BunkBlog

Girl Banned From Prom For Smoking Away From School

Here’s a girl, 18 years old, who smokes. Now, smoking is stupid but it’s not criminal. She doesn’t smoke at school, she smokes elsewhere. This, however, somehow affects her eligibility for extracurricular activities. Huh?

Proving once again that public schools are counterexamples to the democratic freedoms and principles this country was founded on. Sure, we have to limit some freedoms in schools. We don’t want the kids to yell and scream and shoot firearms while conducting various religious rituals. But, c’mon! How does this girl doing something legal and not immoral while nowhere near school affect her schoolwork in any way? Stupid rules.

CBS had a puff piece on The Olsen Twins online from December 2003. Here’s a quick excerpt.

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen aren’t just rich and ambitious, they’re mini-moguls. And they’re already worth, by some estimates, $40 million each and counting.

Did you know that the Olsen girls are not identical twins but fraternal? Amazing, I know.

More importantly, did you know that it’s quite possible these two girls (now 17 years old) may be billionaires by the time they turn 18? Damn, I’m a failure.

W.House Looks for Rice Compromise

The White House looked for a deal on Monday with the Sept. 11, 2001, commission under which national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would appear in private before the panel, but it refused to budge in the face of demands she testify in public and under oath.

What exactly are they afraid of? Why would a public servant who has done nothing wrong want to avoid testifying publically under oath about their honorable and competent actions? Just sayin’.

Welcome a new addition to the site: GiikiWiki. This new section is, so far, devoted to imagery and geospatial information resources. Fun for geeks.

In case you were looking for them, I’ve removed the LJ Userpics I formerly hosted here. I’ve not made a new one in almost a year, and it’s only using 10% of my bandwidth, so it’s gone. Why would I remove something that still gets 100 megs of traffic in a month? Because most of that traffic is from search spiders or from people using some of the animated GIFs as avatars on other sites (that always pisses me off).

If you are actually interested in the templates I made available, let me know. I may put them back up somewhere else.

Suppose her man is at all uncomfortable with Oleg taking this photo of Kit? Just sayin, most guys would be a bit . . . peeved.

The recent news from Richard Clarke and Sibel Edmonds regarding intelligence abuses (they aren’t failures – the intel geeks knew things they were apparently told to ignore) makes me wonder about the enforcement of nondisclosure agreements in the government. I have to sign an NDA every time I get read on to specific compartments of information, and these NDAs are supposed to be adhered to in perpetuity (To reduce paperwork storage requirements, they acknowledge that the NDA will be disposed of 75 years after it is signed. Even so, I don’t have any reasonable expectation of living to 108.).

Sibel Edmonds says she translated materials for the FBI from Turkish and Farsi into English. These materials sound like real corkers, too – details of locations and plans from the 9/11 terrorists. So, they would presumably be at least Secret and compartmented. Yet, she’s speaking with impunity about these documents? Sure, she claims that Ashcroft is out to get her and threatened her with jail. Um, yeah. You should be thrown in jail if you intentionally disclose highly classified information to unauthorized persons. That’s why you signed documents noting your legal understanding that you would get thrown in jail if you talked about this stuff. It’s the rules. You don’t have to sign the NDA – you just don’t get that cushy job as a translator for the FBI.

So why hasn’t the FBI at least arrested her for her security violations? I don’t get it.

BTW, I think Ashcroft is a jackass and should be investigated very thoroughly. But I still signed that NDA knowing I had to shut the hell up about things. Duh.

Desktop Sidebar is like Gkrellm for Windows. This is so geeky, I’m so stoked. Now, if it could get a decent integration with Trillian…

Things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the U.S. Army.

This is an oldie, but if you haven’t seen it before, you must read it.
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The room formerly known as Ugly. Finally got it sanded (with much elbow grease and sander belts), stained and polyurethaned (is that a verb?). Now we’ve got actual floors in every room. That just means we notice the walls need work. *sigh*

Exciting weekend. Much as Mike mentions, weekends seemed so much longer and more important 20 years ago. Then, a weekend may have included any of these things:

* Go to the mall to hang out with friends and drink Orange Julius drinks
* Spend the little money I had on useless things that made me happy
* Ride my bike to Seal Beach with friends, using the absurd paved LA River as a bike path
* Wander the park
* Play a billion computer games

Now, the weekend is a little more proscribed. Here are a few things of interest from this weekend:

* Sand the floor in the ugly room
* Write the required drivel for my humanities class
* Wish there was anyone else in my humanities class who was taking it for literary reasons instead of mystical mumbo-jumbo ones
* Buy a lawn mower
* Mow the back yard
* Do my math homework, wishing all the while it made sense
* Stain the ugly room
* Spend more time than expected at the in-laws
* Polyurethane the ugly room
* Read the last third of a novella from Greg Bear
* Play with Alex
* Watch several movies
* Make DVD copies of several movies

Not a bad assortment of items, but not a one of them involves shamelessly wasting time or money. Sucks to be a grownup sometimes. It’s good.

A month or so ago, I turned in some homework in my Discrete Math class which included the phrase, “here be magick.” I did not comprehend the material, you may have gathered.

Today I turned in another piece of homework containing juicy bits of narrative along the lines of, “and now I’m going to break my monitor.”

Strangely, I’m getting an A in that class so far. Not that I understand the slightest bit of it, but damn can I handle the open-book shiznit. Yo.

Ya gotta love Bill Maher. He’s got a little blurb up at Salon this week. Here’s a taste:

“Washington insider” is by definition a function of one’s proximity to the president. That’s you, Mr. Bush. You’re ground zero. Ever wonder, sir, why everyone stands and they play music when you enter a room? When you’re given check-writing privileges by the Federal Reserve, you just might be a Washington insider.

If you call me…

* Gary – you’re normal
* Gar – you’re Cynthia
* Gar Bear – you’re one of a few people from DLI or High School
* Funkie Bunkie – you’re way too amused by bad Beastie references
* Sergeant – you’re living in the past
* Mister Bunker – you don’t know me very well
* Sir – you don’t know me very well or you’re in the military and can’t stop yourself
* Bunk – you’re one of my old Army buddies
* Gray Buckner – you’re an illiterate telemarketer

From Daily Kos, here’s an excerpt from the list of Bush flipflops. But, of course, we all know Bush has been consistent and it’s only his opponents who ever change their positions on things.

* Bush is against campaign finance reform; then he’s for it.
* Bush is against a Homeland Security Department; then he’s for it.
* Bush is against a 9/11 commission; then he’s for it.
* Bush is against an Iraq WMD investigation; then he’s for it.
* Bush is against nation building; then he’s for it.
* Bush is against deficits; then he’s for them.
* Bush is for free trade; then he’s for tariffs on steel; then he’s against them again.
* Bush is against the U.S. taking a role in the Israeli Palestinian conflict; then he pushes for a “road map” and a Palestinian State.
* Bush is for states right to decide on gay marriage, then he is for changing the constitution.

Another SXSW is coming to Austin, and I shall almost certainly miss it again. This year should be good, since Mojo Nixon is retiring at the Continental Club. And, Cory Doctorow is going to be there, too – he’s an EFF geek and author I dig.

I am now off to WinMX to find as much Mojo Nixon as I can.

I’m frustrated at my coworkers and their near complete inability to feel a sense of urgency about anything they do. We have customers. The customers want us to produce this software. According to the company I work for, the only metric used to measure our usefulness is the quality of each individual piece of software we deliver. I think the customer has two metrics: quality of each piece, and total number of pieces delivered. To pretend that how fast you work is unimportant is disingenuous at best, and delusional at worst. Let me tell a little story…
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