In what one environmentalist described as “yet another public relations disaster” for embattled energy giant BP, CEO Tony Hayward took time off Saturday to attend a glitzy yacht race around England’s Isle of Wight.

[...]

Spokeswoman Sheila Williams said Hayward took a break from overseeing BP efforts to stem the undersea gusher in Gulf of Mexico so he could watch his boat “Bob” participate in the J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race. The 52-foot yacht is made by the Annapolis, Maryland-based boatbuilder Farr Yacht Design.

That dude is one big jackass.

Lawmakers told BP Chief Operating Officer Tony Hayward on Thursday that they intend to grill him on what they believe to be cost-cutting measures adopted by the oil giant that compromised the safety of the Gulf of Mexico well.

“After learning of risks, BP made a decision to ignore them,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, citing documents and confidential e-mails obtained by investigators.

Waxman also said BP’s top leadership was “apparently oblivious” to the design and safety of the oil well.

The documents are strikingly consistent, which was the first thing that jumped out to us. You start to see a couple central themes. And those were: internal criticism for a lack of accountability in the company, lack of support for workers at BP and at BP’s contractors. … [There was also] a consistent emphasis of profits over production over safety and maintenance and environmental compliance, meaning they were putting profits ahead of safety. And finally, a systematic disregard for maintenance of their equipment. It’s a process that they call ‘run to failure’ where they would use the equipment for as long as possible while investing as little effort and money in maintaining it as possible.

It’s surprising to me that it has taken this long for such a catastrophe to take place.

Over one month after the initial explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, crude oil continues to flow into the Gulf of Mexico, and oil slicks have slowly reached as far as 12 miles into Louisiana’s marshes. According to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, more than 65 miles of Louisiana’s shoreline has now been oiled. BP said it will be at least Wednesday before they will try using heavy mud and cement to plug the leak, a maneuver called a “top kill” that represents their best hope of stopping the oil after several failed attempts. Based on low estimates, at least 6 million gallons of crude have spewed into the Gulf so far – though some scientists have said they believe the spill already surpasses the 11 million-gallon 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska as the worst in U.S. history.

Gut-wrenching.

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Dear God.

We’re no strangers to silly app rejection emails from Apple, but this one seems to take the cake (at least in our opinion). Convertbot 1.4 was rejected because our icon for Time is too similar to one of Apple’s default resource icons for History/Recent. They say users might get confused that our Time category might mean History or Recent. Now I might be able to understand if this happened when we first submitted Convertbot, but there have been multiple releases already so why is this a show-stopper now? It does worry me that our product has to be held back for another 1-2 weeks for something so trivial.

So what’s the plan? I need to redo the icon, I suppose. But Convertbot icons were meant to use as little lines/shapes as possible to identify the category. I feel that our current icon represents time as simple as possible. So how can we make Time different? What if it’s set at 9 o’clock instead of 3? Is that acceptable? The big problem here is the only way I can get that answer is by making the change, resubmitting the app, and waiting another week or 2 for Apple’s verdict.

Ridiculous.