BunkBlog

The total Reserve and National Guard on active duty is 79,269 from 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and individual augmentees.
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It’s entertaining to read the debate on ZDNet regarding whether Windows is great or whether it sucks ass. What’s especially great is that I’m working in a Unix-only environment this week. The systems are SGI Irix boxes, Sun Enterprise servers, and so on. They all work seamlessly together, and not a one of them has been rebooted for as long as anyone can remember. The purpose of my visit to Omaha – observe an upgrade to a critical information node on this intelligence system. During this upgrade, the system was up and running non-stop and only the applications being updated were shut down. When the upgrade was complete (1.5 hours), the system was not rebooted, but just had one script run which restarted all the programs that were shut down. The queue of work was waiting, the system got to work, and everything continued as before. When a bug was discovered, the system continued to work on its vital national intelligence while the programmers fixed the bug, restarted the one program which was affected, and the users never saw a blip.

Imagine doing that with Windows. Ha!

We had a discussion about the DoD and Windows versions. For some reason (they claim its cheaper but TCO has to be higher), the Defense Department has decided that all non-critical systems use Windows NT. Naturally, the critical systems use Unix. Those non-critical systems use NT 4.51 for the most part. Many sites are beginning test installations of Windows 2000, while XP is the new standard in the normal consumer world. DoD doesn’t want to trust their information to XP for years yet. hehe
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I’ve got two file boxes full of comic books, many (but not most) bagged. I’ve been carting these things around the past 15 years, and haven’t opened the boxes in nearly a decade. Thinking this is silly, we began considering selling the darned things. I have a large number of 10-14 year old Punisher, Batman, and Manhunter. I also have some other books that I’m not getting rid of, like the Akira books (1-29 only for some reason).

Then comes the hard part: finding out how much they’re worth. There is no comprehensive online resource we’ve found for this. You’d think comic books and computers would be made for each other – both the province of geeks. Oh, well. Anyone want a couple copies of “Death in the Family” original 4-book print run? How about “Black Orchid” – what Neil Gaiman did before Sandman?
current_music: Barenaked Ladies – The Flag
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OK, we have a house. It’s amazing, I was beginning to doubt whether this would actually happen, but we are now living in our new house. We got all the heavy stuff and most of the other stuff moved today, and appliances and living room furniture delivered right on time. Woohoo!

Now we have to unpack those 8 million boxes, try to organize things in some coherent fashion, and I have to go to Omaha on Tuesday. Omaha, again…

The lower house of Russia’s parliament passed a resolution 417-0 calling on Russian athletes to boycott the closing ceremony unless the IOC reruns the cross-country race, bars North American referees from the hockey game and apologizes to the Russian Olympic team.

I don’t think we’ve seen such a contentious Olympics since the whole boycott nonsense in the Cold War.
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OSI not bad

This is a good followup to the earlier discussion about the DoD’s new propaganda office. Rumsfeld and friends claim that, although the office has the responsibility to “influence public opinion abroad,” they have no intention of lying to the media either domestically or overseas. Yep, I’d believe them without any oversight required, yes I would. Nothing like a clean track record of good deeds and completely forthcoming truthful statements to encourage everyone to believe you…
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Filmed Execution of WSJ Reporter Sets Off Revulsion

A whole wave of revulsion, eh? Wow, that must have those radicals quaking in their combat boots. Nothing a murdering kidnapper fears more than other people being repulsed by his actions, no sirree…
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Does this article leave you with the impression that, barring further legislation, the new DoD Office of Strategic Influence could be legally allowed to use propaganda on U.S. citizens? It’s currently prohibited for the State Dept to do so, but that was a law passed specifically against State. Defense is forbidden from working propaganda missions within the United States, but that doesn’t specifically say they can’t “permit” information they create overseas to be applicable in U.S. publications. I’m not sure I like the Public Affairs folks and the PsyOps folks working together on anything…
current_music: Sevendust – Damaged
current_mood: contemplative

This week is busy, next week I’m out of town. I don’t plan on creating any userpics during the next couple weeks, so if you want one, ask another volunteer. is a great animation guy, very creative.
current_music: Barenaked Ladies – If I Had $1000000
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Conversation that spread over 8 days, compressed for your viewing pleasure:

You need to send us these documents, some of which don’t exist on earth.
-OK, I'll make something up
*Dead Silence*
-Did you get the documents?
Yeah, and there are problems we weren’t going to mention until it was too late for you to get the mortgage approved.
-Great, so what's the problem this time, jerkwad?
We need a deferrment letter that states 12 months
-OK
…
-Here it is. Now what?
Great, but we meant 12 months from next week, not 12 months as any reasonable loan company defines time.
-Let me reach through the phone and strangle your stupid ass
…

Morons should not be allowed to handle money outside of a McDonald’s.

Try to follow this.

• You get an email inviting you to join an online discussion forum (on Yahoo Groups).
• You respond with an acceptance of this subscription.
• You get a lot more email than you expect.

At this point, any sane person would read that email that you get whenever you subscribe to a group, the one labeled “SAVE THIS EMAIL,” and find out how to stem the tide. Since you can read the title of this missive, you know that’s not what some folks are doing.

• You get mad at these people who are sending you email, so you reply to one with the screaming subject line, “REMOVE ME NOW!!!!!!” You probably have an AOL return address.
• When you are told that every email includes the unsubscription information, you don’t email that address to stop the mail.
• You email the person who tried to help you (not the moderator) to tell them you will sue them and Yahoo if they don’t fix your shit for you because you’re too stupid to read.
• When the helpful person responds that they can’t unsub you because they aren’t the moderator and that helpful person points you again to the address which will unsubscribe you, you get more irate and send more flames down the pipe.

Is this the behavior of people that should be allowed to use computers? I think not.

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Just for fun, I added a Google Search box to my site. Google says they have 110 pages indexed on AndySocial.com. Guess I’ve been around long enough to be archived on the Wayback Machine as far back as Oct 1999, so I shouldn’t be too surprised. My old Geocities site was archived even earlier!
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The rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.

Posted By: Gary
Last Edit: 18 Feb 2002 @ 07:05 AM

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Categories: Musings