Katherine Hepburn has died today.

On my desk right next to me is a DVD of The Philadelphia Story. This is a movie that showed off the true potential of movies. She had an amazing on screen presense.
She was a wonderful actress and will be fondly remembered. A real class act, that dame.
I talked about her before in Episode 7.
My, she was yar.

Piracy is up 20% so far this year.
Most piracy is in the area around Malaysia, so it is mostly a southeast Asia problem. Australia is taking measures to better protect its fleets, but its becoming more of an issue. Apparently a good bit of the piracy is being commited by Muslim rebels.

My Pirate name is Captain Jack Vane.

Even though there’s no legal rank on a pirate ship, everyone recognizes you’re the one in charge. You tend to blend into the background occaisionally, but that’s okay, because it’s much easier to sneak up on people and disembowel them that way. Arr!

Works for me.
A good day today. Friends came over for unlucky barbequed animal flesh. Jason came over for a while, and we a burger on the grill for him to. Then forgot all about it for half an hour. When we finally looked at it, it was about the size of a silver dollar. A slight touch with the spatula had it crumple to pure dust, just like those horror movies where the sunlight hits the wussy vampire. Scott and his son Lee were watching animes with me and trying to exhaust the dog. Its been 4 hours since they left and Streak is still asleep. They did a good job.
Everyone needs a good day once in a while. I mean, one of those satisfying, excellent days. Damn, I have to mow the lawn tomorrow. What kind of pirate has to mow his own lawn? Sheesh.

Coming home from training today Tom and myself were talking about how bad most TV shows are. We were going around and around on reasons, but nothing really caught my attention as a sure thing.
I then remembered what impressed me about the two last anime series I watched. Trigun and Nadesico. Great shows, a lot more complicated than any US cartoon would ever be. And I realized the point that I had remembered from both. They had the characters make bad decisions. Not bad in the good vs. bad decision way. But bad in the bad vs. worse way. The sort of real world decision that arises all too often in life. Both shows had the main characters do something which immediately caused the death of many people. On the hope that it will save many more in the future. But there were no guarantees, no immediate cause and effect.
Contrast with US television. Rachel decides to keep the baby even though she’s a single mother. A single mother with a spacious apartment in NY, big group of Friends, good job, etc.
Howzabout a decision to abort the baby because she knows she’s a flake and can’t handle it, since it would interfere with her life. The father, the brother of her best friend, freaks out and takes her to court to save the child. The best friend caught in the middle. Court sides with Rachel and she aborts. Ross commits suicide.
Show American viewers the Hollywood way of dealing with that situation. Please.

I’m a little bit conflicted about this. Teachers are to be allowed to carry firearms into the classroom.
Now, I’m not conflicted because I think its a bad idea. I’m conflicted because I’ve been fed so many opinions by the media that this would be a bad idea. But its hard to think of a logical bad conclusion to this.
There have been many school shootings, and nothing can stop them. Students will always bring weapons into school somehow. If it can be done in prison, its always going to be easier to do in school.
Therefore the only way to keep the damage down is to be able to quickly shoot the offender before more damage can be done. This won’t happen when the authority figures have no weapons, or they’re locked up in their cars. But if every third or fourth teacher carries, and its not known which do and don’t, well, that will prevent a lot of violent crime from happening. While “suicide by teacher” may be an issue that will arise now, I seriously doubt any kid will bring in a weapon just to threaten someone else.

Some days in IT.

Started with a 5am wakeup after a bad night’s sleep. Then an hour and a half of waiting for a 2 minute code-push. Couldn’t do my part until the Unix team and DBAs finished. Things went bad for them. So even after I did my part it couldn’t be verified until it was the exact time to wake up normally to go to work.

Today and tomorrow are free training days though. Should be a good thing. Windows 2003 Server upgrade training provided by Microsoft. But this is a high intensive training course, no hands-on at all. High pressure lecture. Roughly a five day training class compressed into two days.

But, once again, as in every single computer class I have ever been in, there is the one person who everyone wants to beat upside the head. It seemed like every point made he had a mostly irrelevant question. At one point the topic was about how you can do driver rollback with certified Windows drivers. He goes on a five minute rant about how he used nVidia, or maybe it was ATI, latest greatest video drivers and he went to roll back, and it got stuck halfway. Somehow he missed the part about it needing to be certified drivers to work correctly.

But what took the cake was when he questioned the following statement three times: Windows 2003 Server comes with 20 new command line tools. He wanted to know how you get 20. We all started laughing because there was a list of twenty new command line tools right on the screen. Somehow we finished what we needed to complete today.

One of the first courses I ever took was a one day fasttrack for Windows NT 4.0 workstation years ago. 11 l33t hax0r types, and one guy who never should have been there. We only got 1/3rd of the way through the class that day. And it was a one day course. Halfway through the day the instructor just flat out told the guy to shut up and don’t say another word. That was one wasted Saturday.

