News about Tibet

The Tibetan spiritual leader also raised the possibility of himself naming a new Dalai Lama while he is still alive.

New rules declared that any reincarnations without government consent were illegal.

Emily Buchanan
BBC News

Thanksgiving

Got a call yesterday from Kevin L in Iraq! Happy holidays to all those deployed out of country on whatever missions, hope you all got a chance to call home this week.

This is Kevin's second trip to Iraq this year. He thinks he'll be home by Christmas. My brother is safely in the USA, enjoyed his thanksgiving with his family.

Beth and I drove up to Silverdale to spend time with my father and his family. All the children are growing, the old people are slowing, and my eating habits are showing.

Nexus Pass

A nexus pass is a joint identification and pre-approval system used at the US/Canada border which allows low risk travellers expedited access to the border. My experience at the Peace Arch makes it look like if the lane is open, it saves about 20 minutes getting into the US, and wouldn't make it worthwhile going through into Canada. I don't remember if the Pacific crossing (a few miles inland from the peace arch -- 24 hr truck port of entry) has a lane.

Nexus also has some improvements in US customs access. A similar program is Canpass Air, which gets your iris scan and prints a welcome to canada receipt once you prove you're you.

I shied away from it for a long time since the border is never very hectic for me. Driving home on a Friday from Vancouver might change my tune. Last time I tried, it was so long a man with an ice cream cart was wheeling through the idling cars, like a six flags water salesman (longer the line, the higher the cost!) It's $50 for a five year pass. Not a bad deal. Canpass Air is $50 /year, which was what I expected.

Of course, it may be time for the 2010 Olympics before the shiny new cbsa station at the peace arch is back in working order. By then we may have razor wire pulled for 3000 miles, and nobody gets across without a rectal exam...

Safety

The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink; and it is often observable that the older a man gets the more difficult it is to him to retain a believing conception of his own death.

Wasted Life and its fruits

Ah, watching reruns of Who Wants to be a Millionaire on GSN last week. One man had made it to 250K and was asked what esperanto meant in esperanto. He still had two lifelines, called a friend, and took the 50/50. He didn't want to answer... I guess it proves that the easiest way to stump an American is to ask him a question about a foreign language.

Ironically, esperanto was designed to almost be intuitive to European language speakers. Esperanto itself means "hoper".

Surrender

In laws in for the weekend from Wisconsin... they have a wonderful habit of antiquing all day, which affords an amount of distance. I almost wish there was more time to visit, but I will be at their house come Christmas...

Next week I travel to Winnipeg, and then Bellevue on wednesday. Like any decent employer, mine gives me a four day weekend for thanksgiving. I then go to Big Sky, Montana just north of Yellowstone (where I hope it is warm), staying at the Big Sky resort, and off to Las Vegas for a Friday meeting, Holiday Inn on Polaris.

Week after that, I'm going to Lopez Island in the San Juans. Staying at the Lopez Islander.

Dunsey Cass, you creep!

“Oh, I’ve swopped with him,” said Dunstan, whose delight in lying, grandly independent of utility, was not to be diminished by the likelihood that his hearer would not believe him—“Wildfire’s mine now.”

Locke

Reading First Treatise on Government. Slow, laborious, intriguing and written to be understood. The switch away from fiction should do me some good.

Redmond Traffic

Worked in Redmond this week. Carpooled Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Marginally better than not.
Going solo tomorrow. Got a few loose ends to attend to, and will be returning when they're ready.
Traffic tonight was miserable. It took me 55 minutes to make it 10 miles to Issaquah.

In other news, we almost were selling our house, and now we aren't. Losing a deposit is a nuisance, but the emotional strain of roller-coaster offers is miserable. We plan to take our house off the market for the winter. Time to break the news to the realtor.
She thinks she's coming to suggest lowering the price--again.

Proofread some pages, badly, on pg's distributed proofreading project. There was some interesting reading about jellyfish.