the tindog coffeehouse

No work today. I’m escorting Megan’s 1st Grade class to the Fort Worth Zoo. Should be absolutely perfect weather.

Megan said she was most looking forward to seeing the horses. (‘Cause, y’know, she never sees horses anywhere else.)

Hopefully the animals will be a little more excited to see us than they were the last time I was there. Hurry! Get this lion a double espresso!

I got a notice in the mail last week from Allstate showing my car insurance was going up almost $40 a month starting in June even though Christy and I both have clean driving records. That didn’t make any sense …until now:

Allstate Insurance agreed Monday to refund $51.6 million to its Texas customers for overcharges in homeowners insurance….

Are my increased car insurance rates helping fund Allstate’s refund to homeowners insurance customers?!

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.

Continue reading…

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…