You know, one of these days Lyssa is going to walk into my office and find me stone dead, keeled over my laptop clutching my chest, possibly with blood streaming from my nose and mouth and steam spraying wildly from my ears.

The Republican Party of the state of Texas has just published its official party platform for the year 2010 and they're going out of their way to make certain people feel welcome. It starts off pretty normally for them, about traditional marriage being founded upon one man and one woman, nevermind history saying something completely different (though that …

Late last year, the bank account of an outfit in Texas called Hillary Machinery, Inc. was siphoned to the tune of $800kus after their online banking credentials were compromised. The bank they did business with, PlainsCapital, required customers to supply a username and passphrase and then enter a single-use passphrase e-mailed to a certain address a few minutes later to complete the authentication process. Investigation showed that IP addresses roughly corresponding to networks in Italy and Romania were used to initiate the transfer of funds to bank accounts in the Russian Federation and Eastern Europe. From this evidence, it seems …

I haven't been writing about the beginning of the presidential campaign season because I've been busy with other things, but I thought that this should be spread around a bit more widely... Barack Obama's security detail ordered on-duty police officers at a rally in Dallas, Texas to stop searching attendees for weapons as they filed in.

You read that correctly, the were told to stop looking for weapons. D.W. Lawrence, Deputy Police Chief of Dallas went on the record as saying that the order 'apparently' came down from the US Secret Service because they wanted to "speed up the …

One Jack Colley of the state of Texas is starting up a program which will require criminal record checks of people attempting to evacuate in the event of a natural disaster; the idea is that they want to weed out convicted felons to ensure that they can't prey upon anyone else trying to get to safety. Everyone attempting to board the evacuation buses will be issued a wristband with information encoded on it that will be used to identify people getting onto and later off of the buses. The data would be transmitted to the University of Texas Space Research …

Things have finally slowed down somewhat in Austin, affording me the opportunity to write a long-overdue update. Workdays have been long (averaging thirteen hours out of every twenty-four), which is why I've been quiet lately.

From what I've seen of Austin, it's a pretty nice place. I"m situated a stone's throw from the airport, and within visual distance of the highway system, which has been both relaxing (coming from an urban background) and a pleasant change of pace from the places that I'm usually put up by my employers.

Two nights ago Tiffany (co-worker and fellow foot soldier fighting …

Short, sweet, and to the point because I"ve been out of touch for somewhere in the neighborhood of a week now. Also because I'm tired, jetlagged, and fighting back a nasty headache that seems to want to reduce my forebrain to a 386.

Last Wednesday night, Lyssa and I drove back to Pennsylvania to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with her family. We spent part of Friday with my folks after several misadventures in trying to find an open bank in the North Hills on Black Friday. We parted company briefly on Saturday, and I traveled back to PIttsburgh to …