the tindog coffeehouse

I mentioned back in April that I’m busy writing my first (and hopefully not my last) novel. Well, I figure I’m about 25% of the way there. That’s a pretty big milestone for me. I know I’ve got a long way to go, but I’m far enough into it that I can look back and be encouraged by my progress.

I’m excited about what I’ve written so far. It’s been really fun and really, really hard. Much harder than I imagined. I’ve written short stories before, even longish short stories, but never something of this magnitude and complexity. I’m not sure exactly how it’ll be received when it’s all said and done, but I think I’m personally going to be very satisfied.

I don’t want to go into details just yet about the plot, but I will say that it involves a young boy from the South, his African-American companion, and the Mississippi River. OK, just kiddin’ about that one.

Yesterday marked the 5th anniversary of President Bush’s ill-executed “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and of course the anti-Bush/anti-Iraq press were very quick to use it as another opportunity to label Iraq (and Bush) as a failure.

For all the polls and statistics, though, something occurred to me as I was driving home from work yesterday. Where have all the patriotic “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbon magnets gone? It used to be not so long ago that maybe every fourth or fifth car you saw had some variant of these magnets on them, either the traditional yellow variety or maybe the red, white, and blue version, perhaps even a camouflage version. There were also a lot patriotic bumper stickers or other stickers on car windows. Today? Very few.

Yesterday I began watching other cars (in addition to watching the road), looking for a patriotic sticker or magnet on the back of cars. Out of the maybe couple thousand cars I saw during my hour-plus drive home, I saw two cars with a “Support Our Troops” magnet. Two.

Now, I know that’s nowhere near a scientific survey, and that’s not to say that a driver without a patriotic sticker isn’t patriotic. (Full disclosure: My car’s only external decoration is a UT Longhorns emblem.) But I can tell you for a fact that the number of patriotic magnets a year ago was way higher.

So what’s the deal? Are people really expressing their frustration and exhaustion with the war? Are we, in fact, as “bitter” as Barack Obama says we are? Or has the obnoxious car magnet fad just played itself out, as the Livestong bracelets did and as Crocs will surely do? I don’t know. But I should also point out that I also didn’t see any political bumper stickers during the same trek home, which seems odd being a presidential election year. Maybe that fad has played itself out, too.

First, the tech blogs started reporting that Microsoft has been giving law enforcement officials special USB flash drives to help decrypt suspects’ hard drives and extract information such as network activity from the machines. The program is called COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor).

Then the next day I pulled up the Microsoft homepage, and this appeared:

Coincidence or inside joke? Discuss while I run down to Starbucks…