Wow what a story: “Blogs save lives” At very least they saved this guy a lot of grief.

Live video feeds from Baghdad:

• Baghdad Pool Cam (n-tv.de/cnn?)
  http://62.156.242.10/cgi-bin/redirNTV?user=ntv&type=live&name=livecam_300_new.rm
• CNN Live Baghdad Feed (occasional, paste url into RealPlayer)
  rtsp://live1.stream.aol.com/farm/*/encoder/cnn_webcast1_high
• CBS Baghdad Cam

Sunrise in Baghdad happens around 10:30pm EST. This page barely works for me, but the “Mother of all War Websites” has an extensive list of cams. Too bad it’s presented as a mess of semi-functional Java.

The free version of Real Player only allows one window at a time. However on OS X you can duplicate the application and run an unlimited number of copies simultaneously as long as each has a unique names. Note that this is a very processor intensive application and three small windows almost completely bogs down my PowerBook. These look fantastic, but I still don’t like RealPlayer…

Watching these feeds, I’m wondering why I don’t have live video on my site yet. If these guys can set up multiple webcams in Iraq with little more than a briefcase, I should be able to do it in my apartment. In theory, it shouldn’t be any more complicated than hosting a network video game. The camera which will become my new outdoor webcam was ordered today and should be here next week (backordered). Annoyingly, my PD-100 continues not to be recognized by OS X. I downloaded the Darwin Streaming Server and Quicktime Broadcaster last night, hopefully they won’t be too hard to get working whenever I get a few minutes to try them out.

Bob Arnot was just reporting live on MSNBC from the middle of a firefight outside Al Kut. A family and several children were somehow caught in the middle, probably used as human shields by the Iraqi army. All were apparently rescued by the Marines. Arnot was with the civilians in a foxhole, comforting a young girl who couldn’t stop crying. He gave a three-year old a fig-bar from some humanitarian rations. In the middle of a battle a little girl ate some American snack food and smiled. Constant gunfire could be heard, sometimes larger guns would overwhelm all other sounds.

One can never adequately count their blessings.

update: MSNBC video of the report.

Several blocks of Avenue A was closed by the police midday Friday due to a suspicious package. The closed area stretched from 9th St down to at least 6th and included portions of Tompkin’s Square Park (most notably the playground) and several side streets (including St. Marks Place between 1st and A). I didn’t see anything on the news about the closure and thankfully it was apparently all just a precaution.

“This is what I signed up to do, to help people.”

Actions have consequences. I’ve been reading Henry Norr’s columns about Mac technology in various publications for probably a decade, but I have to side with his employers here. Mr. Norr wasn’t suspended because of his beliefs, he was suspended because his beliefs interfered with his job, because he lied, and because he asked his employer to endorse his beliefs by paying him for missed days of work.

Here he basically makes their case for them:

“On Wednesday, March 19, after the bombing of Baghdad began and I got home from a long protest march in the rain, I sent e-mail to my immediate supervisors informing them that I planned to get arrested the following morning and wouldn’t be in until I got out of jail.”

“Nevertheless, claiming sick pay for the day wasn’t a point of principle for me. My supervisor knew exactly why I was out of work that day.”

Protesting for a cause is not the same as serving in the National Guard, your employer is under no legal obligation to honor your ‘commitment’ and keep your job open when you return. If you cut work with the intention of being arrested, then claim that day as a sick day, you lied and should face the consequences. Having a job means going to work. Keeping a job means you protest on the weekends or after hours. At very least you do not claim a day missed because you willingly broke the law as a sick day and ask your employer to pay you. That’s essentially asking them to endorse your behavior and political agenda, and that’s just plain wrong. Additionally, although not explicitly stated, Mr. Norr apparently missed more than just Thursday, having spent Wednesday the 19th protesting in the rain.

Mr. Norr needs to step back and reevaluate these events. Regardless of his beliefs, in this situation he’s clearly in the wrong.

I finally wrote a workaround for the worst joesfilters.com CSS float problems introduced by Safari v60. There are still plenty of problems with float handling and margin collapsing in this version and I really wish Apple would publicly release the fixes mentioned by Dave Hyatt.