BunkBlog

Thursday –

I’m a pretty patriotic person (12 years of army service, honorable discharge and all that), and I’m completely tired of the memorialization of last year. I do believe it should be remembered, much as Pearl Harbor is remembered every December 7th. But, let’s not make a holiday out of it – that just cheapens the whole thing, adding a celebratory aspect that shouldn’t be involved.

Meanwhile, the media have been memorializing September 11th ever since September 12th, so I think we’re all a bit numb from the onslaught. If they’d have let it rest for a few months, maybe I could get up some energy to give a shit about anything other than, “This is gonna foul up traffic on Wednesday.”

There are obviously serious deepseated root causes for the anger toward the US felt by many people. That’s something for politicians to deal with by changing our rather arrogant approach to other countries. The amazing intolerance of some cultures, though, is not our fault and I refuse to believe that we are at fault for the muslim extremists being extremist.

The proximate cause of the attack, though, is certainly knowable. I spent 12 years in the intelligence community, and I trust that the information the country is using to justify Bin Laden as the main bad guy is correct. His own statements and actions have more than removed any lingering doubts. Since the root causes are primarily cultural, and since the President is unwilling to change our unilateral approach to foreign policy, the only thing left to deal with is the proximate cause.

I think we’ve done a good job of taking care of Al Qaeda’s near-term ability to do any harm, and hurt their power base considerably by showing that we are willing to react to force with force. Those who claim violence never solved anything should really study history in more detail. We spent many years rattling sabers without any intent to follow through; we became caricatures of a world power. We’re back to being a world power, but I don’t think our current administration has the right path.

The Kyoto Accord should be signed. The International Criminal Court is a good idea. And, for the short-term, we definitely should not ignore Afghanistan. We promised them we would rebuild their country if they didn’t object to us bombing the piss out of it. Well, I don’t see a lot of cash flowing to Afghanistan right now, and that’s just amazingly poor policy. It shows the world that we don’t keep promises to our allies.

So, we’ve now shown the world that we will react with overwhelming force once we’ve been provoked repeatedly. This contrasts with Israel’s method of overwhelming force when laughed at too loudly. And, we’ve shown that we can’t be trusted to keep promises to friends and we don’t want to play well with others.

Damn, I hope we become isolationist. At least that would be consistent with the President’s views on things. I don’t know how he can think we can be a world power but not be part of the world community. We can’t be first among equals and have anyone take us seriously. We have to actually submit to being one of equals, and that’s something that the right-wing nuts won’t stand for quietly. Meanwhile, the left-wing nuts just want us to self-destruct, since we’re so evil. To them, I say, “find another country.”

Yep, I love America, warts and all. We really need to fix some major flaws, but it’s one of the best places to live.

Back to 9-11, I avoided network TV last night, since every channel was a pandering smarmy 9-11 memorial. Too much sacharine for me. 🙂

Amazing, I have absolutely no mac&cheese in my cupboards. How did that happen?
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Anyone know if there is a Livejournal module for PHP-Nuke? I’ve not installed Nuke yet, but I’d like to use it to spice up my site, but I’m not going to change how I journal things, so I’m not going to go to PHP-Nuke instead of LJ. If I can embed LJ in the center, like the PHP-Nuke blog tool does now…
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Is a half-bottle of eiswein really worth $60? Holy cow!
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Got an obscure one for you today:

You are so beautiful
You should be hipdeep in the jungle
On some forgotten island.

Name that tune!
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This is such a complete shock. Wow, nobody saw this coming at all. Nope. Completely out of the blue.

Next revelation, OJ Did It!
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Post yours in your own journal. Questions come up every week at Friday Five

1. What is your biggest pet peeve? Why? Stupid people. Not just the ones that are dumb, more the people who refuse to remember anything or learn anything new. Why? Because they make me want to kill.
2. What irritating habits do you have? I’m sure the peanut gallery will have something to add, but let’s see:
   • I am paranoid about being late to the point of showing up everywhere at least 15 minutes early.
   • Things go in specific places. That is a rule. Food and utensils may not share cupboard space. Hot pads go back on the hooks on the wall.
   • I have been told that I can be a tad arrogant, but that’s only because I’m better than you.
3. Have you tried to change the habits, or just let them be? I don’t show up 30 minutes early, but otherwise this is it.
4. What grosses you out more than anything else? Why? I think I’m remarkably un-gross-able.
5. What one thing can you never see yourself doing that other people do? Avoiding computers or books. 🙂

C’mon, smartasses, jump in!

A restaurant run mainly by blind people, which has no lights.
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While ICANN is contemplating whether to continue allowing Verisign to be a domain registrar (which makes me think of Dominar Rigel but I digress), they are sending out renewal notices claiming absurdities.

Apparently my domain is up for renewal “soon.” By soon, Verisign means next July. What time scale does the company work on that counts any time longer than a quarter as soon? Just trying to rake in a little cash before they lose the business, I suppose.
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From Cary Tennis, a columnist with Salon:

bq. So he wants to be burning for you and feel drunk with love all the time? That’s nice. Well, he’s a musician. Musicians are children. They’re courageous children but still, only a musician — or a poet — would be nearly 30 and say he wants to feel drunk with love for you all the time.

Musicians need a lot of care. They aren’t really equipped to deal with the world. He may need to go off and feel infatuated a few more times. But face it, what this also means is that he and you are both facing adulthood, which is a kind of unconscious code word for eventual death. That’s what it’s all about. Adulthood is about dreary day after day dealing with immovable reality.

