If you’re looking for spare or replacement parts for your DeLorean coupe, look no further than the DeLorean Motor Company (Texas).

They currently have a great deal on the usually hard-to-source DMC part #18851985. Check it out.

Every so often an applicant to the University will lose their password, forget their username, or some such nonsense. Helping them is a very easy process; we ask them a few questions to verify their identity, they supply the answers, we confirm their e-mail address, and then fire off a message giving them the information they want. It’s a simple thing.

What I find sadly amusing is the occasional lack of propriety some applicants use vis-à-vis their e-mail addresses. I mean, honestly, it’s nigh impossible not to laugh when having to confirm addresses like luv2_69u@hotmail.com, xxxfoxychicaxxx@yahoo.com, or bottomtwink@fursuit.net. Please, people, for the love of all that is holy, get a fucking clue here. It’s all I can do to maintain my thin façade of professionalism without trying hard not to laugh in your face.

This morning, when my alarm went off, I rolled over and hit the snooze button. The radio, however, kept chattering on. This is not an uncommon thing, as the snooze button has to be hit "just so", so I flung my arm back over the end table and mashed the button again.

The insipid morning DJs blathered on.

Irritated, I carefully felt my way along the edge of the radio to the button, ensuring that my index finger was in the precise spot necessary to activate the snooze feature. Pushing my finger down, I felt the familiar click as the button engaged, but to no avail; the infernal machine wouldn’t shut up. With the groggy realization that every second of aural intrusion brought me closer to the accursed state of wakefulness, I jackhammered the button with my finger, like a spastic one-fingered typist.

Clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick. Great, my snooze button is broken, I thought.

And then I woke up to find the radio still yammering in my ears, but with both arms snugly cocooned under the cozy comforter. I hadn’t pushed the snooze button at all. My brain made the whole thing up. I was even more irritated than before; of all the adventures my subconscious could have sent me on, all the bizarre dreamscapes I could have visited, and my brain fed me a dream about being in bed?

Lame.

According to my site stats, about 10% of everybody who has nothing better to do with their life than visit this site uses Internet Exploiter Explorer. You 10-percenters have probably noticed that the column holding the posts is not exactly in line with the rest of the garbage on the site.

The rest of the Firefox and Safari-using public has probably gotten used to the absolute positioning that pinned all the site content to the far left of the screen, which, while not exactly a hassle, was kind of weird.

Both problems were due to the fact that my source code was a horrible mashup of old static code I wrote a few years ago, and the default Wordpress theme. The resulting unsightly munge worked well enough, but it gnawed at my soul that the site really wasn’t as well laid out as it should have been. Thanks to the hard work and obsessive-compulsive behavior of my colleague Tim, the thing is finally fixed (except for some remnant positioning weirdness due to how IE fails to render box model elements correctly- damn you, IE!). Hallelujah and uncountable thanks to Tim! You rock.

Every so often as I perambulate around the campus I pick up a print copy of the California Aggie, to find out what the students are squawking about on any given day.

At a mere six pages, it’s not exactly a meaty read, and there is little to no in-depth information in it, but it’s enough to pass the time while scarfing down a sandwich, and it does give me information on campus events I would otherwise be ignorant of. It also confers the added bonus of fostering a sense of community, like the local newspaper in a small town.

And like those local newspapers, the Aggie has a "police blotter" sort of feature called the Campus Judicial Report that is always amusing in a schadenfreudlich way. For some reason, I found this recent item hilarious:

…Upon being confronted by security, the student produced additional Scantrons that were hidden. The student accepted deferred separation and community service from [Student Judicial Affairs]. In addition, the student was notified of a $200 civil demand fine from the bookstore. The total value of the scantrons was $1.77, including tax.

A forced stint in community service, a $200 fine, and being one step away from expulsion for less than two bucks worth of blank forms: I’m guessing this guy never chose Logic as an elective course.

I wasn’t expecting to launch into another political rant so soon, but I was flabbergasted to read this evening that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales casually eliminated habeas corpus from the list of Constitutional protections Americans have enjoyed for the last couple of centuries. Despite more than, oh, about eight fucking centuries of legal precedent and tradition amongst the English-speaking peoples, this poisonous little toady asserted that since there is no explicit right to a writ of habeas corpus, it must, ipso facto, not exist.

Never mind the fact that the Founders considered habeas corpus so fundamental to the concept of liberty and legal custom that it is mentioned in Article I of the Constitution. Never mind that the Constitution states that the protection of the Great Writ is to be the default state of things. And don’t try and use the "in Case of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it" line as a means to justify this latest assault on American freedoms.

The blanket condition of a vague, unspecified threat to our security is not, should not, must never be used to justify the permanent elimination of fundamental legal protections. Under such a rubric, there can never be freedom. Franklin’s oft-quoted maxim about liberty and security seems never to have been heard by the gang of criminal absolutists running the White House.

The Bush Administration plainly seeks to create a state where executive power is supreme, and security trumps law; thousands of years of human history has shown time and time again, however, that where the rule of law is not cherished, there can exist no true security.