Nathan's Occasional Blog

“The officers had no way of knowing the suspect was deaf and mute and the suspect apparently was unable to communicate that to the officers,” one supervisor wrote in a review. “The suspect could have avoided this confrontation by remaining calm and still.”

So the police expect disabled people to start wearing shirts that say “don’t shoot – I’m deaf” or “…I’ve got a learning disability” or …. 

Way to go Seattle PD, this was obviously the fault of the individual.  Can you imagine being in a silent world, one you already have trouble coping with, waiting to go to work, and when you turn around there’s an angry woman pointing a gun at you?  Yeah he shouldn’t have run – but I can understand why he did.

At least they had the decency not to press charges. 

Source: Taser use on deaf man defended

Let me guess … now they’re going to ban shoes on airplanes?

The government’s new order that all airline passengers put their shoes through X-ray machines won’t help screeners find a liquid or gel that can be used as a bomb.

The machines are unable to detect explosives, according to a Homeland Security report on aviation screening recently obtained by The Associated Press.

Source: X-rays won’t detect liquid or gel bombs – Yahoo! News

Belkin looks to be coming out with some new surge protector designs that let you plug in big bricks and lots of other things easily.  But what’s catching my eye is the “concealed’ model that looks to have the outlets on the inside of the unit.  Very cool for those who are trying to protect youngin’s!

Link to Belkin releases Compact, Concealed, and Clamp-On Surge Protectors – Engadget

I’ll have to go get some of these for Kaitlyn.  You know, to keep her important Lego creation designs and pictures of animal crackers.  🙂

Link to Kingston launches Mini Fun flash drives – Engadget

I just came across a new interface for testing your online bandwidth that lets you store previous results … COOL!  Check out www.speedtest.net.  It’s in “beta” (aren’t we all?).  Found via CNet.

I guess Dell is tired of the bad press around all of their exploding batteries.  Good call guys, good call.  Of course, one could argue that you shouldn’t have waited for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to make you do it…

Link to Dell to recall 4.1M laptop batteries – Yahoo! News

As I mentioned last night, Windows Live Writer is a sweet little application.  There are some great screenshots of the tool in action here and here, and one feature that really caught my eye was the ability to put in categories and other details in a pane at the bottom of the page, and select categories in the upper-right portion of the window (above the sidebar).  I don’t see that, and I’m guessing that’s because I’m using Blogger.

I’ve seen a lot out there about WordPress.  I’ve tried MSN Spaces.  Then there’s Movable Type, TypePad, etc.  I’d like something flexible, free, and a package I can continue using my own domain name for.  It seems maybe I’m outgrowing Blogger?

What do you guys think?  Any recommendations?  There are a lot of great themes for WordPress so I’m leaning that direction.  Just stumbled across a comparison table of features for the major players … will have to dive in.

OH – check the comments from my post last night and you’ll see Joe Cheng replied to my post this morning.  SWEET!  Glad to be in the feedback loop Joe.  I linked to his blog and noticed he and his wife dig the Nikon DSLR cameras.  Alicea and I are thinking about getting a DSLR too.  I love the online community!  Subscribed!

Joe I’ve got another bit of feedback for you:  Why can’t I select text in the title space of the blog with my mouse?  This is in the Web Layout view.  I have to use the shift key and arrows.  Seems like a bug to me.  It works, btw, in Normal view.  I’d also like to CTRL+ENTER to post just like I can in Outlook (to send).

Brilliant post by Sean Alexander today about how FRIGGING INSANE some packaging is these days for what we buy on retail store shelves.  I can’t tell you how many sliced fingers I’ve had/seen because of stupid hard plastic packaging that is darn near impossible to open.

I was just talking about it with one of my coworkers and we both agree that when someone starts this class action suit we’re totally onboard.  Here that Kristin?  🙂

I think action #1 isn’t half bad either.  If the retailers want this packaging as a deterrent to theft then they should remove it upon lawful purchase. 

My buddy Bryce said to that, “I like having the store personnel remove the packaging for me.  Unfortunately the minimum wage slaves will have little.”

My counter is this … but if we all get their minimum wage hours chewed up removing stupid packaging, someone will take notice when the scanned items per hour plummets.  THINK BIG!

Link to Addicted to Digital Media – Packaging Hell – Time to Rise Up!

Wow – a company that understands the new medium of marketing.  Very cool to see. My bet is that they’re going to get a lot of good feedback from their target market.  I have a feeling we’re seeing one of the first commercial uses of Second Life as applied to the real world … a collaboration between a company and its clients to create the ideal product

Starwood Hotels & Resorts is launching its new Aloft Hotel in the virtual land of Second Life in September, months before the chain of hotels opens in real life.

Source: Images: First hotel for ‘Second Life’ | CNET News.com

This is a posting from the new Windows Live Writer.  It’s a WYSIWYG blogging editor from Microsoft.  Pretty nifty UI so far … though I’ve only been using it for about 5 minutes.  It will interface with MSN Windows Live Spaces and most of the other popular blogging tools (I use Blogger).

You can check out the dev team’s blog Writer Zone to stay up to date on what’s going on with the package.

 Here’s my first impressions:

1. Great job MS on coming out with a blogging tool … especially one that supports other platforms. 
2. Why isn’t “blogging” in your dictionary for spell checking?
3. Dude – I can copy and paste a picture into a posting!  ROCK ON!
4. Drop shadow effect on images – sweet.
5. Back to the spell checking – why not use the same Word engine that can “inline” check spelling (wrongly spelled word gets a squiggly red line under it)?
6. How do I get more plugins?  When I click the link for More about plugins… in the preferences window I get pointed to a URL that doesn’t work.  At least put a “coming soon” page up.  Right now I get a 404 error from IIS.
7. Can I set the “open in new window” and “rel:nofollow” options in the link dialog to be default for all links?
8. I see you just added a “Blog it” button to my Windows Live Toolbar in IE7b3.  Great idea – but how about you tell me you’re changing things in other programs?

I’m sure there’s more to come, but as of right now I think I just dumped BlogJet.  I still have w.Bloggar around to change my template though.