Aimless Wandering

Sometimes it amazes me how short people’s memory is… Or for that matter how short the media wants our memory to be…

Take for example all of the headlines about how the Democrats and Republicans are going to work together in the new Democratic controlled Congress, and how the White House is going to work with the new Democratic leadership… RIGHT

Hmm I seem to recall hearing this same song and dance 6 years ago when the President first took office. Anybody remember the whole “I’m going to be a uniter not a divider” speeches the President made back then? The speeches that were made just weeks before the start of 6 years of incredibly divisive partisan politics… So why should we believe that the White House is going to be remotely interested in working with Congress?

Heck considering how positively nasty some many campaigns were leading up to the election does anybody actually think that either party is going to work with the other?

Something tells me that once the Congressional investigations of the past 6 years of governance get started by the Democrats, the Republicans will start screaming about how the Democrats are just trying to shut down government and keep anything from getting done… All the while hoping that we forget that the Republicans did the exact same thing to the Clinton Administration during it’s final years in office.

In case you missed it, what was one of the first things that the President did to work with the new Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill? Why, nominate crazy John Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. You remember John Bolton don’t you? John Bolton, the man with a history of bullying intelligence analysts to make sure the provide him the reports that supported his arguments, even if the reports are false? John Bolton who has stated that he doesn’t even like the UN, who’s nomination is so unpopular it can’t even get out of Comittee. The only reason this guy has a job is because the President has been sneaking it in as a “Recess Appointment” that allows the guy to hold the job for a year without Congress approving it. So the White House is working with the Democrats by submitting for nomination a guy that they know that there’s no way in the world the Democrats would approve… Right…

So yesterday, just minutes before my boss was to give a presentation, my boss gets a page from his wife. When he returns the call his wife tells him that she got a call from an unknown caller stating that their teenage daughter was involved in a car accident. The caller stated that there were no injuries, and that their daughter was ok, but that they needed to get to the scene of the accident right away.

When my boss’s wife tried to reach their daughter on her cell phone to check in with her, there was no answer. To further muddle the situation, their daughter should have been in class when the call came in about the accident.

So my boss goes tearing out of the office headed for the scene of the accident to check on his daughter. When he gets there he discovers… nothing. No accident, no emergency vehicles, no sign that anything had occured. A few minutes later my boss manages to get through to his daughter who informs him that the reason why she didn’t answer her phone is becuase she was in class and had it turned off…

It appears that the call was a hoax. But why would anybody do such a thing? Not that I condone making hoax calls to 911, but at least when you do something like that you see police cars and fire trucks, but in this instance to me it seems that for the caller the result would be a bit anti-climatic…

I think I may have found the magic combination against the comment spammers.  I haven’t had a single piece of comment spam on the Cruise Planners site in a little over a week now.  While I won’t make the mistake of saying that I’ve won the battle permanently, it’s the most progress I’ve had so far.
Part 1 is the Akismet plugin for Wordpress.  It has done a terrific job of catching spam before it gets to the blog, comments that Akismet suspects to be spam sit in a seperate moderation queue.  While Akismet has probably caught 99.5% of the spam comments sent to the site, there’s two downfalls to the plug-in, although they are minor.  First, Akismet runs someplace else and if the owners of Akismet make a goof in their maintenance of the Akismet code the spam flood gates can open up.  This is actually something that has happened in the past.  Second, while Akismet is good at preventing the spam from being posted, it doesn’t keep the spammers from the site.

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So, a few months ago we ordered The Best of The Electric Company DVD set. We’ve had the set for a few months, but tonight was the first time we sat down on started watching it. We didn’t get past the first episode but wow…

This was probably the first episode of The Electric Company I’ve watched in more than 25 years. I know the show had cheesy ’70s styles, songs, hair, etc… but I really forgot just how cheesy things were.

Despite the super cheesy feel (like Morgan Freeman wearing an outfit that made him look like Jimmy Hendrix) the boy seemed to enjoy it.

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So yesterday I decided to continue trying to figure out how to get SUSE Linux on the steaming pile of crap Toshiba M200 that has been sitting on my desk at work.  (Don’t worry, this won’t be a post loaded with technobabble and a documentation of how I got Linux on the steaming pile of crap.  I would get bored with such a post long before you would! )
Since we’re very much a Windows shop and connecting non-standard systems to the tubes network is strictly verboten, I got quite a few puzzled looks from people as I continued to curse at the steaming pile of crap.

After two hours of research, I finally figured out that while the steaming pile of crap won’t boot off of CD-Drives that CAME with the thing, it will boot off of some other CD Drive that we had in one of the classrooms. Once I got the thing to boot off the CD, the installation went swimmingly.

I can’t count the number of times I was asked quite skeptically “so why exactly are you trying to load Linux on that tablet?”

Telling them that I had this free copy of an OS just burning a hole in my pocket didn’t appease them.

Telling them that the only way I could learn about Linux was to load it and use it, kinda appeased them.

Telling them that it’s professional development would cause their faces to light up and walk away thinking I as being productive.

On a side note, I told my boss’s boss that I had taken over the branch in a bloodless coup, she didn’t seem impressed… She had found me working at my boss’s desk on something for him while he wandering who knows where. I warned him that if he left me alone I was going to start answering the phone and making decisions for him, he didn’t believe me…

In case you hadn’t noticed it’s been a bit quiet up here over the past week, unfortunately not because I’ve had a quiet simple week.

Lets seen babysitting on Monday, followed by a physical Tuesday AND I started a pretty intense computer class on Tuesday too. Tuesday pretty much sucked, since I got about hours of sleep on Monday night AND I had to fast for the physical. With just 4 hours of sleep and no caffene I was also expected to be able to string a coherent sentence or 5 together for the class I started… Fun I tell ya!

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is one of my neighbors using a circular saw at 9:30 at night? What construction project is so important to be cutting and hammering at this hour? Just wondering…

So, did you happen to catch the statments coming out of the White House earlier this week about the President’s latest round of speeches?

Accoriding to the President and the White House, the current round of speeches are “not Political” but are about the future of this country and the direction we are headed…

What exactly is the President talking about you wonder? The War on Terror and the situation in Iraq. Are these not the two most politically charged topics right now?

Better yet, we’re talking about the President of the United States, not the President of the Fargo ND Visitors Bureau. Short of the man’s lunch order EVERYTHING said by The President is political. He is said to be the most powerful man in the free world, how could anything he says or does not be considered political. Let’s not even look at the fact that he has pursued one of the most divisive political agendas in US history…

So I subscribe to this magazine that’s in its first year of production.  I won’t name it, but depending on how you found your way over here you might be familiar with it.

In going through the magazine I’ve noticed that just about every article with the exception of two columns are written by just 2 different people.
Now I subscribe to several magazines, several of which I was a subcriber to since their inception.  While it’s not uncommon for the same person to pen multiple articles in the same issue, finding the byline to be the same on 90% of the articles doesn’t seem to be a good sign…

So I’ve gotten to wonder, how long a magazine can last when it has such a small pool of people providing content?

There’s been rumbling over the last few days over a new tool from Microsoft called Windows Live Writer…

What does it do? Well you’re looking at it. It’s a stand alone blogging tool that runs on Windows XP (and presumably Vista), that interacts with many of the blogging software commonly in use, including WordPress.

The program lets you draft your entry locally on your computer and when competed lets you upload it to your blog as either a draft or an actual entry.

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