dustbury.com
"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."

• OG&E says they're done
  

  They projected "7 to 10 days," and it took 10:

  "We will not stop until every last customer's lights are on," said OG&E spokesman Brian Alford. "It was 10 days ago when we said we expected a seven- to 10-day restoration. This storm affected 300,000 customers, the largest outage in OG&E's 105-year history. We congratulate everyone who has worked so hard to restore the OG&E electric system. They did it safely, with zero accidents. We also thank our customers for their patience and understanding."

  SystemWatch is reporting just under 3000 outages, presumably those individuals whose electrical hardware was damaged by the storm and who must repair it before service can be reconnected. Most of them are on Oklahoma City's south side; the city has set up a hotline to report damaged meter bases which will be open through today and which will arrange for repairs largely on FEMA's tab. (The $500 repair will be paid for, $350 by FEMA, the rest split between the city and the state; OG&E will furnish hardware.)

• The voice of experience is heard
  

  My Usenet reader of choice for over ten years has been Forté Agent. One of its less-enthralling options is to pop you over to the What's New page every so often, to let you know if there's a new build out there, or if there are other changes in the works.

  This month they have a new item in the FAQ, and it goes like this:

  Only runs once when installed in Vista
  This is probably caused by running Agent from the installer when you installed Agent. This is not your fault, the option is there. However, Vista is stupid. It assumes that any and all actions taken from the installer is part of the installation process, which is a protected process, and will not allow those same actions to be taken from a non-administrator account later. Since Agent was initially launched from the installer, Vista is assuming that action is part of the installation process. By uninstalling Agent and re-installing without that option set, the installer finishes before you run Agent and it's therefore not seen as an installation process, but a regular process.

  I suspect that this advice could apply to almost anything being installed under Vista: when the installer finishes with "Start [name of software product] now?" you should probably tell it No on general principle.

  (Mac guys: What's a good Usenet client for OS X? I may need to know this some day.)

• Quote of the week
  

  Jesse Walker reports from the campaign trail for Reason:

  Tom Tancredo has dropped out of the presidential race. He will be replaced by Montezuma Aztlán Calderón, an undocumented worker from Oaxaca who will denounce the Brown Peril for just $3 an hour plus room and board.

  Yeah, but how is he on punching hippies?

• Rejoicing at the 41st hour
  

  About three years ago, the Bush administration adopted changes in the rules governing overtime pay, changes that were reviled by Democrats and which turned out to affect me not in the slightest. [Link goes to PDF file.]

  This proposal, however, would actually put a few bucks in my pocket:

  Congresswoman Mary Fallin [R-OK] has introduced legislation that would exclude overtime pay from gross income, making it exempt from the federal income tax. The bill immediately attracted several cosponsors and has been endorsed by Americans for Tax Reform.

  The ATR endorsement says [link goes to PDF file]:

  Taxes in general discourage economic activity. Taxing overtime wages sends a signal to hardworking Americans that no matter the extra hours they put in, the government will continue taking a share of their earnings.

  In a time of uncertain economic conditions, encouraging productivity is a positive step for Congress to take.
  

  Actually, had I my druthers, I'd just as soon the government taxed the overtime and let me off the hook for the regular hours, but that seems even less likely to become reality than Fallin's bill does. The opposition, I presume, will have to fall back on the "loss of revenue" argument, inasmuch as those Horrible Rich Folks who are always getting tax breaks wouldn't be getting anything out of this one.

• We'll have none o' those things
  

  The Tire Rack has been after me to write a review of the last set of tires I bought from them, and last weekend I did so. Now normally I'm not one to complain about a spate of editing, even when it's inflicted on me, but when it's purely mechanical, it grates a bit.

  Here's the entire suite of reviews for this tire, and there's not an apostrophe to be seen in the bunch: evidently the Web form they use strips this character somewhere in the import process. I realize that this character can introduce problems, but this seems like excessively-strict sanitation to me, especially since the double-quote character seems to work correctly.

  I did like the tires, though.

• Fee, fi, faux, f---!
  

  According to the Humane Society of the United States, some of the fake fur you might find at retail isn't fake at all:

  Certain jackets ... with the brand names Burberry, Andrew Marc, Marc New York, Preston & York, Aqua, Ramosport and Adam+Eve were found to be falsely advertised or mislabeled as faux fur or "ecological" fur when in fact they are trimmed with real animal fur.

  These brands generally are beyond my budget — usually my choices are between a real poncho and a Sears poncho — but I'm pretty sure that anything fuzzy I own is proudly synthetic. Now leather, that's another matter.

  (Via the Consumerist.)

• Chillingly non-inclusive
  

  While various folks get their BVDs knotted over the presence of Christmas trees and other malign contrivances of the season, we're overlooking the real villains here: the people who write the damn songs you can't escape.

  Herewith, Exhibit A.

• What's more, it's Big
  

  A Kansas firm called Big Industrial LLC has bought the old Dayton Tire plant on Council Road and will turn it into the Will Rogers Industrial Park.

  Bridgestone/Firestone closed the plant last year, citing declining interest in its low-end tire lines. About 1800 jobs were lost.

  The facility covers 2.5 million square feet on 310 acres. One possible selling point is the presence of an onsite gas-powered cogeneration plant, which may reduce utility costs for the new tenants, and "tenants" is plural: in recognition of market realities — turning the whole place over to a single firm is unlikely — Big Industrial is prepared to subdivide as needed. The demand is presumably there, though: the local vacancy rate, despite this and other plant closings, is still only about 10 percent. (A group led by Terryl Zerby bought out the old Western Electric/Lucent plant; speculation is rife that Tinker Air Force Base will absorb the former GM Assembly facility.) Proposed lease price is $2.50 per square foot; if fully leased, the new park will earn $6 million a year.

  The name change for the plant p