Yes, you are looking at a picture of Crossbo being ridden by a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Yes, that's a real Mountie, and not some clown in a costume. No, he wasn't impounded after an international pursuit for RUI. This picture was taken at a recent clinic provided by the Lexington (KY) Mounted Patrol, with instructors from their force, along with the RCMP and London (England) Metropolitan Police Mounted Branch. It was quite an interesting day. I'll have to admit that I was a little disappointed in Crossbo's and my performance. But I think he learned a little, and I learned a lot about what we both need to learn.

The news for the last few days indicates a severe casualty in the war on terror. The latest victim is the collective sanity of an entire society. Without even trying very hard, the terrorists, with a little help from our government (or do I have that backwards?) have driven us all crazy.

Browsing through the print edition of The Nation, I saw an advertisement from Common Sense for Drug Policy. CSDP is an organization which advocates education and treatment, rather than criminal penalties and incarceration, as a cure for drug problems. In support of their position, they cited the example of Dr. William Stewart Halsted.

Good news from Connecticut. I know this is a day late, and the subject has already been beaten to death in countless blogs. But I just have to give a shoutout to the Democratic voters in Connecticut for dumping that asshole Joe Lieberman in their U.S Senate primary. For several years, I've used Lieberman as a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the Democratic party. Finally people are starting to wake up.

I was killing some time at work this afternoon reading some of the junk that had accumulated in my mailbox this week. There was an official looking envelope from the President's Office with the official "Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct". Pretty dry reading, but I figured if they sent it to me, they must want me to read it on their dime. Besides, I needed to avoid any real work, because the First Commandment of Computer Geekdom is "Thou shalt not break anything on a Friday afternoon."

It's been almost six weeks since I posted anything here, so loyal readers may be wondering whether I have succumbed to some horrendous fate. I'm still alive, I just haven't had any wonderful experiences or stunning insights worth writing about recently. The summer slump seems to be contagious; many blogs seem to be suffering the same fate.

This picture shows the view from my office window, as seen by my crappy cellphone camera. Despite the picture's (lack of) quality, you can see a pile of brush and sawdust which was a tree yesterday. Some readers may suspect me of being a closet tree-hugger and think I'm going to rant about the senseless slaughter of a tree in the prime of its life. Co-workers, who are well aware that my appreciation of nature leans more towards fauna than flora, asked me how much I bribed the chainsaw man to make the tree disappear.

This is the weekend when everbody makes a big deal about some piddly little 2-minute sprint, far less impressive than Kentucky's most exciting equestrian event, which happened last weekend. I managed to avoid the hype, not even learning who won until I saw the newspaper Sunday morning. I didn't manage to actually get on a horse on Derby Day, but Crossbo and I had a nice uneventful ride on Sunday, fulfilling my promise to myself to ride sometime this weekend. Not much to say about that, so I suppose this is mainly going to be a reference to the annual Rolex report.

A recent Computerworld article reports on the Explorer Destroyer campaign to get Internet Explorer users to switch to Firefox. It provides script code that webmasters can add to their sites to determine which browser is being used, and provide gentle or blunt suggestions to Explorer users, or even prevent them from accessing the site. As a website owner with a deep pathological loathing for all things Microsoft, I'll be all over this, right? Wrong. Been there, done that, got over it.

I'm not sure, but I might have said that before. Oh well, it never hurts to say it again. Actually, I just wanted an excuse to show off this picture of me and Crossbo from this month's team chase. I don't have very many good action pictures of me with any of my horses, and until now, I had no jumping pictures of Crossbo. Now I do, thanks to Jim Lane, who has taken a lot of wonderful pictures and very graciously permitted me to use this one here. Check out his work at The Photo Lane.

Actually, although it may not be obvious from the picture, an equally good caption would be "Crossbo saves my ass ... again". We may look like we have the situation well under control, but that's all his doing. I had a foreboding sense of an impending train wreck as we approached that wall. If Crossbo had any doubts at all, he never showed it.