Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence

From ABC News:

Vice President Dick Cheney has asserted his office is not a part of the executive branch of the U.S. government, and therefore not bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information by government agencies

Excuse my while I mop up the sake that I sputtered all over my keyboard…
UPDATE: There was an excellent question raised in the comment thread:

If Cheney is not under the Executive Branch, can he still claim “executive priviledge” when he doesn’t want to testify before Congress?

Hitchens' interview

Excellent interview with Christopher Hitchens on BBC Radio Five… unusually intelligent questions for a radio show. (14.6MB MP3, 36 min.) Here’s Hitch on the metaphor of the shepherd and his sheep:

… and I have to remember why you people call yourselves a flock. Be like a sheep yourself if you must, but please leave me out of it. I’m not a sheep and I don’t need a shepherd and what shepherds do when they’re not actually messing around with their sheep is they’re keeping them around and alive so they can be fleeced and then killed.

Personally I never understood the appeal of the “Lamb of God” idea, except as a ghastly homage to the gruesome practice of animal sacrifice. Ughh!

Half full or half empty at the W3C?

Tim drew my attention to the Web of Services for Enterprise Computing Workshop Report that was recently published by the W3C. As he put it, “I thought the pungent smells of failure on one side and optimism on the other mixed oddly, but still worth reading.”
Setting the scene:

The discussion at the workshop tended to revolve around two main streams of thought, which are not as well coordinated as they could or should be. One is that existing Web technologies can be adapted for enterprise use. In this stream of discussion it was proposed that additional standardization is not required, but this view did not garner widespread support.
While post-Web businesses such as Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Google, and others have successfully adapted Web technologies for enterprise usage patterns, they appear to have done so using a lot of custom code and minimal off the shelf software or standards-based approaches to integration.

To which I guess the obvious replies are, “Yes”, “They would say that, wouldn’t they” and “Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from this.” And reading the following passage is like getting a rheumatic twinge in an old sports injury:

At the Web Services workshop in 2001, the approach of having a stack of solutions was appealing and we decided to spin up lots of groups to build these specifications. We were to build a foundation of protocols that work within the context of the Web, with the goal of making lots of things talk to lots of other things. In addition, we wanted to create a system to support dynamic composability to meet problems as these arose and to build the corresponding tooling to make all this happen. After six years, we are half way through the spec stack, and interoperability has remained elusive.

Sigh…

Travelling, travelling

I have an interesting trip coming up this week. On Friday I’ll fly from Seattle to Toronto, and thence to Dublin. I’ll be working at Amazon.com‘s Dublin facility from the 25th to the 28th, and on the 29th I’ll fly to Edinburgh. I’ll spend July 2nd and 3rd at the Amazon development centre in South Queensferry (where hopefully the weather will be better than my last visit!). Then on the Fourth of July, I’ll drive down from South Queensferry to Oxford, where I’ll spend a few days visiting my mother. ((Hopefully I’ll get to see Alec – and perhaps Jeff.)) And on the following Sunday I’ll brave the horrors of Heathrow and fly back to Seattle.
I’ll be flying on three different airlines:

  • Air Canada for SEA-YYZ-DUB. This will be my first trip on AC, and also the first time in six years since I’ve flown across the Atlantic in something as small as a 767.
  • Aer Lingus for DUB-EDI, I have fond memories of EI. My very first flight was LHR-DUB in an Aer Lingus Viscount, back in 1960. (We were going on holiday to a farm in Donegal, and my mother took it into her head to fly to Dublin and drive up to Fanad.) And then on July 9, 1998 I flew DUB-BOS in an EI A330; for some reason I got upgraded, and it was possibly the best transatlantic flying experience I’ve ever had.
  • British Airways for LHR-SEA. What can I say? When they’re good, they can be great… but in recent years that’s been the exception rather than the rule. At least it’s a direct flight.

Hitting rock bottom on low expectations…

Arianna Huffington previews the Bush administration’s assessment of the “surge”. She quotes Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq:

“It’s definitely not by any means a universally negative picture.” Translation: Don’t believe the facts, believe us!
You know the soft bigotry of the Bush administration’s low expectations for Iraq has finally hit bottom when “Hey, we’re doing slightly better than universally negative!” has become the rallying cry.

The phenomenon continues

Indianapolis: Another Grand Prix, another pole position, another victory for Hamilton. Simply amazing. And another “I must be dreaming” story: teenager Sebastian Vettel, standing in for Robert Kubica after his crash last week, brings the BMW Sauber home in 8th place and scores a championship point in his first GP. ((However it seems that Kubica will be fit for the French GP in two weeks time, so this may be Vettel’s only appearance in 2007.))
At the end of last season, people were wringing their hands and worrying about what would happen to F1 after Michael Schumacher’s retirement. The answer seems to be, “the best bloody F1 season in ages!!!”

I'm glad I don't have to try to make sense of this

Here’s some local News that Chris may be interested in:

Shortly after noon on Fridays, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding ties on a black headscarf, preparing to pray with her Muslim group on First Hill.
On Sunday mornings, Redding puts on the white collar of an Episcopal priest.
She does both, she says, because she’s Christian and Muslim.
Redding, who until recently was director of faith formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, has been a priest for more than 20 years. Now she’s ready to tell people that, for the last 15 months, she’s also been a Muslim — drawn to the faith after an introduction to Islamic prayers left her profoundly moved.

Patio

One of the cool features of my apartment in Seattle is that it has a good sized patio, running the full width of the apartment.
Patio without furniture
With all of the hassle of moving in and dealing with IKEA boxes, I put off my plans for the patio… and when winter arrived I decided to wait for spring. Well, spring is just about to give way to summer, so it’s past time for action. Last time I was back in Brookline, I saw the patio furniture which Merry had got for the condo, and I liked the style. I sat in the chairs, pronounced them comfortable, ((It’s hard to find chairs that provide adequate thigh support; most seem to have really short seats.)) and ordered a set (four chairs, one table) for myself. They finally arrived yesterday.
Patio furniture
Of course the apartment is just across the street from Amazon’s US1 and US2 buildings, so with a bit of luck I can schedule some of my late afternoon meetings on my patio. Accompanied by a nice pinot grigio, perhaps – or a pitcher of sangria…? But first I need a stiff broom and some hot water, to clean up after the seagulls!