   40 minutes later we arrived at the Hauptbahnhof (main train station), and found our small hotel on the pedestrian street of Schutzenstrasse. After stashing our bags we had coffee on the outdoor mall, and ambled down to Karlzplatz and then Marienplatz, in the city center.  Being 9am the delivery trucks outnumbered the tourists in the most popular area of Munich.  Fancy clothing and jewelry stores crammed in the spaces between the old churches and buildings.  I immediately noticed the number of bikes darting all over.  I had no idea Munich was such a big cycling town, and seeing so many dedicated bike lanes

I was sitting in my work cubicle, three years into my my first post-college job, when one of my good friends sent me the email below. I can remember my blood boiling with envy and jealousy as I read it. I don’t have a record of my response, however I’m sure it was something to the effect of “just you wait, I’ll get my chance to travel and then I’ll be the one sending you such messages!” —– Original Message —- From: A Friend To: Dave Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2002 11:39:30 AM Subject: Vietnam….. hey mr wannabe world traveler! whats up? At the moment, I’m held up in an Internet cafe in the middle of Vietnam waiting out a f*cking monsoon storm. Hopefully it will pass in the next 20 minutes but you never know! Anyway, I have been traveling and thinking about how much you would LOVE S.E. Asia! Everything that backpacking in Europe USED to be, still exists here in S.E. Asia. The backpacking culture is MUCH MORE pronounced an

I ran across this letter to the editor yesterday:Hold senators to fire regarding Iraq voteOn March 27, the U.S. Senate voted 50 to 48 for a nonbinding resolution supporting a pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq by this time next year.Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Vietnam veteran and staunch conservative, was the only Republican to support the measure. In explaining his vote, he argued "Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. It doesn't belong to the United States. Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost." Wise words. If George Bush's disastrous misadventure in Iraq continues through the November 2008 elections, the Republican senators who failed to follow Hagel's lead should be held accountable. Iraq doesn't belong to the U.S. It's time to bring our troops home.Maurice IssermanClintonFrom The Observer-DispatchIf you have written or seen a letter to the editor about Chuck Hagel I'd love to hear about it.

This is an excellent first hand account direct from another blogger in Baghdad of dealing with our troops. It is from Omar Fadhil a blogger for "Iraq The Model" that I have had linked to from almost day one of this blog. He makes some very good points about dealing with people in general and American soldiers in particular. It is a good read. Major hat tip to Omar. ~RJH Iraq the Model article link Pajamas media article link Baghdad Dispatch: Midnight Company“I often find myself in arguments with people about the behavior of American soldiers when they search homes. Many of the people I talk to base their argument and negative impression on the footage of some raids we see on TV or on experiences of presumed relatives or friends. When I try to counter the idea that ‘they knock down doors unnecessarily, steal jewelry and treat people bad’ by saying that there must be a good reason why the troops sometimes act rough and that ‘for every reaction there must have been an acti

I used to have a separate blog called Mattress Police Dispatches where I would post short random thoughts. I stopped posting to it because I was running low on material, but now I'm finding my list of possible topics for my main blog cluttered with random ideas that can't possibly be stretched into a full post. As a result, lately I've been clumping three or four of these vaguely related notions into a single semi-coherent post. Perhaps you've noticed?Now my idea list is starting to resemble my sock drawer just before laundry day. It's not that any of the socks are bad, per se. But what are you going to do with five socks, the only matching pair of which apparently once belonged to a guy named Noel who loved candy canes? I'll tell you what: You stitch them together to make a beautiful scarf that you wear boldly to distract people from the fungus factory you've got going in your sneakers. I now present to you the blogging equivalent of a sock-scarf:I think cats must use

There is one place you do not want to end up, and that is a medium security prison. From what I've heard, minimum security prisons are pretty posh, and you can potentially meet some pretty important people, like Michael Milken or Martha Stewart. Maximum security prisons at least carry a certain bad boy cachet. But nobody wants to read a book by someone who crashed a stolen minivan and ended up doing six years at Podunk Medium Security Facility. Medium security prisons are for people who either aren't very motivated or don't have enough of a life to bother escaping. I think we can dispense with the barbed wire. No way these guys are going to scale a ten foot wall.Today's Dispatch: If you're considering a career in crime and you're not smart enough to go white-collar, make sure you swing for the fences.This one's a real problem case. Lock 'em up in humor-blogs.com and throw away the key.

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It's quite early for vacationers here in Idaho, 6:08 am.  I suppose I'm still on my CST internal clock, as I'm usually awake if not up by this time.  So far I haven't seen much in the way of news.  I heard about the $67.1B local telephone merger.  I'd be interested in knowing what the actual benefit to consumers was 1, 3, and 5 years after super-mergers.  The pat response is to say that mergers will allow for better customer service, lower prices, and benefits to the consumer.  But who has measured that?  Has anyone followed up on any of these promises?  Watched a little bit of the Oscars.  Glad to see "Crash" took top honors.  A meaningful conversation about race is one of the top 5 on this nation's to do list.  However, as long as it is led by polarizers, apologizers, and talking heads the conversation will never occur.  Instead we'll get what we h

Dispatch from Haparanda Thats in Sweden you know. Im here for a night, before crossing over to Finland, the tenth and probably final country on this trip tomorrow. Today was a travel day, and by day I mean 19 hours... It started last night with a train trip from Stockholm C to Luleå C, on the Connex rail line. There are several different rail companies in Sweden, sort of like the US pre Amtrak. It also means that the trains are rather slow, and quite old and outmoded. I don't figure that this train went any faster than the usual Amtrak ride. Luleå is the closest to Finland you can get on the train... to get to the Haparanda/Tornio border with Finland, you have to take a bus... it takes about two hours, and was quite crowded. I got into town at about three, and fortunately, small town Sweden is rather compact... only five minutes to get me to the Youth Hostel, which was full. However, I did find a boarding house nearby where I have my own room with TV for less than a dorm bed at the