I never had any interest in seeing the movie Stop-Loss.  I didn’t know what stop-loss meant and I wasn’t interested in finding out until I came across a newspaper article in the Ogden Standard Examiner a few weeks ago.  The article was about a serviceman who was in Iraq and his experiences.  To summarize in the best way I can remember, the serviceman was in a vehicle driving along with some others and they hit a mine.  The blast knocked him out and he had been hurt so badly that he was flown to a hospital in Germany.  While he was there he found out that one of his eardrums had been blown out and that he had some brain damage.  The doctor told him that he was not to be around any loud noises and that he was not going back to Iraq.

Days or weeks later another military doctor came to see him and signed him off to return to the fight.  He can’t hear out of one ear, he is brain damaged, and they are forcing him to go back into the war.  I thought this was horrible, but the article just got worse.  He was supposed to be done with his tour in August, but because he got hurt and had to have months of rehabilitation the government is sending him back, brain damaged and all, to make up for the time he was in the hospital.  Stop-loss is the most ridiculous policy I have ever heard of.  This is just one straw in the bale of corruption that our government lives by everyday.

Yes, Jan 14, 2008 has been declared a holiday for both the public and private sectors in Dubai, on behalf of U.S. President George W. Bush’s visit to the city. My initial reaction to the news was, wow! this place has so much respect for President Bush, that they even declared a national holiday on behalf of his visit. Let’s hope Al Qaeda does not think too much about this.

But in reality, Dubai is a traffic mess, and a road system incapable of functioning under the levels of closures required during a U.S. President’s visit to a city in the Middle East. Even, Sheikh Zayed road, the main artery of the city, is being shut down; that is major and is enough to bring Dubai to a stand still. So, it’s not surprising that they had to declare a holiday, to keep cars off the streets.

This is still kind of ironic as Dubai is supposed to be this place at the forefront of building an amazing city of the future; yet, all it takes is a visit from a “not so popular on this side of the world leader of the free world“ to bring it to a grinding halt!

Photos: BBC, Streetsblog

It has been about a year since I initially moved over my sites from Eleven2 to MediaTemple. That change was made mostly due to a major crash at Eleven2 and the hype surrounding MediaTemple’s grid sever. Around the same time I got a DreamHost account as well, to take advantage of their referral program, disk space, and to host subversion.

The past year with MediaTemple was kind of bumpy in the beginning, with all the issues they had with the grid server. Even though most of the grid server issues have been resolved over the past year, it still felt like I was not getting what was promised, and the price felt steep too. So, yesterday when I got the automatic renewal email, renewing the grid server account for another year for $160 (that’s minus $40 which was given back for the grid server failure), I decided it was time to move on.
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Ron Paul is a phenomenon on the web, and today he raised a shattering $3 million in 24 hours from over 35,000 donations.

However, this post is not about that, but about one of the Federal requirements for eligibility to donate to a political campaign I came across on the donation page of ronpaul2008.com.

2. I am a United States citizen or a lawfully-admitted permanent resident. If a foreign national, I have permanent resident status and hold a green card.

Being a permanent resident, one of my favorite things to say is, “Taxation without representation”. So, I found it funny that US Federal law allows a permanent resident to donate without representation as well. If you agree to the above section, and you are a permanent resident, then basically it’s telling you, “You can’t vote, but you sure can give us all the money you want.”

Nik Ainley of Shiny Binary shares his technique for treating 3D typography in Photoshop.

One a lighter note, check out how the Japanese vacation, looks like personal space is not an issue in Tokyo’s Summerland wave pool! Must suck for the life guard. In other bizzare news from Japan, due to a plumbing error, for the last ten years students at Hiroshima University’s Higashi-Hiroshima campus have been drinking toilet water!

Font find – Komika Poster

How to think like a great graphic designer: James Victore

The unspoken part of what we do is compromise. Clients don’t just come to me and say, “James Victore, he’s the auteur, we’ll let him do what he wants.� I have very little of that.

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