Year: 2005

I’ve blown this off for a few weeks. Busy, uninterested, sore shoulder, pain, pain, pain.

Doing this on Saturday-no time during the week. Kids are napping, there’s a church pledge thing tonight, and my shoulder aches. I went to the Dr.’s Monday, he sent me to a physical therapist Friday. Ouch. Dude totally dug into painful parts of my left shoulder. Says I have tendonitis. Got some painkillers, which helps…

Weekly recap (easily the best part of your week, right?) Erika went to the Dr.’s Sunday-they took x-rays at the hospital-she doesn’t have a broken nose-messed up cartilage, though. New office on Monday-set up everything, dead hub, docking station. Got to put up more of my toys and stuff. Got a blood sample taken Tues., more move ins, Erika & kids visited twice. We had some rain. We got new cellphone service Thurs., canceled my old one. Physical therapy Fri., ouch. Went on a lantern walk at school for Michaelmas-made a lantern. Dinner at Chili’s afterwards. Dorothy Nolte died. Lazy today. Erika visited an aging church member today and is shopping now.

Not much happening this week that I want to talk about-a bombing in Jordan, French riots are subsiding, gas prices are going down, Quest had good earnings, Schwartzenegger lost all the ballot measures, an 18 year old is mayor of a small Michigan town, Dems did well, Paris Hilton was in a car crash-Lohan was in one a few weeks ago, Lost is huge and we’re not watching it, but we are watching the “category 7” thing-horrible, it is. Yesterday was Veterans Day.

Chimpy trotted out the old “questioning anything about what the administration does hurts the troops and helps the terrorists” line. What BS that is. They used the same line during Vietnam-it’s just a feeble attempt to deflect attention away from the serious problems that exist in the runup to war and how the war and its aftermath was handled. Questioning things is patriotic, doesn’t tell the troops anything but that we’re in a functioning Democracy-the opposite is the real problem-either stifling dissent or there being none at all.

I only picked 2 things-xPlorer2-a Windows explorer replacement and Liferay-app server portal. Check out Tribenet-it’s pretty cool, sort of like mySpace…

It’s Saturday, no Sunday, and I started this a few minutes before we take the kids to a pajama party and we go to the Melting Pot. So we had a nice fondue dinner with friends. Erika fell on her face when we picked up the kids & prolly has a broken nose.

Busy week. Helped with the Harvest Festival at school, birthday party for our minister’s son, wash, church, wash. Halloween Monday, dinner at a church friend, trick or treating, visit 2 other church friends. Flew indoor kites every lunchtime-lotsa space at work. Church meeting, a few beers after work Thursday, packed up and moved Friday. Went to San Juan Capistrano. It was our anniversary Tuesday, Erika’s birthday Friday. Dinner, church today. Erika went to the Dr’s. Tomorrow is the first day at the new place, parent/teacher meetings at school. I’m prolly going to the Dr’s after to look at my painful hips and shoulders.

Libby got indicted, is gone. Long live Libby. He pled not guilty. Couldn’t get him on the leak, just on perjury and obstruction. You really shouldn’t lie to a grand jury…Rove is next, and everyone says he should resign, or get his clearance pulled.

Samuel Alito is the new Supremes nominee. 15 years on the bench, lotsa rulings. He’s good for the base. Don’t like what I’ve seen so far.

Congress is desperate to keep on message-bills with cuts to food stamps, medicare, child welfare, drilling in the Arctic reserve. Typical. Alan Alda on West Wing was parroting this line tonight. <sigh> Gotta roll back everything enacted since the New Deal.

The riots in France are spreading. Shades of ’68. It’s poor African/Muslim immigrants, though. This rage has been simmering for years. No idea how this will play out. IM and cell phones are helping people to coordinate things.

Chimpy’s trip to S. America was a failure. No big surprise here-most people there dislike him. And he’s weak, and people smell blood in the water.

IBM researchers have been able to slow light down to 1/300th of its regular speed. This is an advance for optical switches and computing.

Downloads: Xara Xtreme, Open Office and gnuStep.

Thursday again. Tomorrow is Harvest Festival at school, Monday is Halloween, and next Friday I leave this office for the last time. Cyclical events and transitions. Not much else happening.

