BunkBlog

In case you needed another reason to slam Microsoft, the Windows OS has been used by the Air Traffic Control folks in LA, rather than the Unix systems that worked for decades. It hasn’t been pretty.

The servers are timed to automatically shut themselves off every 49 days, because otherwise they’d crash. Are these the kind of high-reliability systems we should be using for something as essential as keeping track of multi-ton flying bombs filled with people? Just a thought.

The so-called Marriage Protection Amendment comes before the House on Wednesday. Please let your congresscritter know that it’s a stupid thing to enshrine discrimination in the Constitution.

You are Shockwave. The fact that you don’t have a face says it all. No one really knows what your true intentions are but you, and your intentions are dictated totally by logic. You approach everything with a cold and objective approach. You think you should be in charge because you believe it’s only logical. It has nothing to do with ambition. However, if you are faced with anything emotional, you just can’t understand it. Rock on with your logical and secretive self.

Transformers Generation One Personality Test
brought to you by Quizilla

Slashdot has an article about the new World Wind software from NASA. Naturally, this causes NASA’s servers to choke from the load of trying to serve up a 200+ megabyte file to every geekboy on the planet.

Solution? Several bittorrent files have been posted. Now I’m grabbing this monster file in under 30 minutes, instead of looking at a day. Good thing Orrin Hatch hasn’t gotten this Peer to Peer stuff outlawed yet. I wonder if there is some other substantial non-infringing use out there? 🙂

ABCNEWS.com : Stevens Returns to U.K. After Detention

bq. During a visit in May he met with officials of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives “to talk about philanthropic work,” according to White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan.

That’s classic. He is cozying up to the controversial Faith-Based Initiatives office, yet not allowed to come back to the States? What the hell?

What a difference a build makes. The 0.9.3 build of Firefox was a little weird for me, causing me to reload pages from dynamic scripts at times. The 1.0RC is faboo, though. I’m trying to decide if I should kill NewzCrawler for the built-in RSS feeds in the bookmarks page. I’m thinking not. The newspaper format I can generate from NewzCrawler is just much cooler than the headline-only feeds in the Bookmarks list. Still, it’s interesting to see a new way of deploying RSS feeds to users.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a cool movie. Alex is running around the den screaming random Sky Captain-related phrases now, driving his mother insane.

Gorgeous movie, really. The first 30 or 40 minutes were fantastic, and then it slowed down a bit. Still maintained a great noir-like look and feel, but Paltrow was doing way too much of the intrepid female reporter crap. I know the movies it is aping were kind of melodramatic, so I’ll let it go a bit. The performance of the late Laurence Olivier was pretty cool, but not as realistic as I thought it would be. The trailers made it seem that Angelina Jolie was the lead, but she doesn’t even show up until at least an hour into the film.

Anyway, fun movie. No particular depth, and some of the surprises are telegraphed 5 to 30 minutes before the punch lines, but fun matinee. Go see it. Take your hyperactive little boys. They’ll love it.

Teacher Arrested After Bookmark Called Concealed Weapon

bq. Harrington said she’ll never again carry her bookmark into an airport.

Guess she learned her lesson. Just think, you could have been mauled by a 50-something schoolteacher and her bookmark!

Some soldiers at Third Brigade Combat Team have been told that they need to reenlist for present duty assignment or go to Iraq which means they’ll get stoplossed and their enlistments will be extended indefinitely anyway. Althought they aren’t literally being told this, it is implied.

bq. “There’s probably a lot of places on post where they could put those folks (who don’t re-enlist) until their time expires. But I don’t want to rule out the possibility that they could go to a unit that might deploy,” said Healy.

So, they just might get sent to Iraq, there’s just no way to be sure. But, hey, we’ve got an offer you can’t refuse. Reenlist for Third Brigade and you won’t have to go to Iraq (so far as we have planned right now). Then, when the global war on terror is over (surely in less than three years, right?), you’ll be free to get out with no more Stop Loss looming.

