BunkBlog

Realizing that the military (and veterans groups) leans about 70% Republican, you’d think I’d get used to the insane drivel that spews from them on a daily basis.

The offtopic chat room, after ten minutes of lurking, has already managed to annoy the piss out of me this morning. I don’t even know what the context is, but at least three (of eight) members of the room have comisserated about how horrible the New York Times is, that liberal media mouthpiece. I guess they forgot how the Times was used as the unofficial news outlet for every lie told by Ahmed Chalabi about the inevitability of finding WMDs in Iraq, or the various other ways that paper held up the Bush Doctrine of preemptive warfare as a good thing. These are the same people who use Rush Limbaugh the druguser and G. Gordon Liddy the convicted felon as news sources. How can any reasonably intelligent person (all M.I. guys here) actually believe that there is a liberal media, when Fox News is the highest-rated news channel and Air America is struggling to survive amid the Rush and Liddy radio waves?

I don’t like people who mindlessly parrot viewpoints formulated by wiser heads. I don’t like people who can hold such wildly contradictory beliefs to be self-evident as, “Bush is good for the country and he lowered my taxes.” Does anyone think that we can keep going with trillions of dollars in debt, while continuing to dig deeper? Hell, Cuba has told its citizens to stop using dollars. When our money isn’t even any good in that broke-ass country, what does that tell you about our economy?

Karl Rove and friends have done a fantastic job of snookering the American people. Many undecided voters (how can it be a week from Election Day and you be undecided?) are going to vote based on whether they think Dubya or Flippy is the more honest or agrees with their views on gay rights. Who gives a shit what your neighbor does in his bedroom? All I care about is what the impact on my bottom line is from the government. If I notice the inconveniences imposed by a shrinking set of civil liberties, that is a big deal to me. If I notice that my income is shrinking because of the government’s actions, that is a big deal to me. Social issues like abortion and gay rights are not the job of the government anyway, so how the candidate feels about each issue is completely irrelevent. Or it would be irrelevent in a sane world. We live in Bizarroworld.

Mtzlplk lives.

Bush campaign creating lists of black voters in Florida, to challenge them en masse on election day. This type of intimidation is probably not legal, say experts. This seems unlikely to stop it from happening, of course.

In case I don’t mention it enough, my webhost (Greg) is the coolest guy on the planet.

I recently got saddled with took over the local Cancer Society website for the Relay for Life in the spring. The previous person used Frontpage to create the site on Freeservers. This combination makes my head hurt. Frontpage is evil, makes bad code, and is a bitch and a half to maintain. Freeservers are overpriced (funny for a company with “free” in the name), underpowered, and annoying.

So, I ask my webhost if I can use some of my excess capacity to host this small (30 megs) site, under my own account that I’ve been paying $75 per year for. His response? Well, normally that would be no problem, but I’d like to give you a separate account for the .org site free of charge, for as long as the Cancer Society needs it.

That just totally fucking rocks.

While chatting in the “off topic” room at work today, one of the morons participants mentioned how laws are made, not by the President, but by Congress and activist judges. I objected to the adjective before “judges” since they are judges, whether appointed or elected, and the term has become one of derision used by the neocon nutjobs.

When pressed, he averred that judges were making law, in contradiction to the wishes of the electorate and the legislature.

Landmark Supreme Court Cases is a good reference.

I mentioned that Brown v. Board of Education was just such an event, and does this mean that we should have kept segregation in schools because the electorate and the legislature wanted it?

Response: If I say yes I’m a racist biggot (sic), if no then I’m inconsistant (sic).

Yep. Don’t want to be a flipflopper, do you? Or a good speller. 🙂

Isn’t this shocking?

bq. At least seven former prisoners of the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have returned to terrorism, despite gaining their freedom by signing pledges to renounce violence.

Gee, they promised they were going to stop shooting at people, and then they went and shot at people? If you can’t take the word of a fundamentalist extremist, whose word can you believe?

I’ve added another photo to the photo gallery, a satellite shot of my old high school. I’m having way too much fun with World Wind.

New photos in the gallery, of Alex’s birthday party. He had lots of fun and there was much chaos.

I fully intend to go to In n Out at least once on the Great Californian Trip next summer. Looking at their nutritional information, it might be only once. They’re not as bad as Burger King with their 1200 calorie Double Whopper, but one meal is a day’s supply of calories and a couple days worth of fat. Geez.

Add it up:

* Double Double 670 Calories
* Fries 400
* Chocolate shake 690 (!)

That’s 1760 calories for one meal. I won’t get a Double Double, because I can never finish one, but even dropping down to a cheeseburger only loses 190 calories.

I hate being aware of what I eat – it’s no fun.

Had a conversation with one of my cow-orkers today which was quite surreal. It’s like I’ve had a similar conversation before…

One of the geeks at work is the only person who really understands how some of the tools work. This is because he’s the one who wrote the tools, and he uses the strangest user interface non-standard widgets seen since Kai’s Power Tools. So my cow-orker says the problem we’re having is that Mike just is so smart he thinks differently than we do.

