BunkBlog

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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Five out of six pieces of spam are for Cialis or Viagra. Woohoo! I can get a hardon that lasts for days! The other spam is usually trying to get me to refinance my mortgage.

What is with American companies and introducing tiny cars that almost nobody will buy? There was the Ford Festiva (Kia Pride), the Ford Aspire (Kia Avella), and now the Chevrolet Aveo (Daewoo Lanos).

These are all Korean cars and so are made for skinny short people, no matter that the latest Aveo commercial shows basketball players getting into one. I’ve ridden in a Daewoo Tico, the Lanos’s predecessor, when I was in Korea. It is most assuredly a lot tinier than you think it is. Think roller skate.

Poppy Brite posted about O.S. Card’s anti-gay marriage article yesterday. This is another perfect example of someone’s opinions being elevated based on their success in a completely different realm. Much as I don’t automatically believe Margaret Cho about politics just because I find her hilarious, I don’t agree with things Orson Card says just because I like some of his books. He should really stick to writing advice columns on how to get published. That, at least, he doesn’t sound like an asshole while doing.

Here’s the deal: Orson Card is a Mormon. Orson Card is a writer. Orson Card has named his children after authors (pretentious much?). Orson Card is not a military veteran, yet takes it upon himself to speak for us.

Who do you think is volunteering for the military to defend America against our enemies? Those who believe in the teachings of politically correct college professors? Or those who believe in the traditional values that the politically correct elite has been so successful in destroying?

Speaking as a veteran with 12 years experience defending the nation, in this all-volunteer military we have, I think I’ll pick apart his paragraph here. Those who are volunteering for the military include those who believe in the teachings of Ayn Rand as well as those who believe in the teachings of Tom McClancy. They include a surprisingly heterogenous group, not the bloc of mindless Neoconservatives that Card and (apparently) Dubya believe are in the service. Besides which, using the military majority as a basis for social laws is stupid. If we did that, we’d still have segregation by race and gender. Both of those integrations were forced on the military by the wiser and cooler heads of state.

Foremost, I have to say, “Stick with writing about writing” to Mr. Card. When he writes about what marriage is supposed to mean to me, he sounds like an asshat.

Everyone else with a literate bent has mentioned it, so here ya go: Learn Writing with Uncle Jim. Jim McDonald is a fantasy writer, and I’ve never read a single one of his books, but that doesn’t mean his advice is poor. He is, after all, published. And, he has over a dozen novels in print, so maybe he knows something. Regardless, I found this post hilarious.

* Spelling counts.
* Agreement of number is important.
* Keep the tense consistent.
* You’re allowed to have more than one sentence per paragraph. In fact, you’re encouraged to do so.
* Dialog is one of your basic tools. Learn how to use quote marks.
* Don’t make your readers guess about the antecedents of your pronouns.
* You’ve heard of Point of View? Pick one. Then use it.
* Not all nouns need adjectives; not all verbs need adverbs.
* Assigning emotions to inanimate objects is called the Pathetic Fallacy. First, because it’s a fallacy. Second, because it’s pathetic.

Things break down.

This is an eternal truth, and certainly rings true today. The universal remote, bought to replace the DVD remote which broke after having soda poured on it (thanks kid), has recently decided to stop operating the television. It worked for months, and then – poof. Fine, just use two remotes. Big deal.

More fun in entropy-land – the router. Our wifi router decided to give us 10% instead of 100% ever since we moved. No amount of reconfiguring and rejiggering would make it behave. So, I finally got the tech support guys at DLink to RMA it. Get the new one on Friday, hook it up… woohoo! Full speed ahead. Let’s download a DVD image! Fast forward to Sunday.

Sunday, we get back from the carnival (much cotton candy and funnel cakes and spinning rides), and the wifi connection begins to crap out. Looks like the router is randomly rebooting. Then, it begins a cycle of reboots every 15-20 seconds. WTF? Am I getting a DDOS attack, or is it just a piece of shit? Who can tell? Reset the router. Works. Whew. 30 minutes later, stops working to reboot. And reboot. And reboot.

So far, it’s been 90 minutes since it reset itself. I immediately assumed the router was faulty, but now I wonder if it’s possible that there is a DDOS crashing it. Why would someone target me, though? Seems absurd. Also unlikely, considering I have reset the modem and been issued two different IPs during this ordeal, and both of them have had reboot problems. Sigh. Besides, if it’s an attack, wouldn’t it take down the modem, not the router? The modem is first, after all. Anyone have any insight there?

I downloaded the DVD image from Project Gutenberg’s CD and DVD Project this weekend. The replacement router fixed my bandwidth issues, so it took only a few hours instead of weeks.

So I now have this wonderful DVD-ROM containing almost ten thousand electronic texts. That rocks. Anyone want a copy?

Because a judge in California thinks a semicolon is important, gays and lesbians keep marrying in San Francisco. I love it. Imagine the consternation on those pinched little bigoted faces when they were told they couldn’t stop women from marrying women because of an elementary school punctuation error. Hilarious.

In worse news, they expected to only marry 50 couples today, as compared to the 750 yesterday. I guess a lot of city workers had been drafted to fill the ranks of Mayor Newsom’s marriage brigade and they had to go back to work today.

A semicolon. I still love it.

BillMaher: Georgey The Greek

According to the same finely-tuned analysis that led them to believe the stuff about the WMD, how we’d be greeted as liberators and the like, the White House now says the economy will create 2.6 million jobs in 2004. Not just jobs, but fantastic jobs. And leprechauns. I’m a tad skeptical of his powers of prognostication, however. You might remember last year when he told us if we passed all his tax cuts the economy would create 1.8 million new jobs last year and 3.7 million in 2004. Well, we did pass the tax cuts and we lost 53,000 jobs last year. But if you don’t believe we’ll have 2.6 million jobs in 2004, would you believe 3.6 million jobs in 2005? Well, they’re saying that, too. It’s like we’re watching a bad re-run of Get Smart.

I really don’t have anything to add to that. Just wanted to say, “bwahaha!”

There must be a seriously large group of people who buy erection-causing drugs online, or I wouldn’t get so many pieces of spam (even with Spamassassin) for Cialis and Viagra. Daily. Huge numbers.

Alton Brown kicks butt. His rants about the stupidity of Kathy Cox’s crusade against the “offensive” word evolution are awesome.