One of my coworkers this morning attempted to declare a jelly donut as a near-complete food. There’s jelly, which (theoretically) means fruit. The donut itself has eggs, milk, and grains. Sounded good to me, so I ate three.

OK, not really. The banana muffins someone brought in were good, though.

Anyone want to give me a massage? Didn’t sleep well last night, for some reason, and now my shoulders are tight. Sitting at a computer all day won’t help, I’m betting.

Ah, well… off to work.

Citing Effort to Fight Terror, Vladimir Putin has put forth a plan to return to the days of Soviets choosing the political leaders of each country, and each Soviet answerable only to the President rather than to the citizenry.

Under Mr. Putin’s proposals, which he said required only legislative approval and not constitutional amendments, the governors or presidents of the country’s 89 regions would no longer be elected by popular vote but rather by local parliaments — and only on the president’s recommendation.

Sounds an awful lot like a return to pre-1992 to me…

Kerry says failure to deal with regime led to nuclear threats…as if Clinton dealt with the DPRK any better? Or Bush 41 or Reagan? For whatever combinations of reasons, we haven’t had a consistent policy dealing with North Korea in the past 20 years; I wonder what Kerry supposed we should do about them.

This analysis of CBS’s documents seems pretty thorough and convincing. The superscript and completely different signatures are interesting. Not to mention, the document used as a “proof” of forgery was done with Word’s default settings: 1.5 inch margins. Normal margins are 1 inch per side; even assuming the document was created on the old mil-standard paper, that leaves a half-inch anomaly for any clerk worth his salt in 1973. Wonder if the people who created these apparent forgeries are working for the Left or the Right. If the Left, they should not be trusted with anything ever again; if the Right, congratulations and well-played.

Now, if someone would please get the political discourse back to something that resembles current issues, please? Like I give a rat’s azz about what either of these two twits did in 1968 or 1973. Geez.

Reuters reports on the latest Congressional Budget Office findings, which show a 200 billion dollar increase in the projected long-term deficit compared to reports just six months ago. I’m sure this will be attacked and trumpeted by the two candidates in the next couple weeks.

Bush blames the 2001 recession, the costs of the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the war on terror for the growing budget shortfall.

Yeah, I’m sure the tax cut didn’t do anything at all to reduce our total budgetary inputs. Do you suppose the politicians who run our country can even balance their checkbooks?

If you saw the RNC at all, you know the podium had a less-than-subtle cross on it. Some people objected.

Karl Rove told CNN he did not think the podium’s decorative woodwork looked like a cross.
“My God, where do they come up with this stuff?” he said. “Does it look to you like it’s a cross? I don’t think so.”

Yeah, right.

Kerry now claims that Bush is Unfit to Lead, a sharp change to his earlier approach. I still wonder at the ability to focus on the Vietnam War as the most important issue of this election.

Why has Kerry not explained why he was so credulous as to quote discredited reports about military abuses 30 years ago? Why has he not brought up any details of his 20 years in the Senate? And are all of his speeches filled with vague promises, or just every one I’ve seen or heard a piece of?

On the other side of the political fence today, was the Republican Convention just a chance to bash the Dems or what? It’s an interesting contrast – the DNC stressed Democratic party people and issues; the RNC stressed Democratic party people and Republican issues. Very vitriolic this week. Looking like an ugly election.

Driving down a four-lane one-way street this morning, I had the interesting experience of watching someone turn left from the second lane right in front of a motorcycle officer of the local PD. The officer, sensing an easy ticket, did . . . nothing at all and drove away.

This is such a typical move by the police here. The only laws they enforce seem to involve speeding in school zones. Park on the wrong side of the street? No problem. Park on a corner, rather than the required 15 feet away? Still good. Run every stop sign in town? Hey, you’re from Texas. Never use your turn signal? That’s okey dokey. Go 22 miles per hour in a school zone, with no children within a mile? Busted!

Is it any wonder we have more accidents in this small city than in the much larger Midland-Odessa area? Our drivers suck and the police let them.