From yoshitsune, a link that, in his words, will break your brain.

Some more fun links, with random brain dumps afterwords.
An injured soldier is suing an accused Al Queda finnancier, for $102mil. Now he says that the govt. freezing the guys assets is making it impossible for him to collect. While I can't really begrudge the guy for taking advantage of one of the lesser known parts of the patriot act, I find this pretty disgusting. Among other things, the terrorist he's suing is a 15-year-old kid in Guantanamo. Apparently, the kid's dad is some rich Bin Laden buddy or something, details are unclear. Another thing is that this guy is just one of thousands who's been wounded, one of tens of thousands. To say nothing of the dead. If it was a class action suit, then I could see it, but as it is it seems like some bitter guy trying to get rich off a legal loophole. It says his lawyer is working pro bono, but I wonder if he gets a cut of the loot. And they say we don't hire mercenaries. Again, if it was a class action open to any wounded soldier or any survivors of dead solders, then you could defend it as some kind of noble act, not just another example of, to quote Boston Legal, "Denny, you're an American! What does any true red-white-and-blue American do when he's been wronged? Or even slightly put out for that matter? We sue!"

One year in Iraq with the 101st. I got this link through wcg. This story would be better, and more interesting, if the writer wasn't so self-righteous and arrogant. The way that he proudly relates his "corrections" of security procedure and then is surprised to find the troops cooling to him is the height of disconnect. The documentary looks good from the trailer, but this article reveals a bias and ignorance that is hard to believe.

Otherwise today was decent. I took a human resource management DANTES test, which I might or might not pass. Half the questions were softball common-sense types, the other half were hardcore, you'd better have been taking notes killers.

Example: "What is an example of the Hays Method of Performance Review?" Needless to say, I guessed quite a bit. There were a lot of questions on union negotiations, and I found myself trying to remember the last baseball strike, since that forms the basis of most of my union knowledge.

I made the mistake of mentioning the union questions to a union employee at the museum and he got going on union minutia for about 20 minutes. Bah. We had a huge let down today over the fate of the Planetarium.

At 11 they told us there was a big meeting, requiring all department heads to attend at 2 o'clock. At about 1:30 cops on horses started showing up, which made no sense but implied something big going on. We all thought that we were finally going to get something definitive about the fate of our jobs under the new management.

Nope. It turned out that the museum director just wanted to announce some new project he's doing, which has almost nothing to do with anyone besides himself. The horse cops turned out to be just randomly there for no real reason at all.

I spent a couple hours this afternoon making preview movies of full dome movies using After Effects. I'd never used it before, but it seems intuitive. They're probably still rendering now, so I'll see how they turned out in the morning.

We spent over $150 on travel stuff today at Target. Well, $65 of that was on new shoes and a couple of shirts for me. So I guess on $90~ on travel stuff. In 6 days I'll be in France!