I'm outta office. Too late sucka!

E-mail records required by law to be available were "lost" during the Bush administration and somehow no one seemed to end up bearing the responsibility. That aside, the e-mails have now been "found" and it will be very interesting to see what's in them.

Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive, said "many poor choices were made during the Bush administration and there was little concern about the availability of e-mail records despite the fact that they were contending with regular subpoenas for records and had a legal obligation to preserve their records."

"We may never discover the full story of what happened here," said Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director. "It seems like they just didn't want the e-mails preserved."

"It seems like they just didn't want the e-mails preserved"…. No kidding. During a time when they were blocking the subpeona's of congress for Whitehouse staffers to testify against them for the screwups of WMDs in Iraq, the CIA leak, the security agency spying case, and more. I wonder what they could have to hide?

More importantly, can they retro-actively impeach him or is there some kind of statue of limitations? One of the biggest mistakes Obama has already made was to say that we should look forward and not back. That is incorrect mister president. The American public needs to see that abusers of power are held accountable. Make it so!

Betcha never meant for that to be public

So Facebook is not exactly known for protecting people's privacy. Besides many grievous displays of poor security, they have only added decent privacy controls over time none of which matter because you can get to the pictures anyway and every installed Facebook app can get all your data too.

All that aside, assume that setting your privacy controls is still better than not setting them. Facebook pulled a real jerk move recently when it required all users when they first logged in for the day to make a decision about their privacy settings. You had to click to keep your current settings, but if you didn't, it would open your profile up using the new default settings.

Though it doesn't probably change anything in the long run, it's quite satisfying to know that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, fell prey to his own tactic.

In a bit of very interesting timing, Zuckerberg’s photos have been made public to the entire internet, mostly through a post from gossip blog Gawker, after Kashmir Hill at True/Slant discovered and reported that Zuckerberg was sharing photos with a wide circle — friends of friends — and his event calendar with everyone.

Serves him right.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment about whether Zuckerberg’s changes to his privacy settings were deliberate, leadership-by-example-style actions. But in a status update on his profile (pictured above), Zuckerberg says he sets most of his content open and “didn’t see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :)”

Sure… He claims that he didn't mind that they were public and that he did it on purpose. Of course it wasn't proof positive that the settings changes are confusing and designed to nudge people out of their privacy into the public eye. Still, some would claim foul.

But why did Zuck suddenly decide to be less private than two months ago, when his settings were uber-private? You couldn’t even friend him before, and you certainly couldn’t see him shirtless..

The fact that Zuck drastically reduced his privacy settings makes me think the Facebook CEO did this accidentally, and now doesn’t want to change back for fear of the resulting PR disaster.

I wonder if Zuckerberg is regretting this move now. He can't go back towards privacy without making it seem that he's a hypocrite. Still, you have to wonder if he's going to start posting less information to his event calendar and photo albums than before since it's been forced for PR reasons to remain public.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

This chart is a little eye-opening. I already knew that a lot of bottled water is actually filtered tap water, but I didn't know (nor am I surprised) that the regulation on bottled water is insufficient. If you want to buy a bottle of water, go ahead, but know what you're getting for the money.

Presented by Online Education

The Facts About Bottled Water

(Image is used under the Pixabay license)

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Amazon.com, but this season, it's more hate. I found the gift I'd been looking for on Amazon for about $10 cheaper than my normal favorite, Newegg.com.

However, I suppose nothing cheap comes without strings attached, not at Amazon anyway. Check out this BS:

Are you kidding me? (click for the full picture)

So not only are they saying that with more than 20 days lead time, they can't get me this item by Christmas and it's not free shipping as was promised, but there's hope! If I sign up for "AMAZON PRIME" I get not only free shipping, but it comes on time. It's only 80 FREAKING DOLLARS should I somehow forget to cancel.

Ok, so I could just sign up and cancel right away, but I shouldn't have to jump through goofy hoops just to buy something and this smacks entirely of deliberate obstacles for the sake of pushing me into their "premium service". I don't do deceptive.

For $10 more, I just kept my business at Newegg.com which has been the most consistently excellent source of electronics research and prices all while maintaining excellent customer service. Be sure to take your business there too.

Update: It's the 11th and my gift already arrived. I wonder why Newegg's free standard ground shipping managed to get me my item in less than 5 days, but somehow Amazon just couldn't do it in less than 20 unless I signed up for Amazon Prime… Hmmm…. It's a mystery.

A friend asked me today how to wrap text around an image in PowerPoint and it occurred to me that I had never done or even tried to do that. So I looked up the answer and found this from Microsoft's webpage:

We want to wrap this

There! That's better!

The trick is to use a built in Microsoft function called the tab key. That right… there is no function. First you put your graphic behind the text (and make sure the textbox doesn't have a background color). Then, Microsoft's own tutorial says you have to use tabs or the spacebar to create empty space over the image.

"Sure", you say, "but that's an irregular object. If I want to wrap around something square on the left or right, that should be much easier right?" Rest assured, it is.

In that case, all you have to do is create three different text boxes. One above the image, one to the side, and one below. Use the same font and size and be sure to place the boxes so they look like the text in the top flows to the one on the side then bottom when they're actually just three different boxes.

Seriously! Those are the instructions for wrapping text. What kills me is that sounds exactly like what I'd tell someone as a hack to make it work when no other way exists which must mean that it's an unsupported feature in PowerPoint. I can only assume that there's so little demand for this feature that they still haven't bothered to add it even to their 2007 version of office. Tags: Bad Design, Computers, Hacking, Microsoft, PowerPoint