Segacs’s World I Know

Excess baggage on Thai Airways can be very costly, as this guy learned the hard way:

Bob Wolfe and his wife were flying from Bangkok‘s Suvarnabhumi Airport to Panama. At the counter, Wolfe was told that his four bags were each about 2 kg or 3 kg over the 32 kg limit, and that he’d have to pay a penalty.

Wolfe was sent to a Thai Airways office where he says a number of employees discussed how much he should be charged for the bags. They argued with each other. They made phone calls. They looked generally confused, he says. More than an hour later, a verdict was rendered: Wolfe owed 66,000 Thai baht, or approximately $2,200.

Of course, it does beg the question of why this couple needed over 128kg of stuff for a trip to Panama in the first place. But, seriously, ouch!

Is Vietnam the latest country to block access to Facebook?

Since last week, it seems that way. Even though the Vietnamese government is issuing denials.

Some Vietnamese Facebook users launched a Facebook group in protest of the blockage, but as of right now it appears to only have a handful of members. Hmmm, wonder why that could be?

Of course, as Barack Obama found out last week after giving a speech in China about internet freedom, protests against censorship have an above-average risk of, well, being censored.

Au revoir, Gui.

So, how do you like the new look?

It’s the latest in the long list of changes that have been taking place around here. The first step was my move to my own hosting at segacs.com after Geocities closed. Now, the bigger news is that I have officially migrated from Blogger to WordPress – a move that was long overdue.

Shiny! New! Features! include:

• Improved post navigation by calendar archive, keyword search, categories and tagging
• Inline commenting, including threaded comments
• Post pages – finally! – with proper permalinks (yeah, I know, that’s so 2005…)
• Improved RSS feeds
• Updated look and feel
• … and more still to come!

Needless to say, you’ll want to update any old permalinks that you still had lying around. Redirects from old segacs.com links should be working, but I can’t do anything about broken Geocities links, unfortunately. So please update them on your end.

The actual blog migration has been a real headache, and is the result of weeks of behind-the-scenes work. And I’m not quite done yet. You may still notice some broken links or images, and I’ll be rolling out a few new features and still tweaking the look and feel in the next little while. But, I’m up and running (and I am feeling quiet proud of that accomplishment, being something of a technical neophyte and all).

Got any feedback on the new look? Any WordPress tips? Feel free to share suggestions and advice here.

Iran continues to play nuclear weapons chicken with a world community that’s basically out of options. But, according to Barack Obama, there’s a silver lining to the world’s powerlessness to stop Iran from going nuclear: At least the world is united in its powerlessness:

Obama added: “Our expectation is that over the next several weeks, we will be developing a package of potential steps that we could take that will indicate our seriousness to Iran. . . . I continue to hold out the prospect that they may decide to walk through this door. I hope they do. But what I am pleased about is the extraordinary international unity that we have seen.”

Well, that’s nice. Even if it’s nowhere near accurate.

Oh, the irony:

Texas’ gay marriage ban may have banned all marriages

Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston lawyer and Democratic candidate for attorney general, says that a 22-word clause in a 2005 constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriages erroneously endangers the legal status of all marriages in the state.

The amendment, approved by the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that “marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.” But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:

“This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”

Architects of the amendment included the clause to ban same-sex civil unions and domestic partnerships. But Radnofsky, who was a member of the powerhouse Vinson & Elkins law firm in Houston for 27 years until retiring in 2006, says the wording of Subsection B effectively “eliminates marriage in Texas,” including common-law marriages.

There’s some sort of metaphor here about how bigots who live in glass houses shouldn’t try to circumvent people’s rights or something. Rather than try to find the words for it, I think I’ll just have a good laugh.

I looked outside and saw masses of cars honking like crazy and waving Algerian flags out the windows. And I had to ask myself why.

Oh. That’s why.

Algeria became the last African nation to qualify for the 2010 World Cup finals on Wednesday, beating Egypt 1-0 in a bruising playoff in neutral Sudan. The breakthrough came in the 40th minute, when defender Antar Yahya’s volley clipped the bar and ducked in from a long cross from Karim Ziani.

Let the games begin…

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The first decade of the century (the 00’s?) is coming to a close in a little more than a month. A lot happened in the past ten years. Need a recap? Here’s Newsweek’s American-centric but still impressive 7-minute summary of the decade:

Hard to believe that this time ten years ago, we were worried about the Y2K bug, and now we’re worried about the H1N1 bug. Plus ça change…