Going to school stoned probably means you don’t learn as much as if you weren’t stoned.

But having the cops band together with principals create an organized narc effort is just plain stupid.

First, if you are a narc, you will be ostracized (or at least you should be).

Secondly, if you are narc’d out, the wrath of the school and law the will rain down upon you, but little else about your life will change for the better, and none of the aspects of school that lend themselves to experiencing stoned will change.

School is, on balance, prison like or worse for a good collection of kids. If drugs provide a way out of this, or a way around, I would much rather see a solution based on changing school for the better rather than creating a culture of distrust and suspicion. Which just makes school worse.

Have we learned nothing?

January 9th will forever after be known as “the day that Oliver figured out how to open the door to my office on his own.” Life will never be the same.

As noted by many, Apple also release an X11 server for OS X on Tuesday. While this isn’t a revolutionary release — the same capabilities have been available using XDarwin for some time — the new server is much zippier, and better integrated into the desktop environment.

What the hell am I talking about?

Well, best explanation is through an example: there is a Linux server sitting, behind a firewall, 1/2 a mile from me. Using a VPN, I can connect to the server, and using the X11 server in my local Mac, I can run software on that machine that is displayed locally. For example, right now I’m running the Mozilla browser from that server, but its windows are being displayed on my own computer’s screen. When I save files, they get saved on that computer’s hard disk.

The network really is the computer.

Pictured right are Chimera and Safari, running locally, and Mozilla, running under X11 from the aforementioned server 1/2 mile away. Neato.

The Safari browser runs the RedHat Network better than any browser I’ve used, Windows or Mac.

By the way, if you’re running RedHat and you’re not using the RedHat Network to keep you’re packages updated, you probably should be: it’s an excellent, inexpensive service well worth the investment.

Here’s a nice feature of Safari: it’s very well integrated with Apple’s “keychain” service, a central, secure repository for username and password information. While other browsers allow you to save password on your keychain, Safari is the only browser that doesn’t simply “type them into the password dialog” for you; once you enter your username and password for a site in Safari, you have regular, seamless access to it.

There was a version of Internet Explorer for Windows that tried this several years ago — I believe there was an option like “enter this password automatically every time?”. Somehow the feature was removed.

Makes you realize how annoying it is to have to enter your username and password — or even just confirm it — so often.

Warning: you may think that McDonald’s new Chicken Flatbread sandwich looks good in the advertisements on television. It looks sort of like a crispy fastfood gyro, filled to the brum with tasty vegetables and suculent chicken.

You may think this.

But, alas, you are wrong.

The new Chicken Flatbread sandwich is a soggy morase of gack. It is not tasty. It is not crisp. It is nothing like a gyro. And, with 18 g of fat and 464 calories, it doesn’t appear to be particularly healthy.

I am so naive.

In late 2002, I remarked on the interesting fact that the high temperature is always 87 degrees F in Palau. Unable to contain my curiousity, I sent a note to the National Weather Service station in Guam that is responsible for Palau forecasts, and received the following very helpful reply:

The Nation of Palau is made up of several islands. Most are small. When the wind is blowing, the temperature of these islands is largely influenced by the temperature of the ocean. The ocean temperature only changes significantly over a period of months. Around Palau, even these changes are small. If winds are very light, the islands will get warmer in the day and cooler at night, provided they aren’t very cloudy. The weather station is on one of these small islands. There is a larger island, Babelthab, which does get warmer in the daytime, but there are no temperature observations available from there.

One of lesser known secrets of the Internet is that you can almost always find a helpful public servant to provide you with an answer to whatever questions strikes you.

As an aside: the National Weather Service is part of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

NOAA — and indeed the U.S. federal government in general — has a very helpful and liberal policy towards the release of public information to, well, the public. As an example, the Weather History page at the website of The Old Farmer’s Almanac is driven by NOAA’s free, web-available weather history data.

Interestingly, the data from NOAA includes Canadian locations, but the same data is not available, or at least freely available from our own government.

Americans, it seems, take the “we the people paid for this information, so we have the right to use it” credo seriously. Here in Canada we’re caught up in the notion that The Queen should own everything Government produces.

My strongest memories of my days as a university student — a short, unfocused, uncompleted part of my life — are sitting in front of a Sanyo MBC-550 (a “somewhat PC compatible computer”) at 3:00 a.m. trying to squeeze out another 125 words into an essay so I could meet the minimum 1,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 words dictated by the professor.

I’m sure many in the readership have been in the same place faced with the same daunting challenge. And you probably employed many of the same stretching techniques I did — “he moved” becomes “he changed his location,” and, presto, 2 more words!

While I’m certain I learned some things during that aborted year, the pleasures of the pen was not among them.

Which is why it amazes me that, in the 42 months that this website has played its current role, I’ve written 187,273 words here. That’s an average of about 140 words per day.

Now of course idle musings about the state of the local telephone company, the ramblings of my wee son, and whatever illuminated animals have taken over my neighbourhood hardly compares to serious ruminations on the relationship of Pliny the Younger to the Praetor of the Centumviral Court.

But I do enjoy it. And that’s something.

I wrote a little bit on the new Safari web browser from Apple earlier today.

I’ve now been using it for 5 or 6 hours, and I’m takin’ a liking to it. It is really clean, simple, and elegant. It is quite fast (though not quite as fast as Chimera).

And it’s less incompatible than I originally imagined; the only site that’s totally unusable is the aforementioned Credit Union MemberDirect; several other sites have difficulties, but they may be related to non-standard HTML as much as a broken browser.

Diversity of rendering engines, as long as standards are standard, is a Good Thing. And that Apple so openly came out in support of the Open Source movement today when unveiling Safari is a Good Thing too. The Internet is becoming interesting again.

For more on Safari, see Steven Garrity’s wise musings.

Today’s musical pick is Jennifer Kimball, a singer-songwriter from Somerville, MA. You can listen to a small clip [860KB MP3 file] of one of my favourite songs, An Ordinary Solider.

Jennifer is a former member of The Story, a duo she shared with Jonatha Brooke (who is also a great artist).

She’s also a member of The Wayfaring Strangers, a “band, an album, a project, and a new way to play American music” that includes Matt Glaser, Andy Statman, John McGann, Jennifer Kimball, Bruce Barth, Lucy Kaplansky, Tony Trischka and Jim Whitney. You can listen to [rather poor] audio clips of their album Shifting Sands of Time at the Rounder Records website. I especially like High on a Mountain. Jennifer Kimball signs on the cut Funeral in my Brain.