Can I get a side order of hollow-points with that please?

It had been a while since the family had had some good old fashioned IHOP for dinner so we decided to treat ourselves the other night.

By chance we're seated at a booth near the entrance and it turns out we have a good view of folks as they enter and exit. When a couple of guys left the restaurant my wife and I noticed that one of them was wearing a shoulder holster containing a semi-automatic pistol. We figured he was a police officer since we've heard they must carry a weapon at all times. We didn't think much more about it until we left IHOP.

As we're loading the kids in the van, the armed gentleman leaves the restaurant with his companion and what appears to be their families: they've got young ladies with them and small children, one of which is an infant. They proceed to load up the car next to use with the kids and I notice that one of the young ladies is wearing a hip holster containing what looked like a pearl-handled 45-caliber colt. She's wearing a tight tank-top, low-cut jeans, and A PISTOL. As we pulled out we left the armed couple chatting and sharing a cigarette.

I wonder why they carry guns. Maybe they both were officers. Maybe they think they're safer from terror attacks if they carry pistols.

Whatever, dood!

Unusual morning commute

I normally wouldn't bother mentioning my morning commute except that this morning's was definitely out of the ordinary. This is what I saw:

1. A policeman had a pulled-over driver out of their car and hand-cuffed. He seemed to be interrogating the guy. I'm a suburbanite so I hardly ever see this.
2. A little further down the road a box-van was pulled-over and emergency personel were working on the driver who was still in his seat and looked unconscious.
3. I passed an extremely slow driver (like 25 mph in a 55) who looked like he was shouting at himself and everyone else on the road.

Might as well add this: and now we're having unbelievably stormy weather this afternoon. We're under a tornado warning, meaning tornadoes have been spotted in the area.

Hrm.

JSTL Date Formatting is Locale/Language Sensitive

Ever write a JSP that contained JSTL-formatted dates? Ever found that the formatted date appears differently when requested via a text client like wget?

I recently built a web page that uses JSTL to format dates using the pattern "dd MMM, HH:mm:ss". In a browser this renders as: "04 Nov, 13:03:00". However, I found that when I requested the page using wget, the dates were formatted like so: "2006-11-03 13:03:00.0". I found a post at sourceforge that suggested setting the locale for JSTL in the page itself. I didn't want to have to modify the JSP so after some trial and error found that sending the header "Accept-Language: en" in the wget request fixed the problem. *sigh*

It's little frustrations like this that build up and make me (and others I bet too) want to look for other solutions and/or frameworks. GRRR!!!

Ugh - mouse crud

What the heck do I call this crud that accumulates on the feet of my mouse? It looks like it's a combination of dust, lint, and secret sauce in a tacky layer that makes the mouse drag instead of glide across my desk. Sometimes I can scratch it off with my fingernails, other times I have to use my car keys or something hard and sharp.

I think I'll call it "MOUD," short for "MOuse mUD."

What-EVER.