The blogosphere is abuzz (well, buzzing just a little, given the topic) over Obama’s choice for Secretary of Transportation: the hitherto unknown Rep. (as in REPUBLICAN) Rep. from Illinois, Ray LaHood.  Given OB’s promise to bridge partisanship in his cabinet, the choice, while coming from left-field, shouldn’t surprise: LaHood has a reputation as a centrist, and has a record, sort-of, of supporting infrastructure spending (if only because Caterpillar is one of his largest campaign contributors).  But dissent over the choice isn’t hard to find.

Given the train-wreck (or bridge collapse, or metaphor of choice) of an infrastructure policy we’ve been blessed with, shouldn’t the President Elect have chosen someone a bit more forward thinking?   What gives?

On a selfish note, we here at Blinktag Inc. might garner a contract or two investigating the cause of the next catastrophic failure.  But as a nation, we deserve better.

Has anyone else ever wondered why flickr uploadr sucks so much?  I think the Mac version is particularly bad – it crashes if you try to upload more than a few pics at a time, you can’t really batch edit any of the metadata or rename your shots . . . all around a frustrating experience, all the more so because Flickr is actually a pretty good site.

For those of you who use Adobe Lightroom to manage your pictures (I’m a big fan), I’ve found this solution.  It gives you (almost) all the flexibility you need to process and rename images and, best of all, hasn’t crashed on me yet.

One of the perks of self employment is that you can take as long a vacation as you’d want – even better, you can work from cyber cafes in whatever crazy country you wind up in.  At least you’d think that would be the case.

But Africa presents a special set of problems.  First, most places have special software that block all programs other than IE6 (if you’re lucky!).  The second problem (Dakar, I’m thinking of you) is that unpaved roads means a lot of dust, and keyboards and sand are a bad combination.

Here’s the worst part (especially if you can’t access the keyboard settings on your control panel in XP):

Thailand, it ain’t.  Happy travels.