While at the mall bookstore recently, I overheard a woman say things that just did not compute for me. She proclaimed, almost proudly, “I have not read a book since they made me in high school. I sometimes get through a magazine.” Then she went on to talk about how proud she was of her son, who was 14 but reading at an 11th grade level. Wonder where in the world he developed that skill?

I can’t imagine how empty life would be without books. I get the majority of my news online, and much of my interaction with friends from out-of-state. Yet, living in a world where my entertainment was exclusively from television or movies or the radio scares me. There’s a reason why people always claim the book is better than the movie – unless you’re a chucklehead, your imagination is much better than anything Lucasfilm can put on the screen.

Thanks mom.
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Just came across a new buzzword (well, new to me anyway) – knowledge management.

Introductory KM article includes a basic definition of KM, discussion of intellectual assets, benefits from KM, challenges of KM, who should lead KM efforts, and technologies that can support KM.

Oh, geez. Just when CEOs have spun down from Six Sigma bullshit, they’re going to start subjecting people to Knowledge Management seminars? What color is your stupid freakin’ parachute?
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Explain this, oh great geeks on my friends list:
The DNS records for andysocial.com were updated at midnight Saturday night. When I query ns1.earthlink.net for andysocial.com I get the new IP address. When I query WinSock’s internal lookup for andysocial.com I get the old IP address. I waited until 2 full days had passed before I erased the account at Virtualave, so I figured I’d be safe. Hell, I was surfing through my site all day yesterday, on the new host. I even set up a subdomain for to use for her vanity site. I uploaded a boatload of pictures to the gallery. Yet, I cannot get to my site through my ISP. The log files show other people are getting to the site just fine.

Why am I being sockblocked, if the DNS servers I am querying know better?

Update: Earthlink’s local POP got their cache re-started again. How it went back from a working updated load to an older set of data is apparently pure fucking magic…
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I’m changing webhosts currently, moving from Virtualave to cclHosting. I have nothing particularly bad to say about Virtualave, except they are overpriced compared to other systems.

Because of the move, the DNS propagation is ongoing. By Tuesday, all should be right with the world and the domain should resolve to the new host, but right now some people will see the VA site and some the ccl one. I’m not quite finished populating the ccl host, so bear with me. I’ve got 55 megs of site stuff to post, after all.
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The Friday Five makes a triumphant return!

1. What’s your favorite piece of clothing you currently own? Funky blue shoes
2. What piece of clothing do you most want to acquire? What am I a girl?
3. What piece of clothing can you not bring yourself to get rid of? Why? Class As, because they’re part of my personal history
4. What piece of clothing do you look your best in? Perhaps someone else should answer that
5. What has been your biggest fashion accident? Um, white socks with black shoes, maybe? Who freakin’ cares?

The Friday Five this week is brought to you by the word lame and the number zero. I guess they ran out of ideas or something…
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On the cover of the latest issue of Los Angeles Magazine, there is an absolutely gorgeous dessert, which is called a Triple Chocolate Marquis Cake.

Anyone have a Marquis Cake recipe? I tried Google and found nothing. I looked through my Mastercook collection, and found nothing. It looks amazing. Anyone?
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I never bothered to set a “robots” text file for my site, which explains some of the peculiar search results I get occasionally.

I noticed that I’d gotten 50 hits for “windows xp activation crack italian” as a search term, so I entered it into Google. Amazingly, my site is up toward the top of the hits, but the page it goes to is the stats page itself. It appears that once one person gets a strange search onto the stats page, it ends up being self-fulfilling, since the robots that index web pages hadn’t been told to exclude the stats directory. That’s been all fixed now, though. Of course, the Google cache won’t expire for months or years, so I’ll keep getting strange hits but at least now they won’t continue to multiply I hope.
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So your ex got a mansion where you kick it on the hill,
your boy comes to see you, he’s your Hollywood thrill.
He’s a Spanish fly, that bucks like a stallion.
In the suits that you got him, he looks more Italian.
You worry bout your tan when the weather’s gettin’ clammy,
summer in the city and winters in Miami.
You get so high on the high life pills,
cruisin’ and boozin’ and rockin’ on the horse size pills.
You could even take more thrills- you could even take more spills,
pills, thrills, chills and ills man, kills.
And rockin’ on the horse size.
Butt’s gettin’ bigger, do you think he’ll notice maybe?
That’s ok, don’t worry bout it baby!
Cause everybody knows he pumps you for your money, that’s alright,
don’t worry bout it honey!
In your itsy bitsy teenie weenie riding up your butt bikini.
Keepin’ on the heels cause you’re saggin’
just a teenie bit more than the girls he pretends he doesn’t thrill.
Rubbin’ on the lotion, and rockin’ on the horse size pills.
You could even take more thrills,
you could even take more spills, pills, thrills, chills, and ills man, kills.
And rockin’ on the horse size.
Sometimes you feel like Moses, that’s when you’re toasted.
Yeah, kick it.
Yo bitch.
That’s right, yeah.
Rockin’ on the horse size…
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Finally trashed the cascading menu-tree metaphor for the site, replacing it with a frame-free DHTML-based menu system. Love that DHTML.

Anyway, hope it is easy to follow, I thought it worked pretty well. I even tested it in several browsers. It works in Opera, Netscape 6, IE, and Mozilla. Coolio.
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I’m thinking of leaving my current webhost (a thought that occurs several times a year as I encounter roadblocks in their service). I’m looking at DownTown Host right now, but I’m open to suggestion.

For about $100/year, I expect to have POP/SMTP support, as well as Perl/PHP and other CGI abilities. For some reason, Virtualave has gotten dumber and dumber over the past year or two that I’ve used them. Their email auto-responders no longer work, they claim POP and PHP but don’t actually offer it, and so on.
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