Perri Nelson's Website 

The Litvinenko saga continues...

In a somewhat disjointed article the BBC says that there may have been multiple attempts to poison Alexander Litvinenko.

There may have been multiple attempts to kill Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko before he died, BBC One's Panorama programme has discovered.

The first poison bid may have come two weeks before he met Mario Scaramella in a sushi bar on 1 November.

More than one poisoning attempt? That doesn't sound too surprising. Poisonings don't always come off as planned. At least they don't on "The Forensic Files" (OK, this isn't a Court TV docu-drama, but you get the point).

The programme also visited Laboratory Number 12 in Moscow.

An anonymous ex-Soviet intelligence officer said: "It's the laboratory that every year gets its budget to work with radioactive poisons."

Isn't that interesting? A Russian laboratory with an annual budget to work with "radioactive poisons"?

Since Russia has effectively managed to block and suppress the investigation of this murder, we may never find out the truth. But every new story seems to point the finger back at Russia and Vladimir Putin.

Earlier posts:

• Another Kremlin Critic in the Litvinenko Mess
• Did a "highly placed" Russian have Litvinenko assassinated?
• Who's killing Kremlin critics?
• Russia promises to block extradition of Litvinenko's murderer
• Ex-spy's death to be treated as murder
• Russian security service 'led poison plot'
• Yushchenko, Politkovskaya, Litvinenko, and Gaidar?
• Radiation found on London-Moscow route planes
• Litvinenko victim of "state-sponsored" assassination
• Did Vladimir Putin have Alexander Litvinenko silenced?

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Mark My Words, The Random Yak, Big Dog's Weblog, basil's blog, Shadowscope, DragonLady's World, The Bullwinkle Blog, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, stikNstein... has no mercy, Pirate's Cove, Constitution Matters, Dumb Ox Daily News, High Desert Wanderer, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Snap Preview Anywhere

I'm sure you've all seen this cute little blogging widget. When a website includes the javascript and they've got the options configured right, it's pretty cool looking.

The user comes to the website and mouses around. As the mouse hovers over a hyperlink on the page up comes a balloon window. Inside the balloon is a quick little preview image of the website linked to.

I used it for a while on this site, and there's a lot of sites that are using it. I've decided to drop it though, at least for now.

When I first saw previews on basil's blog, I thought they were pretty cool, and decided I had to try it out. I had them up and running on the site for a day or two, but took them down after that because they were just a bit too slow for my tastes.

After all, when you use just about every cool third party feature on your blog, some of them are going to take more time to load than others. The more features you stuff into the blog, the slower it loads. If one of those features is provided by a bandwidth-challenged service, you can end up with some terrible delays while the site loads.

That was my experience the first couple of days with Snap Preview Anywhere. They've since managed to get past that and they load much quicker, so I decided to give it another try.

I took them down this time for a couple of different reasons. First, there's something about their javascript that IE doesn't like. I'm always getting some sort of notice indicating that there's an invalid argument in the script. I'm sure they'll fix that in a hurry though.

My second reason is why I won't be bringing them back though. The popups are cool, but they get in the way of using the hyperlinks.

Half the time when I want to follow an "enhanced" hyperlink the popup opens while I'm in the process of trying to click and my click goes nowhere. More often than not, if I want to open the link in a new window and I right-click, the context menu is screwed up and looks like the context menu for an image instead of a link.

I know that I could click on the preview image to follow the link, but why would I want to? Two, or three clicks to go where one click was all I needed before is more than a little annoying.

Snap Preview Anywhere is a cool widget. But for me, it's too much of a distraction from why I go to a web site in the first place. Its presence or absence on a page isn't going to change whether I read your blog though. As for me and my site, well, I guess you'll have to preview somewhere else.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Random Yak, Big Dog's Weblog, stikNstein... has no mercy, basil's blog, Shadowscope, DragonLady's World, Pirate's Cove, Constitution Matters, The Bullwinkle Blog, Dumb Ox Daily News, Conservative Cat, High Desert Wanderer, Right Voices, and Pursuing Holiness, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog

That's how the old joke goes. Once long ago there was a cartoon with that for a caption.

Some people think that the Internet gives them anonymity. But it doesn't. Everywhere you go on the Internet you leave a trail.

In order for two computers to communicate, they have to be able to establish a connection. On the Internet, that means sharing an IP address with each other, even if it's for a brief period of time.

There are services that help to make you more anonymous, by pooling IP addresses and relaying traffic, but most people don't use them. Anybody that sees my site offer a weather forecast in the sidebar has been here before, and I know where your ISP lives, not that I ever intend to do anything else with that information.

The point is, that you're almost never really anonymous on the Internet. But, it sure seems that way to a lot of people. So some dogs pretend they're people. And when they do, sometimes people get hurt. From the Seattle Post Intelligencer: [UPDATE - I mistyped the original link. I've now corrected it.]

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- He was an 18-year-old Marine headed to war.

She was an attractive young woman sending him off with pictures and lingerie.

Or so each one thought.

In reality, they were two middle-aged people carrying on an Internet fantasy based on seemingly harmless lies.

When a truthful 22-year-old was drawn in, authorities say, their cyber escape turned deadly.

"When you're on the Internet talking, you haven't got a clue who that is on the other end," Erie County Sheriff's Lt. Ron Kenyon said. "You don't have a clue."

When Brian Barrett was shot to death Sept. 15 outside the factory where he worked to help pay for college, investigators and his family were stumped.

You know where this is going don't you? For the rest of the details, go read the article. It's a pretty frightening story about what can happen when fantasies and lies affect real people.

Harmless lies? I don't think so. There was a lot of harm done here. Brian Barrett is dead and three families lives have been disrupted in a bad way. The alleged murderer's family has to deal with what he appears to have done. So does the woman's family. Not to mention Brian Barretts family.

On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog. But they just might get bitten by your fleas.

Trackposted to Big Dog's Weblog, stikNstein... has no mercy, basil's blog, Shadowscope, DragonLady's World, Pirate's Cove, The Bullwinkle Blog, Conservative Cat, High Desert Wanderer, Pursuing Holiness, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Monday...

Holy cow! Is it Monday already?

This is your open trackbacks post for Monday, January 22, 2007. If you have something interesting you'd like to share, feel free to link it here and leave a trackback.

Just remember the trackback policy.

For the best exposure, go to the blogger's oasis and use the linkfest chooser to choose the posts you'd like to hook up with.