Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Feeling Cheery? Have Some Meat Juice!

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Melissa and I had dinner last night at a nearby Thai restaurant that we enjoy, and had to have a laugh at the drink menu. In fact, I just submitted this photo to the ever-hilarious English Fail Blog. I can’t decide which part I find more humorous: the twice-misspelled word ‘cherry’ (printed as ‘cheery’) or—the part I didn’t even notice until reviewing the photo at home—the ‘Coconut & Meat Juice’.

Regardless, I can’t harp on them too much. Their fried rice was excellent, and a fair argument can be made that the quality of English in the menu is inversely proportional to the quality and legitimacy of the food in ‘foreign’ food restaurants.

Update 7l27l2008: My picture was posted on the English Fail Blog! Woohoo!

Windows Mobile Software Roll-Call

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Since last summer, I’ve had an AT&T 8525 wireless phone. This phone, also known as the HTC TyTN HERM100 (say that three-times-fast) originally shipped with Windows Mobile 5, but an official ROM update ups it to Windows Mobile 6 Professional. I selected the 8525 as the lesser of many smartphone evils. At the time, the iPhone (which had just come out) did not support third-party software, Blackberrys had no reliable synchronization software available for Mac, Palm OS was hopelessly antiquated, and no Symbian smartphones were available through AT&T. Windows Mobile was my best choice at the time.

Today, with the iPhone supporting third-party software and Missing Sync available for Blackberrys, I might have selected a different phone. But this is what I have, and will continue to use until I’m eligible for a cheap upgrade in December. I can say, however, that my experience with Windows Mobile has been much like my experince with Windows on the desktop: it’s capable and powerful, but hobbled by reliability and usability problems. With smartphones across the industry upping their game, I’m unlikely to subject myself to Microsoft’s operating system again come December. Preliminarily, I’m looking at the iPhone, Blackberrys, Symbian, or—assuming they’re available in time—Android-based phones.

I can’t recommend Windows Mobile at this time. My phone shifted all my scheduled appointments by an hour when the time changed in the spring, periodically forgets to repeat my repeating tasks, and has a number of other goofy problems along those lines (mostly with simple PIM functions that even free Motorola phones can handle). But through the addition of various third-party products, the phone can be made pretty usable and, occasionally, even awesome.

Read more . . .

Telling the Truth is Islam Bashing?

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Amil Imani, an Iranian-American who’s family fled Iran after the 1979 radical revolution, writes about the reality of Islam in the world today. It continues to amaze me how little attention the media and general populations of Europe and North America pay to the threat of radical Islam. In the face of widespread Islamic violence and rioting that flares up periodically in Europe, and continuing acts of terrorism, we still laud it as a ‘religion of peace’ with which we earnestly expect to coexist.

While there are plenty of fine, peaceful, upstanding people who call themselves Muslim, the sad reality is that the religion as-a-whole is—as Imani so eloquently puts it—not multiculturalist, but mono-culturalist. It accepts no culture as valid except for the culture of Islam. It seeks to “ . . . terrorize the infidels. So wound their bodies and incapacitate them because they oppose Allah and His Apostle” (Qur’an 8:12).

Sooner or later, the threat must be confronted. The war brewing—a vicious clash of ‘western’ and Islamic values—cannot be prevented through diplomacy, or blind acceptance, or mincing our words for fear of ‘offending’ people. We must speak the truth, and we must prepare ourselves for the inevitable.

Santa Arrested in Sweatshop Sting Operation

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Santa Claus has been arrested in Hong Kong, China following an international sting operation investigating the jolly elf for involvement in a sweatshop cartel. A high-ranking Interpol official speaking to Off on a Tangent under conditions of anonymity stated that Claus, known worldwide for his annual distribution of Christmas gifts, enlisted the network of sweatshops several years ago to augment the production capacity of his North Pole toy-making factory and meet increasing demand from the world’s children.

Santa’s team of elves have been faced with difficulty keeping pace with the world’s consumerism over the last two decades. Cost-cutting measures have led to periodic elf strikes and other labor difficulties, including a 2004 investigation of unexplained elf illness by the North Poll Occupational Safety & Health Agency (NPOSHA) that remains unresolved.

“When we got into this business, it was wooden horses, fireman helmets, and plastic swords,” said Claus in a 2006 interview with BBC World News following a two-month-long elf strike. “If we are to remain competitive in this world of iPods and X-Boxes, we are going to need to work longer and harder. We may also need to outsource some of our toy production to non-elf factories around the world.”

According to officials in Hong Kong, Santa outsourced as much as 50 percent of his 2007 and 2008 toy production to a network of sweatshops in the Chinese countryside. These sweatshops, known for dangerous working conditions and the illicit employment of child labor, have recently become the subject of various crackdowns from Chinese and international law enforcement agencies.

Claus was unavailable for comment.

Conquering the W&OD, 10 Miles at a Time

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The Washington & Old Dominion Regional Park is one of the premiere bike trail parks in the DC metropolitan area. It’s 100 feet wide (with a 9 foot wide paved trail) and 45 miles long—running from Purcellville, Virginia, all the way into Arlington. You can read some more about the park and trail from BikeWashington.org or Friends of the W&OD. As part of my quest to ride at least 30 miles each week, I’ve been spending at least a couple hours over the last three weeks riding the W&OD.

I’ve been tackling the trail in 10-mile increments (each outing is a 20-mile ride: 10 miles from my chosen starting point, then 10 miles back). In my three rides so far, I’ve successfully conquered just over 30 miles of the 45 mile long trail—from its Purcellville end-point all the way to a rest area past Hunter Mill Road.  If you look at the map on BikeWashington.org, I’ve ridden everything from the left starting point to a point about 2/3 of the way between the dots for Reston and Vienna. I’ll probably really push myself and finish the last 15 miles in one big ride (30 miles total!) this or next week before moving on to some other local trails.

If you have any interest in local history, check out Paul McCray’s fascinating photographic history of the Washington & Old Dominion Railroad, which was abandoned in the 1960s and later converted into the W&OD ‘rail trail’. Some of my favorite bits include the W&OD bridge over the [4-lane!] Beltway in 1967, the grade-crossing over the Shirley Highway (now I-395) in Arlington from 1968 (local readers will recognize the building in the distance to the left, which is still there), and—best of all—the Dulles Airport siding from 1959. The airport siding is especially ironic, since the W&OD was both a freight and passenger line, so we had a passenger-capable rail line running most of the way to Dulles Airport while it was being built in 1959 but don’t have any line or service to the airport today.

Apparently though, the W&OD line had a reputation similar to that of today’s MetroRail system. It was known by a few interesting nicknames like ‘Wobbly & Old Dilapidated Railroad’, ‘Worst & Openly Damned Railroad’, ‘Old Devil Railroad’, and others. So it turns out that MetroRail is just part of a long, consistent transit tradition.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.