Well, here I sit in the Lisbon International Airport, having survived a sleepless nightime transatlantic flight. No matter how I twisted or turned, the fact remained - I was too tall to fit. A nice bed on a cruise ship will feel so nice, but we still have five more hours to go.

Every vehicle zipping around the airport is so different in design. For the most part they are shorter, and look like they have tiny engines under the hood. A Dodge Ram or a Ford F-150 pickup would look like weight lifter here. And the quantity of special purpose trucks at the airport is astounding. I’ve never seen busses with liftting bodies to allow hadicap visitors to enter the plane.

Every one drives fast around the planes. I’d say it’s at least twice as fast as the fastest someone dares in the US. Plus they never stop at intersections marked “Stop”, they just zip into to the traffic, weave through airplanes, and generaly just race around. Needless to say the view out the airport windows is much more entertaining here.

So far this trip, I’ve managed to remeber every piece of metal in my pockets, and I’ve made it through security with out a hitch everytime. When I step through the detectors, and nothing squals I feel like I’ve just won a little victory.

Lisbon was beautiful from the air, all the houses and buildings are painted the same color, and in the rosy dawn the city had a surreal appearence.

A few short hours before we leave, I finaly get Blapp up and running so I will have my normal updating of braino.org while on the ship. This post, is of course, just a test. :)

What a great idea, now I can have my beloved mouse guestures from Opera available in most of mw programs on my whole mac. I’m downloading CocoaGesture right to give it a try.

Now I can update braino.org by email - perhaps from my father’s spiffy Treo. This evening I tried a few existing mail-to-blog programs, but none of them quite worked the way I wanted. Naturally I made just made my own and learned a lot in the process.

The air was hot. Aside from a clanking fan placed at the end of the long hall of people, there was not a sound. The tension in the air could be felt - and seen in the stillness of everyone in the room. Along both sides of the hall, windows opened up into a large room surrounding us. An unbroken line of targets ran along the wall, each mounted on a green stand, and ready to electronically to the millimeter the location of each shot fired at it.

Unknowingly we had stumbled onto the Women’s US Air Rifle finals - the winner would be going to the Olympics.

Only eight finalists stood by windows, though there were windows in the hall for seventy two. Their rifles, partially resting on stands in the windows, could have been taken out of a futuristic movie. Their clothing too, could have come from another time. Totally concentrating on the match they were about to shoot, the women stood motionless, each looking to the side over their rifle, intently gazing at nothing.

Only ten rounds would be fired, and each shot was given everything each contestant had. Ninety seconds were allowed for the finalist to take a single shot. After each person in the line had fired once, the range master would walk down the line and announce each person’s score, while those on the firing line again stared at nothing, and those watching quietly applauded for every ten point shot. “Load one match round,” was be announced, and the entire process was repeated yet again for one more hole in the target.

Saw someone give their live to Jesus Christ last night. The joy pouring out of their face made me cry.

Soldiers on 4x4 ATV’s with Light Anti-Tank Weapons could be effective against tanks in woodland areas. Just an idea… :)

Being able to program is a wonderful thing. Suddenly I can make tools that allow me to do things previously time consuming or impossible. Yesterday I made a tool that allows a Wulfram map designer to import in a image, and turn the dark areas into valleys and the light areas into hills. Being able to do so opens up a huge wave of programs that can be used to make maps with. It probably cuts about two whole days of the time to make a map.

From personal expereice, profiling of international visitors to the USA won’t stop terrorists. Subjecting people who are suspected to be possibly like terrorists to additional searches and scrutiny, has come under a lot of fire for it’s negative “Racism” attributes, but proponents of profiling say it will increase security. Nope.

I ran the community of an online game for a few months. One day I decided to have player ranking, so I took the numbers and worked out a formula that put the good players on the top, and the bad ones on the bottom. Now if I had kept that list totally secret, and showed it to no one, it would have continued to give correct results, but when it was posted on the website, people began working to get up it. Bad players, started figuring out ways to beat the system, and began looking - on the stats - just like good players.

It’s the same way with any active form of profiling. Not all humans are idiots. As soon as bad people see that a twenty eight year old arab male is subject to extra hassles, they will send in sixty nine year old white females.

“It is a mistake to allow any mechanical (or Electronic) object to realize that you are in a hurry.”