Jericho: The Home Game

Wired has an interesting story on Staging the Largest Terrorism-Response Drill in U.S. History.

The scene is supposed to simulate the effects of a “radiological dispersal device” — a dirty bomb.

Sounds like fun.

Victims are given an identity, symptoms, and vital signs, all printed on a card worn throughout the day. Over scrambled eggs and coffee, a group of twentysomethings have a good laugh over one of them being assigned “watery and bloody feces.” One woman wants to see a stranger’s gaping cranial wound.

You could do worse, I guess.

Blog updates

I’ve made a number of changes to my blog recently that I thought I’d point out, feedback is appreciated on any/all.

First off, I’d love some feedback on the fantastic caricature created by caricatureking.com.

With the help of Simple Tags WordPress plugin, I was able to clean up my tags. I’d highly recommend this plugin, you can do mass additions, renames, merges and deleted of tags, automatically tag new (and existing) articles based on their content, display that handy “Related Links” near the bottom, all in a nice clean easy to use interface. Especially useful, when creating new posts, after typing the first letter or two of a tag, Simple Tags shows me matching tags, so hopefully the days of having redundant tags like “humour, humor, jokes, funny” are over.

I also have a handy Contact page up at the top of my blog, this one is powered by Contact Form 7

I also updated Sensitive Tag Cloud, which allows navigating content based on tags which apply to the current view, rather then just showing a huge mess of tags.

Lastly, thanks to the fine folks at UsedCalgary.com providing a data feed, I now have an up-to-date listing of the most recently added items in my for-sale list in the sidebar, and I only slightly feel like a whore.

Feedback on any/all is appreciated!

Australia issues travel warning against Canada

The website, which is run by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, has Canada listed as a country where travellers should “exercise caution,” which is the second-lowest rating out of five – the highest being “do not travel.”

Several risks are listed, including:

  • Avalanches
  • Heavy Snow
  • Windchill
  • Forest Fires
  • Terrorist Attack
  • Celine Dion

Interestingly,

Countries listed as safer than Canada include China, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Belarus, Romania, South Korea, Ireland, Norway, Japan and Latvia.

Wow, that’s… special.