There used to be a time when twitter.com spammers still made an effort to disguise the fact that they’re, well… spammers:

Subtle, really!

Update on the unlucky rock slide story: Apparently it’s going to be closed for five days, meaning we have to leave much earlier in order to take an alternative route to Vancouver.

I can’t exactly say I am looking forward to spending 7 instead of 3 hours in the bus At least I am not flying back straight to Pittsburgh on Friday, so at least it won’t be followed by another 8 hours or so of traveling.

Update: My bus was rescheduled to 3 am in the morning. Looks like I’m not going to go to bed that night and just sleep on the bus.

Update 2: Thank heaven somebody filed a bug on this: Can’t get out of Whistler — can’t be long until this gets fixed!

Oops, a rock slide trapped us in Whistler: “Rock slide closes Vancouver to Whistler route” (cbc.ca)

Luckily, there’s still time until Friday to clean it up. Had it happened on departure day, there’d be over 400 flights to reschedule. Good times.

Update: The story of Mozilla being trapped seems to get a little press feedback: On ZDNET, for example, and the local press wants to cover our experience as well.

Update 2: The highway is to reopen today (Saturday) night, they say.

“The smoking bans in the German states of Baden-Württemberg and Berlin violate the constitution. However, the laws stay valid until the end of 2009, by when the parliaments have to pass new laws.”

Seen on tagesschau.de (German). Crazy. Baden-Württemberg happens to be the state I live in.

It seems, the laws violate the rights of owners of very small bars. Why? Because owners of bigger bars are allowed to designate special areas to smokers; in smaller bars, that’s impossible, leading to a significant disadvantage for these bars. As people won’t have a way to smoke there, they’ll move on to bigger bars instead, violating the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of profession.

Apparently, while only the anti-smoking laws of two states were in question here, this is a big signal for the other 14 states as well, as most of them have almost identical laws in place.

We’ll see how the state governments react to that. If I had to guess, I’d say they’ll allow bar owners under a specific square meter size of the establishment to choose whether or not they want to be a smoking or non-smoking venues.