A Change to My Flight Itinerary... or not.

In the near future, my parents are celebrating a milestone anniversary, so I've booked flights to go see them.  Of course, sometimes things change on the airlines, so I wasn't terribly surprised to get email from Orbitz notifying me of a change to my itinerary.


I skimmed the new and previous itineraries, and confirmed that the only change in flight times was... well, there wasn't a change in flight times.  Odd.


So I cut-and-pasted the itineraries into files, and asked my computer to point out the lines that were different.

Wait a minute - am I reading Mad magazine?

 The Associated Press reveals:

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, detainees in the CIA's secret prison network told interrogators about an important courier with the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti who was close to bin Laden.

But:

It took years of work before the CIA identified the courier's real name: Sheikh Abu Ahmed, a Pakistani man born in Kuwait.

There's a shocker for you – "Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti" is Abu Ahmed from Kuwait.  And it only took years of work to sort that out.  I can't decide which is worse – al-Qaida's inability to come up with decent fake names, or the CIA's inability to figure out who someone is when al-Qaida essentially tells them his name and where he's from.

Even the "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon in Mad Magazine isn't this silly.

Merrie Monarch Ho'ike night 2011

Yesterday was Ho'ike (display) night at the 2011 Merrie Monarch Hula Festival here in Hilo. While the competition held over the next few nights is strictly hula, the ho'ike featured dances from four different cultures across the Pacific.

The night started off with Hilo's own Halau O Kekuhi, performing kahiko (ancient) hula.   For their opening number, they actually wore clothes of traditional kapa barkcloth!

 

Students in the Marshallese Iakwe Club at UH-Hilo performed some Marshallese dances.  I think "Iakwe" is the Marshallese word for "Aloha."

Merahi o Tapiti performed a bunch of Tahitian dances.

Te Tu Mataora, a Maori group from New Zealand, ended the show.

Monitors-to-People Ratio

I tried out the new iPhone version of Microsoft's "Photosynth" panorama app in the control room at work, to show off our monitors-to-people ratio.

Chicken Tender Fail

Burger King put more chicken in their new Chicken Tenders, yet kept them as far as possible from tender... and found a way to make the breading even more tasteless and cardboard-like than before. Wow.

And how's the weather where YOU are?

 

Can Boeing still make planes?

 Daily Finance asks: how many compression cycles should a 737 last? N73711 made it 89,089 before that little problem with AQ 243. 75,000 was expected back then. Since then it's fallen to 60,000, and now Boeing's acting nervous beyond 30,000. Hmmm.