Leaving the scene of an accident after you hand your driver's license over to a Sheriff's deputy isn't exactly the smartest thing to do.

Running away from an accident scene after giving your license to police officers makes it pretty easy for them to find you. But that's just what authorities say a Loudoun County man did.

According to the sheriff's office, Richard Dumm was driving on Route Seven in Ashburn on Christmas night when his pickup rear-ended a Mazda stuck in the right lane with a flat tire. Of the four people in the Mazda, two were seriously hurt, while two others were treated and released.

But while firefighters and deputies were helping the injured, authorities say Dumm walked away. Of course, having his license, deputies knew where to find him. He was arrested at his home early yesterday on a charge of felony hit and run.

Man, I hate following memes, but my bro David slapped me with one, so I guess I'd better respond (and my apologies to anyone else who has hit me with one in the past, and I didn't follow-up — sometimes I just can't get inspired. In other words, it's me, it's not you ;).

Four jobs you've had in your life: Software developer, Instructional Technologist (yeah, it's a made-up job title, but I'm not the one who made it up), Arabic linguist, general purpose worker at a Southern Baptist summer camp.

Four movies you could watch over and over: National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Terms of Endearment (it has great meaning for me), Top Gun.

Four places you've lived: Texas (of course), Greece, Spain, Washington DC area (first in The People's Republic of Maryland, but I finally escaped to Virginia).

Four TV shows you love to watch: 24, House, CSI (plus spin-offs), Cold Case. And as a bonus, I watch every season of American Idol just to hear Simon Cowell insult people. Especially Paula Abdul. Because she has a silly name, especially to someone who understands Arabic.

Four places you've been on vacation: Italy, England, France (feh!), Germany, Austria, Switzerland...oops, I got carried away. Anyway, the last four were all on the same trip.

Four websites you visit daily: SpamCop (I have an email account there, and process/report my spam through them), MSN (it's my home page, even in Firefox, but I seldom pay much attention to it — old habits die hard), the forums at my hosting company's web site, and a whole buncha blogs. As David said, have a look at my blogroll.

When you stop and think about it, though, this question is becoming less and less relevant to how people use the Internet. Some spend their life conversing over one instant messaging client or another. Others, like me, keep up with a lot of things through their RSS readers rather than visiting the actual web sites (except when they're very inconsiderate of me and don't put the whole post in their feed — ptui!). Email, of course, is still very popular. For me, I'm subscribed to about five billion or so email reflectors, most of them associated with Amateur Radio, so a significant portion of my free time is spent reading (and then deleting, since they're almost all in Yahoo! Groups) these emails.

So I think it's about time to start getting away from the concept that we only interact with the Internet through our browsers. While I can't imagine it going away completely, it's becoming less and less the tool that we use to interact with the Internets.

Four of your favorite foods: Barbecue beef, salmon grilled on my Weber with hickory and mesquite wood smoke, the bread at Macaroni Grill, and a nice, well-marbled ribeye grilled, again, on my Weber with hickory and mesquite wood smoke. Did I mention I like to cook food on my Weber? With hickory and mesquite wood smoke?

Four places you'd rather be: Texas, Texas, Texas and Texas. Oh, I can't do that? Hmm...okay, how about Texas; visiting my son, daughter-in-law and granddaughters in North Carolina; visiting my son and daughter in Tennessee; and visiting David in Costa Rica, that work?

Four albums you can't live without (Albums? How retro! I've haven't played an album in almost 20 years! I'll do CDs): Best of the Doobies, The Eagles' Greatest Hits (both volumes), Dan Siegel's Northern Nights, Maroon 5's Songs About Jane.

This question was a tough one for me because it's not something I think about too much. I started off by looking at what artists I listen to the most, and then look for their CDs where I really like all or almost all of the tracks. To be honest, The Doobie Brothers and The Eagles just barely made the cut. But Siegel and Maroon 5? All of them. Without exception. I highly recommend both.

Satisfied, David? Now go away and quit bothering me.

Merry Christmas to all, but especially to those who are offended by Christmas.

Folks everywhere are blogging about today's decision by the Federal District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in the suit against the Dover Area School District for requiring an Intelligent Design disclaimer be read to students in 9th grade biology classes (PDF of the court's decision). I'm not going to try to report on the reporting, or on the decision itself, but instead take this opportunity to post my reaction to the whole Intelligent Design controversy.

I approach this issue as an evangelical Christian, by the way. I believe that God created the Universe (but not in exactly seven days). I believe God created the sciences as the rules that every thing in the Universe must follow. I believe that the Theory of Evolution is more or less accurate, because that's how God wants these things to work. He didn't manufacture fossils to confuse us. He didn't cheat by jump-starting life here on Earth, and then stepped back to let it develop without further dramatic and invasive action.

But I really want to address how I feel about my fellow Christians who, having failed to get Creationism or Creation Science into the public schools, have tarted up those two philosophies and relabeled the whole thing as Intelligent Design. What really gets me is that they run the Creationism line all the way up to the word "God," and switch it to "intelligent agent" or some other such substitution.

