I continue to be very pleased with my Ultimate Ears headphones. Today I was listening to Will Wright talk about game design—very interesting but maddening not to see the slides—and a plane flew about 300 feet overhead on final approach to Lindbergh. I didn't miss a word.

In other news, I passed a thousand miles on the new bicycle I bought in January. Next year's goal is, I guess, two thousand miles.

Today's good news is superficially pretty technical: "Core KDE developer George Staikos recently hosted a meeting of the security developers from the leading web browsers. The aim was to come up with future plans to combat the security risks posed by phishing, ageing encryption ciphers and inconsistent SSL Certificate practise." But this is interesting not just because it may help improve internet security, and not just because it is a bit of much-needed cooperation between competitors, but also because of how open the process is becoming. You can even read a narrative of the event from the Microsoft developer's perspective.

I know that Frank and Gerv from Mozilla, George from Konqueror and Yngve and Carsten from Opera have their own thoughts for an improved certificate standard and how they would handle that in the user experience.

I wish we could promise you that you will see this experience in IE7 and its equivalent in other browsers but there are a lot of details to work out before browsers can differentiate SSL sites based on how well vetted they are. For this to work, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror, amongst others, think there should be some common validation guidelines for rigorous website identification. There is a lot of preliminary agreement but also a lot of work to do. The American Bar Association Information Security Committee is providing a forum to pursue this. You can check back with us and other browsers to see how the process moves along.

—Microsoft developer Rob Franco

It's easy for me to take this in stride, especially since I wasn't paying much attention to commercial software development processes in the seventies and eighties, but the openness and access that the internet is providing is really something out of science fiction.

Baseball has a tradition of rule continuity, and there have not been many substantive changes in the last hundred years. Some of the rules are a bit complicated, like the infield fly rule, and the rulebook isn't particularly well written, but it's pretty straightforward. It's the rules outside the white lines that are tricky:

If a player with at least five years of major-league service is traded in the middle of a multi-year contract, he has the right to demand a trade after the season. If the player so chooses, he can also identify as many as six teams to which he will not accept a trade. Notice of the trade demand must be given within the 15-day period beginning on October 15 (or the day following the last game of the World Series, whichever is later). ...

The player's club has until March 15 to trade him, and if they fail to do so, the remaining years on the player's multi-year contract are voided and he becomes a free agent. Any club signing such a player does so without regard to either the compensation requirement of the CBA (which requires draft pick compensation to clubs that lose Type A, B or C free agents) or the quota provisions (which limits the number of Type A and B free-agent signings allowed to each club in years with few free agents)....

I guess labor negotiations can have that effect.

... a rare defeat for Republican leaders as well as the White House as 22 Republicans teamed up with Democrats on Thursday to kill a major health and education spending measure. The 224-to-209 rejection of the $142.5 billion in spending on an array of social programs was the first time since the early days of the Republican takeover of the House a decade ago that the majority had come out on the losing end of such a vote. ...

In rebelling against the spending measure, Democrats and some Republicans said it fell woefully short of fulfilling federal commitments.

They pointed, for example, to $900 million in health care cuts that took a toll on the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and on rural health care. They opposed the elimination of $8 billion to prepare for a potential flu pandemic. And they pointed to a provision that would strip money from a variety of popular education programs and leave Pell Grants to college students frozen, as part of the first reduction in education spending in a decade.

—New York Times

Note that this is good news because my values are being expressed in Congress, not because "my side" won a fight.

Applying for a promotion in the Reagan administration 20 years ago, Samuel A. Alito Jr. described himself as a thoroughgoing conservative "particularly proud" of contributing to cases arguing "that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion. —New York Times

[Alito] tried to play down the importance of the 1985 job application as he met with senators, including two prominent Democrats on the Judiciary Committee.

"He said first of all it was different then," said one of the two, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. "He said, 'I was an advocate seeking a job, it was a political job and that was 1985. I'm now a judge. I've been on the circuit court for 15 years, and it's very different. I'm not an advocate; I don't give heed to my personal views. What I do is interpret the law.' "

...

"And so I asked him, 'Why shouldn't we consider the answers that you're giving today an application for another job?' " Mr. Kennedy said.
—New York Times

I've decided to feature one piece of good news every morning. Here's the first installment:

Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed a bill Tuesday meant to provide comprehensive health coverage for every uninsured child in Illinois. —Chicago Tribune

Swiss Seize Russian-Owned Art to Settle an Old Debt

By REUTERS
Published: November 16, 2005

MOSCOW, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Russian authorities alleged on Wednesday priceless artworks from a Moscow museum had been impounded in Switzerland, apparently at the request of a Swiss firm that has long claimed repayment of debts from Russia.

[...]

