Citizens of Fairfax County, Virginia will be voting in a special election on February 3, 2009, to choose a new Chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. Chairman Gerald “Gerry” Connolly (D), who was in his fourth term as a member of the Board and second term as Chairman, won election to the U.S. House of Representatives (VA-11th) in the November general election and left an open seat on the Board. Two County Supervisors—Sharon Bulova (D-Braddock) and Pat Herrity (R-Springfield)—are vying for the seat, joined by Carey Campbell (IG) and Christopher DeCarlo (I).
Inaugural Insanity
Stuff happens in Washington, DC, all the time. That’s part of what makes the DC metro area such an interesting place to live. We have political events—presidential inaugurations, State of the Union addresses, and more—as well as international events like IMF and World Bank meetings, protests, ‘Million Man Marches’, etc. We’ve grown accustomed to it. We don’t bat an eye at a motorcade going by, or Secret Servicemen milling around, or the metallic clang of the recessed, automated road blocks in the roads as we drive around the district—they’re designed to spring up and physically halt all traffic in an emergency. This is part of living near/in Washington.
But every once in a while, the whole place goes absolutely nuts—irrationally, stupidly nuts. The inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama (D) on the 20th—next Tuesday—is one such example.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at the list of planned road closings. Obviously, some road closures are normal and expected for a Presidential inauguration or other major event in the heart of the city. But don’t you think we’re going a bit overboard? Every single Potomac River bridge leading into the city of Washington from Virginia will be closed—the 14th Street Bridge, the Roosevelt Bridge, the Memorial Bridge, the Key Bridge, and the Chain Bridge. Many (but, curiously, not all) of the bridges from the Maryland side of the Anacostia River will be closed too. The entire northern half of the George Washington Memorial Parkway—a major commuter route in Virginia—will be closed. Interstate 66 and Interstate 395, both major commuter routes leading from the outer Virginia suburbs into Arlington, Alexandria, and the District, will all be closed inside the beltway.
In other words, every single major freeway serving Arlington and Alexandria—Virginia areas that shouldn’t have to shut down for an event in DC—will be closed.
Even further out where I live, a solid 25 miles from DC, things are getting all mixed up. The Dulles Toll Road and Interstate 66 will each have HOV restrictions in place from the evening before until 3am on inauguration day, and then from 3am through to 6pm only buses will be permitted to use the HOV lanes that are usually open to all traffic outside of rush hour.
I know they’re expecting a lot of people, but isn’t it a bit overkill to shut down the entire metro region—effecting residents miles and miles and miles away from the city—for a major event downtown? Seriously people. Calm down.
Palm: Back From the Brink?
As I’ve mentioned before, I have had a lot of frustrations about smartphones. Most of them are kludges with major usability or extensibility problems. I finally settled on a BlackBerry Bold as my new phone, which I am very happy with so far, but I’ve had a long-running soft spot for Palm and the long-neglected Palm OS operating system.
Palm lovers like me though have had a rough few years. First, the old Palm Inc. (which made the hardware and the software) lost its way and its original founders left to start a new company called Handspring. Handspring made some great devices which ran the Palm OS made by Palm (under license), including my beloved old Handspring Visor Pro and the original Tréo smartphone.
Then Palm, for reasons nobody really understands, split itself in two. PalmSource was the company that would build the software, and PalmOne would build the handhelds and phones themselves. Both would have legal right to use the name ‘Palm’. PalmOne quickly merged with Handspring (bringing Palm’s original founders back in-house) and embarked upon some of their best hardware devices ever, including the groundbreaking Tréo 600 and Tréo 650 phones that set the course of the smartphone market for years to come.
Changes to Mobile Browser Support
I’ve made a number of modifications to the ‘low-fi’ version of Off on a Tangent that gets fed, primarily, to mobile and text-only browsers. While the mobile version of Safari (the iPhone/iPod browser) and the Android browser each do a decent job of rendering the full version of the site, the drop-down menus and other elements of the site don’t work too well in a mobile environment. As a result I have started sending the low-fi version to mobile Safari and the Android browser.
I also made some modifications to make the low-fi version work better on those two browsers—everything should be readable and usable. I have also improved support for the most recent version of Internet Explorer Mobile on the Windows Mobile 6.1 platform (it should work well in portrait mode in IE 6 Mobile, but there are still some minor issues in landscape mode and on higher-resolution WM devices).
You can see the up-to-date list of supported desktop and mobile browsers (as well as screenshots of the site in each browser) on the ‘About the Site‘ page. While the listed browsers are the ones I actively test with, the site likely works on lots of other browsers too. I expect that the changes I’ve made will improve the site on various unsupported mobile browsers as well.
As always, I recommend you use the most up-to-date version of your chosen browser (since I do all my testing in the newest versions of each). If you have any problems with the site in a supported browser, please let me know!
Permit to Carry a Concealed Handgun
So the folks over at the Fairfax Circuit Court finally woke up and mailed my Concealed Handgun Permit six days past their legal deadline. Apparently the court’s definition of 45 days is, in fact, 51 days. According to the paperwork, the law enforcement folks cleared me on 11/26 (ten days after submitting my application), the circuit court cleared me on 12/18, and the permit has a printed ‘Issue Date’ of 12/29 (which was a couple of days before their deadline).
The postmark on the envelope was 1/6 though, so it either sat around somewhere for a solid week-plus or they falsified their issue date. I’d believe either.
Regardless, I now have permission from the Commonwealth of Virginia to exercise my God-given civil right, guaranteed by the Constitution, to keep and bear arms un-infringed (except in those places where the state chooses to infringe anyway . . . ~sigh~).
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.