The American Auto Industry

Is anyone else surprised that the day after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is passed, GM shows up in the news, hat in hand, asking for $30 billion USD? Is that timing not lost on anyone? Further, they “could run out of money by March without new funds” – I have a news flash – March is two weeks away. Oh noes! Panic! And to further scare the US populace into action, they announce that they don’t have enough cash to keep Saturn or Saab afloat.

My thought is that they are betting that after the lawmakers have given away $800 billion, they aren’t going to flinch over another $30 or $40 billion. And three months from now, another undisclosed chunk of change, because “the downturn is more pronounced than expected”. Sure – give them the money – but fire all of the management, and tell the United Auto Workers that “sorry, GM’s too big to fail – and that means that you need to get lost as well.”

http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/1409632.html

But Seriously

I was going to write a post about how much I love the fact that our stuff is clear from customs and will be delivered on Friday, but while trying to do that, I ran back into the … feature … that Firefox has with the delete key and browser history. Why on earth did someone ever think it was a good idea to have the key that DELETES something act as a “back” button. We have perfectly good keys for that (the arrow keys) or other keys that are paired – such as [ and ]. These can handle the concept of forwards and backwards very nicely.

The upshot of this design decision is that if you haven’t paid careful attention to where you last clicked, and you try to erase some text, there’s a very real possibility in Firefox that you’re not going to erase that text, but to go back in your browser’s history to something else. And with today’s sick reliance on AJAX – which breaks the back and forward button anyway – you get very frustrated, very fast. Yet another reason I much prefer Safari to Firefox.

Intelligent design, people. It’s not just for the religious nutjobs.

UPDATE: Yes, I know it can be disabled, but still – why is it the default?

And now, time to move back

The iPhone comes to the UAE. I guess it’s time to move back.

Vonage

By the way, we have our Vonage line hooked back up. So you can call it and it won’t waste our minutes with AT&T. I’m slowly building out our home network again – waiting for the final parts to arrive with the rest of our stuff early this coming week. Assuming there are no major issues.