Noga, a trading company, has in the past caused the temporary seizure of a ship, warplanes and diplomatic property in a series of bids to secure payment of debts linked to deals for the supply of food in exchange for oil in 1991-2. It has demanded immediate payment of $63 million.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-switzerland-russia.html?hp&ex=1132203600&en=abbcfdc97099a0fa&ei=5094&partner=homepage

After all my complaints about things, I felt I should highlight a success. My Kinesis keyboard started acting funny. Actually, it has a few minor problems: the Escape key doesn't always register, and sometimes it goes into caps-lock mode when I press one of the keys in the vicinity of caps-lock. But this was a new and more serious problem: the r key went wonky. When I pressed it, I got somewhere between zero and about five r's. I cleaned it up and the problem persisted. I started to panic. I emailed their support line and got an answer in less than an hour, to try a hard reset. I did that; it didn't fix the problem, but did force me to figure out how to restore my customizations (this time I wrote it down). So I called, and they asked if it was under warrantee. "Maybe." The serial number was worn off, because I type with the keyboard in my lap, but they were able to look it up based on the purchaser, even though that wasn't me. (Thanks, Lars!) It was about 19 months old, and so still covered, so they sent me a replacement unit for the right keywell free of charge ($35 + shipping otherwise). The next day, the r key mysteriously worked fine, but the arrow keys stopped working. A hard blow to the case made that problem go away, and it's been fine since. The replacement part showed up a few days later, but until more problems crop up I won't disassemble the keyboard to use it. Still, it's a nice security blanket, and great service from Kinesis.

I also picked up some new headphones to replace the uncomfortable and defective iPod earphones. Most of my listening is in one of two situations: on my bicycle, where I listen to books on tape but only with my right ear; or on the train, where I want to drown out the cell phone conversations, redundant announcments, and snoring. I ended up at the bottom end of the in-canal products, the Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3. Ear canal headphones get put inside your ear like an earplug, and block out all of the other sound, like an earplug. The two big brands are Shure and Ultimate Ears. You can spend up to $900 on these, and if you go above $200 you have to get custom molds from an audiologist. The pair I got is $100, and they work exactly as well as I imagined. When I got them, I opened them up, read the instructions to figure out how to get them in my ears, plugged in the iPod, turned the volume way down, went out to the balcony, started the music, and got a big big grin on my face. The sound quality is excellent, both because the earphones are very high-quality and because they block out other sound. I was able to hear for the first time the electrical noise in the iPod circuits, a squealing and hissing when it's on but nothing's playing.

So far, the only problems I've found are inherent in the design:

• They get a bit uncomfortable after 30 minutes or an hour, just like earplugs do. They are more comfortable than the iPod buds, though.
• Even if you stop the music, you can't hear very well unless you remove them from your ears.
• Bumps and scrapes along the cord, such as when you turn your head, get transmitted into your ears.
• If you are walking, especially on pavement, the thud-thud of your tread is very noticable. I suspect this would be much worse for jogging, though on a bicycle they are okay.

In case you missed the diplomatic incident between fictional Kazakhstan reported Borat and the real government of Kazakhstan, and you missed the MTV Europe music awards that ignited the feud, here are some of Borat's comments:

At the press conference
"My 13-year-old son is travelling here by foot, with his two wives and his three childrens." "If he survives the journey I have promised him that he can make penetration with Colombian prostitute Shakira."

In interview with the BBC
"Unfortunately my wife was unable to leave Kazakhstan as she is a woman... this is a good news, she is a boring. High Five!!!"

To finish the show
"To the world, I love you! Apart from Uzbekistan. Assholes."

All eight Dover, Pennsylvania school board members up for re-election have been booted out after introducing intelligent design to the science classroom. In their place are a number of those who campaigned against the policy.

...

Meanwhile in Kansas, the Board of Education has voted to make the teaching of the principles of intelligent design mandatory.

In an internal memorandum, Microsoft employees were told not to use the term Dzongkha in any Microsoft software, language lists or promotional materials since "Doing so implies affiliation with the Dalai Lama, which is not acceptable to the government of China. In this instance, replace "Dzongkha" with 'Tibetan - Bhutan'."—Tibet News

This came as a surprise to Bhutanese officials who expected an official “Dzongkha” support when a UK-based company called the Orient Foundation took up the task in 1998. ... [Orient Foundation president] Mr. Coleman proposed to the then Dzongkha Development Commission that the Orient Foundation would develop the Unicode system for Dzongkha and help incorporate the Unicode into the Windows Vista. ... The government paid US$ 250,000 and, with the Orient Foundation reportedly unable to pay its share, the Swiss Development Corporation contributed US$ 175,000. The Orient Foundation eventually contributed US$ 14,000.

All the funds were paid to the Orient Foundation.

The final cost of the project was billed at about US$ 523,000. Many observers believe that the project was greatly overpriced.

—Kuensel online

So your goverment pays (through a larcenous, mercenary middleman) Microsoft to add support to your language, which will enable you to, well, to pay Microsoft for their product, and then Microsoft disrespects your culture in order to stay on China's good side. This is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me so committed to working in and with free software.

The story of Er and Onan, among others, with Lego illustrations. Warning: contains Lego nudity.