Please, if you’re ever in a technology class, save the questions that only you care about until after class. If you need clarification on a certain point that was just made, thats one thing. But don’t spend five minutes describing some situation that happened to you once in your environment, when 20 other people from 10 different companies just want to whoop your ass and leave early to go home.

You did not capture me yesterday!

You did not capture me. It is a lie. Since the Americans aren’t even in Iraq, how could they capture me? And the ones that are in Iraq are being beaten like the dogs they are! Not that there are any. Our glorious mujahedeen have smited them! What you see on TV is nothing more than propaganda to keep you from thinking about the 2000 election!

Over at Right Wing News, John Hawkins came up with a best of Jonah Goldberg’s quotes list. Its sweet.

So I copied it into a unix fortune file, and pipe out a different quote each time this page loads. You’ll see them on the menu bar on the right…

Ummm…. DAMN! Wow…

and thats all i gotsta say about that…

I’ve been reading blogs on and off for a while now. One of the things I’ve been doing lately is filling out my blogroll with other sites that I like to go back to several times. So I’m doing a lot of exploring lately.

One thing I’ve noticed is how many sites have broken javascript!!! I’ve been on a few sites that have 10-20 error messages on them! C’mon people, its not that hard to fix.

In other news, I have found a blog that actually makes sense! Plesae give this link a good bit of traffic. Its really funny, and its a great idea for a blog.

I’ve made a few Today Themes you may want to download. I’ll be adding more over time as I get good pix to make them from…

Right now the Ruri from Nadesico is my favorite. Just way too kawaii!!

Aargh! Aaaaaargh! AaaRRRGgh!
For those of you not familiar with pirate-speak, that translates roughly to “It’s Summer, and time for the Summer news lull. Anyone as sick of the Lacy Peterson case as I am and want to simply hang Scott Peterson from the yard-arm - along with his counsel and Greta Van Susteren?

The end of the War (actually a lull when lots of important behind the scenes stuff is taking place to remake Iraqi society into something NOT resembling Transylvania under Vlad the Impaler) means that Fox News has reverted back to it’s usual CNN-like look. Greta breathless analyzes the Peterson case, O’Reilly returns to sounding like a right-wing nut (his anti-Internet crusade makes me want to libel him myself), and my kid begins singing the “You’ve got the Greenlight!” commercial jingle. Hey Di-tech! Refinanace THIS!!! Or what little of THIS remains after 12.75 years of marriage…

At least Cartoon Network is there for us. I have become addicted to Futurama over the past few months and have begun looking at Family Guy. For those who stay up late, check out Inuyasha - where a Samurai is reincarted into the body of a contemporary junior-high school girl - thereby melding the two great themes of Japanese culture: Bushido and the Lolita-complex. Also, check out Yu-yu Hakusho at 6pm - literally “Spirit Detective”. Again we have a Japanese junior-high school student as the hero, proving once more the adolescent absorption of contemporary Japanese society. But hey, they still make great Anime (Spirited Away) and my kid’s addicted to Yu-gi-oh! cards so really, what more can one say?

Another good show to watch is “Keen Eddie” (Tues 9pm Fox) - about a New York detective in London. Shot entirely in that fair city, it combines action with a bit of a wit that is a cross between Moonlighting and British imports like Inspector Morse and A Touch of Frost. It’s also got a great soundtrack by Orbital and Danial Ash - formerly of Love & Rockets / Tones on Tail / Bauhaus.

Shameless plug time. I am developing a lobbying organization for IT professionals. Seriously. I’m trying to leverage my experience as an IT professional with my degree in Political Science to create something effective for both IT professionals and the companies that employ them. It isn’t anti-corporate - I’m as leery as unions as any white-collar worker - so it is modeled on the American Medical Association.

Wonder why doctors aren’t being employed on the H-1B and L-1 visa here - even though there is a doctor shortage? The AMA. A company like Tata could flood the American market with Indian doctors paid less than retail workers at Walmart within months - thereby ruining the profession and destabilizing the entire Medical Establishment - from med schools to insurance companies to hospitals. Why hasn’t this happened? The AMA.

A free market is our right as Americans. If there is demand for something, it should be allowed to drive a natural increase in supply through the natural incentives of higher wages until that demand is met by supply. The H-1B and L-1 have short-circuited supply-demand in the USA and lead to the extinction of American programmers.

For more info (send me content please!) visit www.itpaa.org.

Scott K.

Looks like The Bitch Girls have a good idea when it comes to National Ask Day…

National Ask Day is tomorrow. Remember to ask the parents of any friends of you kids’ if they have any plan to protect their family and your child while he/she is over at their house. If they don’t, offer to take them to the range and teach them how to shoot properly and put them in touch with people who can help them choose the best firearm and best method to store such a firearm in their home.

Now thats a great idea. I mean, really. We need to have more “take a liberal to the range” days. I’ve taken several people myself in the past year to the range. Now the biggest problem is affording to go all the times they want to now.
The management commitee of the company I work for wanted to do an outing to the local range. Of course the insurance company rejected the idea, but now my tech ops department wants to go one night after work as an unofficial outing.