I believe that the big-name ID proponents are liars falling into two camps. The more honorable camp are merely lying to themselves by turning off their brains to the illogic of their position. The others are true scum, who know they're lying about their word substitution in an attempt to get Biblical Creation taught in the public schools. But hey, they're lying in order to get the word out about God! That's honorable, isn't it?

Intelligent Design contains no falsifiable premises (the accepted standard for scientific theory). While ID proponents say their "theory" is non-religious, that's a pile of nonsense. ID is no more scientific than Astrology. Are we going to start teaching that in science classes?

And I take exception to the whole Intelligent Design premise on a religious basis, and this is what I believe to be an original position. You ID proponents need to reexamine your faith, the underpinnings of your religion. Why do you believe in God? Why do you believe that He sent his Son to us, to die for our sins? Do you require God to give you some proof that He's who He says he is? Do you require a lock of Jesus's hair or something like that to prove that He existed? Must you have some token or something which proves, which irrefutably guarantees, that Jesus is your Savior?

If so, you are lost. My God is not your God. My Savior is not your Savior. My God requires me to take Him on faith, with no evidence whatsoever of His existence. He requires me to believe that Jesus died for my sins without a shred of proof that it actually happened.

You ID proponents are trying to prove God's existence. And thankfully, you're failing miserably at it. Because there is no proof. And you make me believe, at least, that you have no faith.

Update: Joining in the Beltway Traffic Jam.

I'm still trying to catch up on my blog reading, and Kurt pointed me to this online article which states, in the final paragraphs:

Ohio deer hunters can only have three bullets loaded at a time.

That's because wildlife studies find the more bullets hunters load at once, the more likely their guns will accidentally go off, with potentially deadly consequences.

On the one hand, I've never fired more shots than necessary for the kill when I've been hunting (and that's always been one shot, thankfully), despite the fact that I consistently fill the magazine whenever I load a weapon. On the other hand, my hunting buddy hunts with a lever-action .308, and he always works the lever and fires another shot without checking to see if his first shot was effective.

But notice that the article doesn't say that the studies indicate that more bullets means more shots (and my buddy doesn't ever shoot more than the three, and usually only two anyway). It says that more bullets make it more likely that the weapon will discharge accidentally.

I'd like to see that study, preferably in the company of the author(s). Then I'd have the opportunity to pistol-whip them when I discover the problem with the study.

Note for the humor-impaired: I don't even own a pistol right now, and I'm not particularly violence-prone, except for my quarry when I'm hunting.

As is usual this time of year, I get a little (okay, a lot) behind in my blog reading, so I only ran across this post by Bruce Schneier. While the subject of his post is the Patriot Act, and while I disagree with some of his opinions on the Act, he makes some very good points about laws in general which bear repeating:

Most laws don't matter when we all trust each other. Contracts are rarely if ever looked at if the parties trust each other. The whole point of laws and contracts is to protect us when the parties don't trust each other. It's not enough that [an op-ed author who believes there have been any abuses under the Patriot Act], and everyone else with this opinion, trusts the Bush government to judiciously balance his rights with the need to fight global terrorism. This guy has to believe that when the Democrats are in power that his rights are just as protected: that he is just as secure against police and government abuse.

Because that's how you should think about laws, contracts, and government power. When reading through a contract, don't think about how much you like the other person who's signing it; imagine how the contract will protect you if you become enemies. When thinking about a law, imagine how it will protect you when your worst nightmare — Hillary Clinton as President, Janet Reno as Attorney General, Howard Dean as something-or-other, and a Democratic Senate and House — is in power.

Laws and contracts are not written for one political party, or for one side. They're written for everybody. History teaches us this lesson again and again. In the United States, the Bill of Rights was opposed on the grounds that it wasn't necessary; the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 proved that it was, only nine years later.

It makes no sense to me that this is a partisan issue.

This is a very good point that people in general, and legislators in particular, need to bear in mind when they're currently in the majority and crafting laws and rules. I have no illusions about this actually happening, of course. The things politicians have to do to get elected tends to weed out thoughtful, fair-minded people. And that's a shame.

Jeff Harrell's take on parental notification when their daughter wants to get an abortion pretty much matches up with my own position on the matter.

While I can see where there might be times when this could cause problems (the most severe of which, it seems to me, is with a pregnancy resulting from incest), legislating (in court, no less) for the most extreme circumstances and applying it to everyone seems completely backwards to me. To my naïve and inexperienced mind, it would seem easy to craft a law that would provide for the exceptions, allowing a minor girl to get a court order for the abortion when the circumstances warrant it.

I suppose I need to read up on this subject some more, because I can't think of a rational argument against my suggested approach. At the very least, I'd get to laugh at somebody's wacko ideas.

I neglected to mention that the folks at the Mozilla foundation released version 1.5 of Firefox earlier this week. Some of the improvements include a faster rendering engine (pages load faster), enhanced pop-up blocking and a new Clear Private Data tool.

