rudis dot net

From Xinhua:

Japan starts to fingerprint foreigners_English_Xinhua: "OKYO, Nov. 20 (Xinhua) -- Japan's new Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law took effect on Tuesday, authorizing the government to fingerprint and photograph all foreigners aged 16 or over upon entering Japan at 126 ports and 27 airports.

The law made Japan the second country following the United States to fingerprint and photograph foreigners.

During inspection of Tokyo's Narita International Airport on Monday, Japanese Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama said the law could help block terrorists and repatriated foreigners from entering Japan.

The procedure is to affect up to 7 million of the 8 million people entering Japan annually. The electronic system will send the information to the Justice Ministry's host computer, which will then check against a blacklist based on the Interpol and other institutions."

Before you go to Japan, you might want to ask how they are storing your biometric data (if they are storing it) and what the procedures are to have it deleted.

I wonder how long we can keep our dollar low enough to keep attracting visitors before it becomes completely worthless.

I'm ready for a change in Washington if only to give someone else a chance to royally screw up our economy, foreign policy and energy strategy. The problem is that there are really no candidates out there who seem to have any ideas how to make it better.

The ladies leave tomorrow (Wed), so I'll be "back" online then and can get to some e-mails (sorry, Mr D) and regale you with tails of our familial adventures this past week together. I also finally fixed a problem with FlickrExport and uploaded some pictures that have been lagging for a while: More Seattle Pix.

The final reason I'll be "back" online is that I broke down and got an AT&T HSPDA ExpressCard for my MacBook Pro so I can be online on my own terms.

Enjoy the pix and look for an update tomorrow night (PST, remember)...

Mary & Tori touched down ~10:47am. Long flight, but they are now tooling around the University District while I'm stuck in meetings.

It is *so* good to see them after three weeks.

Made it to the airport for real this time (more on that in a trip summary later). We leave @ 1430, so we've got ~1 hr to kill. *Not* looking forward to the 5.5 hr trip from DC to Seattle. At least LVIA has free wireless internet access.