This is insulting and wrong. It’s insulting because it supposes that Mike is smarter than I am; I’ve seen no evidence of this. It’s wrong because smart people need to remember to make their projects accessible to the people who will be using them. If you’re a designer and you break every convention that people expect to see, you’re an idiot or an artist. If you’re an artist, get off the Intelligence Training System. If you’re an idiot, stop being dumb.

And why do people continue to lump me into the group that does not include the “crazy smart people” anyway? Is it because I’m capable of a normal conversation? Is it because I try not to pepper my speech with too many obscure references? Is it because I’m not a prick, as so many of these people who are perceived as “crazy smart” are?

Maybe I should start insulting people gratuitously and then they’ll think I’m smarter than they are. Still won’t make any more money, but they’ll stop asking for my help anyway. 🙂

Name a CD you own that you think no-one else on your friends list does.
Ofra Haza – Kirya

Name a book you own that you think no-one else on your friends list does.
Mel Gilden – Surfing Samurai Robots

Name a movie you own on DVD/VHS/whatever that you think no-one else on your friends list does.
Grey

Name a place that you have visited that you think no-one else on your friends list has.
I really doubt that I can, but how about…
La Bufadora, Baja California Norte, Mexico

Libertarian and Green presidential candidate arrested

bq. On October 8th at 9PM, two third party candidates were arrested for attempting to enter the Washington University complex holding the second presidential debate. The candidates, Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party and David Cobb of the Green Party, chose civil disobedience to fight the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Over half of Americans believe third party candidates should be included, yet politicians continue to funnel public funds into the bi-partisan Commission.

I am now 5 lessons shy of 400 total created at work since September of 2003. I’m past the 400 mark if I look at the previous contract numbers, but that requires opening two databases instead of one, so I’ll stick to just this contract.

If you count up the lessons produced by the next-highest producer (137) and then keep going down the line until you beat my total in aggregate, you’ll have rounded up five of my cow-orkers and still be 20 lessons short.

On the plus side, I finally got some recognition from this company yesterday, with an employee of the quarter award and a hundred bucks in Mall Money. I do need some new socks…

Google has introduced yet another search tool – Google Print. This is like Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” feature, which lets you do full-text queries of any book in the database.

Neither of these two services cover public domain works, over 10,000 of which are already scanned in and converted to readable ASCII text. I guess if you can’t make money at it, Amazon doesn’t see a benefit; but Google probably isn’t making much money off of this to begin with, so I don’t understand why they haven’t hooked into Project Gutenberg in some official way. Yes, I know that Google can be used to search PG archives, but linking it to the print.google.com URL would be cooler.

Shoot, with the availability of print-on-demand machines, Google or Amazon actually could make money off of public-domain books. Wouldn’t that be an interesting profit-generating idea?

According to the CIA, there were no WMD stockpiles in Iraq at the time of our latest war. *None*

bq. “[Saddam] wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted,” a summary of the report says.

I’m sure the neocons will take that one line and decide that they were right. We’ve gone from saying he had weapons, to saying he had weapons programs, to saying he had weapons-related programs. What’s the harm in changing that to “the intention to someday once again have weapons-related programs maybe”? What’s a little truth and accuracy between ideologues anyway?

The VP debate wasn’t as intense as the Presidential debate last week, but it was decent enough. Considering it preempted everything else, it was hard to miss.

I was surprised by both candidates performance last night. Cheney actually seemed sane and reasonable, a feat he doesn’t seem capable of on the campaign trail. Edwards, for his first debate ever, turned in a good performance as well. Of course, since he’s had lots of practice in court rooms, I’d expect him to be a decent orator and quick to respond to questions. But, he didn’t let Cheney rattle him, which might be difficult considering some of the personal attacks the VP slid into the debate while sounding reasonable.

Both of them made good points, and I don’t think this debate really ended up with one of them as the clear winner. Edwards spent too much time belaboring Halliburton, but then it is an enormous scandal – or would be if the media actually spent any time at all doing a decent analysis of the whole mess. Cheney, for his part, didn’t beat any one horse which may end up making Edwards’s speaking more memorable to the public. We’ll see.

Regardless, the VP debate doesn’t really make much difference, unless you have a narcoleptic admiral on the podium.

SecDef Rumsfeld says his statement has been misunderstood to mean that Iraq and al Qaeda did not have any links. What might that statement have been? Well, let’s see…

“To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”

Gee, where would someone get the idea that he said there was no evidence of a link between them? That’s such an ambiguous statement, I can see how he might be misunderstood. Much as when the President said the war on terra is unwinnable. Very confusing statements – it’s a good thing they came back later to contradict themselves, isn’t it?

OK, maybe not fun. Easy to make fun of?

I don’t know how many times the “deer in the headlights” look appeared on the President’s face last night, but it was quite a few. I’ve never seen someone founder so badly while groping for an answer.

I like the way Bush was able to turn every question about Afghanistan into an answer about Iraq. “The enemy attacked us, so we took the fight to them in Iraq” seemed to be his attitude throughout the debate. Apparently nobody has told him the hijackers were mostly Saudi citizens who trained in Afghanistan. You’d think after three years he would know this, wouldn’t you?

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
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