Of course, if you're already using Firefox and have any extensions installed (which you should, by the way, on both counts), some have not been updated for this latest version yet. One extension which I had used before was miniT, which allowed me to reorder Firefox's tabs by dragging and dropping them. Since this functionality is included in Firefox now, the extension isn't necessary. For all but one of the remaining non-updated extensions, there's a workaround to allow them to work with this version. That left only one extension that I have installed in earlier versions of Firefox that doesn't work now, and I don't think I ever used it.

Now remember, I earn my living by building applications for Microsoft Windows using Microsoft tools and languages. I have the beta of Internet Explorer 7 installed on my computer for when I have to have IE for a particular web site, but my default browser is Firefox. If you browse the Internet from a Windows computer, you should be using Firefox as your default browser.

There are a few bumps when changing over to Firefox from IE which I need to tell you about. One thing that you could find annoying is your IE Favorites (called Bookmarks in Firefox). Of course, you can import your IE Favorites into Firefox, but if you have rearranged them into a particular order, you lose the effort you put into that, since they all end up in alphabetical order. This problem is compounded by the fact that Firefox requires an additional step beyond IE's approach of just dragging your links around in the Favorites menu. But it's a one-time shot, and once you've imported them and gotten them back in your desired order, you're done.

Anyway, go get Firefox, install it and use it for a while. Once you get used to it, you'll be glad you did.

Update: As Kevin reminds me in the comments, the problem with dragging and dropping Bookmarks is limited to moving Bookmark folders, not Bookmarks themselves. At any rate, the folders can easily be arranged using the Manage Bookmarks... functionality on the Bookmarks menu, and again, it's a one-time shot and you're done with it.

Another problem I just discovered was that upgrading to 1.5 broke the SpellBound extension I use to spell check text I write in Firefox. Reinstallation of the extension and associated libraries (found here) solved the problem.

Anne Applebaum's op-ed in today's Washington Post reminded me of something I wrote recently in another venue: many things, maybe even most things, are not wholly good or wholly bad. The Iraq War certainly falls into that category, in my estimation.

It's bad, horrible, terrible, that lives have been lost in this effort. Not just American lives, but the lives of members of the other Coalition forces, the lives of Iraqi civilians, too. The cost to our federal budget, and hence to all US taxpayers, is bad. The way the Bush Administration has done some things will, in the longer lens of history, turn out to be bad. The way some service members, throughout the seniority spectrum, have conducted themselves has been bad, and make me, as a proud retired Sailor, ashamed of them (I must hasten to point out that this is a minuscule proportion of the total force; the vast majority of our military folks make me proud that they perpetuate the high military traditions and values that I and others have passed down to them).

If we've fomented more terrorists and terrorism (and that's a big "if," but I'm including it to cover the bases), that's bad, too. Yes, there are a lot of bad things that have resulted from this war, as the never-ending litany of reports by the like of The New York Times and The LA Times and their ilk continue to remind us.

But good has come from this war, and more will come in the future (just as more bad will come in the future). We've deposed Saddam Hussein, a monster who fits the Texas legal phrase "He needed killin'" as well as anyone. We're teaching the Iraqis democracy, how to build and conduct military and paramilitary forces to defend their nation. As much as some folks hate to admit it, our continued presence in Iraq gives pause to at least some of the people and states who, at the very least, are not our friends. We're shaking off the perception that America doesn't have the guts to stick it out when things get difficult.

The whole point is, you can't get the good without taking along the bad. If you don't believe that the good that comes from the Iraq War outweighs the bad that comes with it, I think you're wrong, but it's a perfectly reasonable, if misguided, position to take.

But the refusal by some to acknowledge the good that's coming from the Iraq War can only serve as a damper on getting more of the good stuff. If it's severe enough, and if there's enough of it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And when it's done solely for political gain, as I believe is the case for many Democrats, starting with the leader of their Party, it's contemptible. It is, I believe, responsible at least in part for some of the deaths our troops have suffered, and for deaths we have yet to suffer.

Dissent is a necessary and valuable part of our political culture. But the intellectual and even factual dishonesty by some, purely for political gain, is disgusting. I don't have a Rush Limbaugh-like desire to have everyone think the same way I do, and I recognize that spin, misdirection, plausible deniability and so forth are traits of politicians of all stripes. But these acts, which deny the good and amplify (and sometimes create out of whole cloth) the bad, are hurting America in general, and my comrades-in-arms in particular.

And on this 64th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it turns my stomach.

A quote from Robert Heinlein's book, Time Enough For Love:

The way to live a long time — oh, a thousand years or more — is something between the way a child does it and the way a mature man does it. Give the future enough thought to be ready for it — but don't worry about it. Live each day as if you were to die next sunrise. Then face each sunrise as a fresh creation and live for it, joyously. And never think about the past. No regrets, ever.

Don't mind me, I'm just going to sit here and contemplate that paragraph for a little while. You go on. I'll be fine, honest.

Shamelessly stolen from John over at TexasBestGrok.

I'm back, but I'm buckless. We still had a great time, as usual.

Now, to catch up on all my emails, blogs, bills (grrr...) and so forth.