Travel Rants...
I just came back from an eight day trip. First a week of W3C XQuery WG meetings in Clearwater (much nicer weather than Boston that was also offered :-)), then some nice dives with Ocean Quest Dive Center together with Jim Melton (of SQL standardization fame and also member of the XQuery WG) on Saturday. We did five dives: one on the Eagle (a nice wreck at about 30m depth), and a day and night dive at Hens and Chickens, one of the nicest reef dives in the Keys (and only 6 meters deep). Since my UW Flash's battery were not cooperating, I will not have many pictures, but Jim took some as well, and I may be able to convince him to put some up on the Web.
Finally, I planned to travel to our PSS site in Charlotte to present and talk about Yukon's XML support. Unfortunately, the freezing rain in Charlotte closed the offices there so that I spent half a day in Charlotte sitting in my Hotel room doing some work. Oh well...
But now to the rant: Airline security gets bizzare. On three of my 4 flight legs, I had to go through the special security line (where you are specially searched). In fact I when through the searches four times, since it looks like that you cannot take any tool (not even a small wrench) into your hand luggage anymore. I just wonder what a terrorist would do with a wrench on the plane? Trying to take it apart? Not only that, but it looks like I (and many others) got chosen for the additional screening because we were on non-return tickets. I don't think terrorists will care about having to buy return tickets... Such profiling is just dumb. Every clever person will be able to figure out the profiling rules and attempt to fit in. The only ways to really avoid that is to either screen everybody at that level or add a random factor in. Note, I do not complain about the searches (the TSA staff was nice and helpful and took my wrench incident with humor and stride), but about the assumption that such type of profiling is actually going to achieve anything...
(Later addition: And if you read this article about the TSA No-Fly list (found at Steve Maine's blog), I fear it will only get worse. Catholic nuns...)