Miracle of Miracles.

Today is March twenty-second, two thousand and seven. Remember that date. You will remember it for ages to come. And you will always remember what you were doing when you heard the news of today.

It is a momentous occasion. Unbelievable in its unlikelihood. Unfathomable in its impossibility. Inconceivable in its, um, inconceivability. I have done what many before me have tried and failed at. I have foiled the evil plots of the traffic planners of the City of Irvine and the County of Orange.

I drove the 2.9 miles from home to work without having to stop for any of the 12 traffic lights on the way.

I have documented this glorious achievement so that others might revel in the wonders of the moment. I'm sure that after studying this image, you too will understand the awesomeness of this day. Spread the news! Bring the glad tidings to the nations!

For I, Joe Belland, have made the commute from home to work in four minutes.

From an Actual E-mail I Received Today.

"We are participating in a US Army TATRC and NIST-Threat and Situational Assessment development around Regional Capacity to sense and respond to pandemic flu and similar events. The NIST project will include an effort to add a Bayesian BN onto the Semantic Web stack related to machine learning. Several of our group are participating in OASIS-open.org standards such as EDXL and HAVE as well as OMG efforts in BPM and MDA- RuleML.

"So an obvious question is: can your reports be presented in XML and XSD formats, and are you using OWL-DL now or will you be in the near future?"

A bag of marshmallows to the first person who can tell me what the hell this guy is talking about.* Time is of the essence.

I swear, there must be a government department that does nothing but come up with acronyms for the military and technology. They're probably called the EACD: Excessive Acronym Creation Department. Or maybe the DCTLAFLAOWMLIC: Department for the Creation of Three-Letter Acronyms, Four-Letter Acornyms, and Other Ways of Making Language an Impediment to Communication.

*You must explain what all the acronyms mean to qualify for the marshmallows.