So thats our proposal from here. Take a friend who has never gone shooting up to the range once. Just to see what happens. And we need to do the same every single National Ask day. Ask someone if they’d like to go shooting with you. Supply the guns and ammo, make sure they have the hearing/eye protection, and let them have fun for a few hours!

General Wesley Clark, Commie. According to Rachel Lucas at least. From what I see she’s right. Progressive taxation has nothing to do with our county’s founding. Freedom from taxation had everything to do with it. General Clark is either stupid or a marxist.

What about the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution? Generally, the question of whether the equal protection clause has been violated arises when a state grants a particular class of individuals the right to engage in activity yet denies other individuals the same right. So why do some classes of people not have to pay income tax, while other classes will pay varying rates of taxes? To me this is the only necessary reason for a flat tax.

Was reading something the other day, think it was Derbyshire in National Review, that was talking about the bums, I mean, homeless people, in San Francisco. About how they just hang out in the public library watching DVD’s and such.

So me and Tom are talking about it today. Someone has to have a solution, he said. You just differentiate the ones that are down on their luck, and those with mental problems. Give the down and out a break and some work, and they should be able to regain their place.

Then we just have to figure out what to do with the mental cases. Used to lock them up in asylums, but that is so out of fashion. So what do they do with them in other countries? Lock them up in prison in some countries, shoot them in others. A lot of countries, since they’re so much more civilized, such as France, however, would just give them high level jobs in Government.

Calling all server engineers, programmers, coders, technology architects, hackers, help desk techs, workstation admins, and anyone else living behind a keyboard that keeps the technology going…

Visit the ITPAA website. It may be just what you’re looking for in your career.

Every once in a while a politician comes off completely half baked. Senator Orrin Hatch (R) thinks its OK to blow up other people’s computers.

So let me get this straight. I can destroy someone’s PC that has unlicensed copywritten material which I created. Well, lets see. Someone out in Blog-land (Thats in east Missouri I think) pissed me off, so I’m going to blow up there computer and later claim that they had a copy of my webpage cached on their computer. Since they didn’t license said web page, and they had a perfect copy of both the HTML and the images, well, thats good enough. Let the bombing commence!

Found on Wired today…

After reading that title, can you say, DUH!

From Tom&Amy -

These days we have plague of people who love to be idealistic, not because they genuinely are but because they’re in love with the idea of being so. People get so enfatuated with individuality that they lap up anything that’s not mainstream, the music, the literature and as foolish as it may sound the politics. I love finding a band that no one has ever heard of and then sharing the music with my friends, but I’m not going to do the same with politics. Why? Because typically what you find out there is going to be garbage, not because it’s indy but because it’s based on opinion, conjecture or at worst fantasy.

NAILED IT! Couldn’t have said it better. This has been my thought for years. This is whats really wrong with the whacko nutjobs we all know and love to annoy. They’re so not happy with who they are, they must become “different” than everyone else. I’ve never cared about people who try to be different. Those that truly are, well, thats something else. They’re the ones who tend to hide their differences a bit sometimes. Or maybe they don’t, but you’ll never see them go around and flaunt their differences. Because there is no real reason to care about it.

Every blog site that in any way mentions politics should possibly have a ratings system on the left-right fascist-libertarian scale. Just so you know where you stand when you hit the site.

Myself? Well, easiest way is that I’m an NRO / South Park conservative. I just don’t like people telling me what to do and how to live. Most of what I’ve seen described about the neocons would apply to me. I’m not paleo because I think liberty is a great export. Any people willing to take responsibility for themselves should have that chance to do just that. The US started that 227 years ago, and its been a good model. As a people, we fought one of the bloodiest wars with ourselves over the future. We still struggle every day with where we want to be tomorrow. But thats our decision. We’re all individuals who blend ourselves into the whole of society.

Generally I think people should be left to do as they will. The “Social Feedback Mechanism” would apply however. If you want to go so far against the grain, no problem. Just don’t be suprised when no one else wants to deal with your crap. Thats the price of being an individual. I think it’s silly to do things “just to be different” like some folks do. I always do just what I want to do, be it mainstream or not.

I prefer freedom. Thats why I’m not left-wing. “You have it wrong,” the lefties would say. They think they’re for all the rights of the peoples. But from everything I’ve seen that’s just not true. Just like the checkbook environmentalists, they are really for making everyone else conform to just what they want society to be like. People are true individuals, which means opinions will run the gamut. And you either have to accept that, or be left-wing and refuse. To belittle the others. To deem them flawed or uneducated.

Those right-thinking folks tend to look at the left-wingers as little children, since that is how they act. Hoping they’ll grow up one day and see the big, complicated world for what it is.

Personally, I always think the answer is somewhere in the middle. The left wing will pull towards a certain goal. The conservatives will slowly take in what truly works and fight against the rest. Overall, we’re a better people for that. My role as a conservative is to be a judge of whats good and bad for our society. I will reject what I feel is bad, and accept what is good. The liberals among us will continue to try every idea they can come up with. They dynamic works.

Ehh, what can you do?