Pretty quiet week-Erika got an ultrasound Friday, worked on a fraudulent debit card charge-B of A gave me instant credit for it! Worked at school Saturday-cutting sod for a digging area. Sunday-left church to do sound for the concert band-Erika had to go to a funeral in San Diego-our sitter bailed so I had to leave the gig before the band played-I was pissed…Ate at IHOP on Tues pm, lunch for a departing co-worker Weds, Colin’s carseat got stolen.

AOL & Novell lay off a bunch of people-well, AOL at least. Novell is denying it. But the source is “close to the company”…so more likely than not. This is prolly more evidence that the industry is contracting and consolidating-AOL has been having a hard time competing and Novell is seeing declines in old lines of business.

Bush picked a new Fed chief-Ben Bernanke-well known and respected by insiders. For once Bush has made not a bad choice. The guy is mainstream, middle of the road, good on the things Fed chiefs need to be good at-inflation, basically. He’s also super smart, plain spoken and a fan of transparency. And he said “stay the course”, and the markets liked that.

Rosa Parks died. She was old. She gets mad props for kicking off the Civil Rights era.

NY Times says that Cheney was the one who leaked Plame’s identity. No one else seemed to pick it up, though. And indictments may come down tomorrow, so who knows? This will end up I don’t know how. It’s a fine distraction for the White House, though.

Harriet Meiers withdrew her nomination. This isn’t a big surprise, given the pressure cooker she’s been under… Now the big question is who will replace her… This might be a case of better the devil you don’t know than the devil you don’t know. Hee.

The count is 2000 dead in Iraq. Lotsa vigils. Lotsa press, on both sides. Chimpy is standing his ground, even while it shifts underneath him. He’ll suddenly decide that it’s not worth it. His approval rating is abysmal. Only his base remains. Some interesting stuff on Democracy Now. You need to listen to this show.

The only software I got was Petals-a service bus platform. Here’s three websites to look at: askTam-my sister in-law’s blog, totse-alterna-stuff, and Cliche Site. That’s it!

Halloween is getting closer-Erika bought costumes for the boys-a dragon and a knight. The Foamy this week was a rant about how Halloween isn’t scary anymore.

As usual, not much happened this week-went to Javier’s at the Spectrum, cleaned up Friday & Sat. morning-parents visited. Swam & played racquetball, set up chairs for a wedding at church Sunday. Rainy & thunderstorms Sunday night, band practice & pictures Tuesday. <yawn>

Here’s the news-the Iraqi election went by as expected-not like it means anything. Robert Fisk was on Democracy Now today and said some fascinating things. Check him (and the interview) out.

Riots in Toledo-neo-Nazis marched in the ‘hood and a riot started. Something new here? Nope.

The Angels lost. Something new here? Nope. Sports means so little to me. I’m sure there are people who are devastated by this. Don’t care.

Saddam’s trial started. He was defiant. Something new here? Nope. He got a continuance. They’re trying him for one small massacre. It’s a show trial-no due process, just sound bites.

Tom DeLay has had a warrant issued, got mugshots and asked the judge to step aside. Well, I guess that proves that he’s not guilty, if the vehement denials of any wrongdoing and the vindictive witchunter accusations didn’t. Absolute arrogance-he totally believes that he hasn’t done anything wrong! Talk about drinking the Kool-aid…

Hurricane Wilma’s diddling around the Caribbean-it was a cat 5 and the strongest Atlantic storm ever-882 millibars. It weakened, slowed down, is lashing the Yucatan and probably headed towards Florida-these storms are driven by upper level winds. It’ll probably be a cat 2 or 3-cooler water in the Gulf of Mexico… It’s also the last named storm, and a tie for the number of storms in a season-double the norm. And people still think global warming isn’t here. Piffle-this and melting polar ice should be enough proof.

Avian flu, Avian flu, Avian flu. It’s all over the news this week. And while it is a worry, it hasn’t jumped to humans or spread in numbers that indicate a pandemic. That said, if it mutates into a form easily spread by contact (basically saliva-sneezing and coughing being the most common methods), we could see bad things, depending on infection rates-looks like about 50% mortality. If there’s a pandemic, most of that will be in crowded, poor cities. Scary, though-prolly a good idea to pick up some surgical masks if things start to look bad.

More Meiers stuff-she supports an abortion ban, based on a questionnaire she filled out. She didn’t fully answer the Judiciary’s questionnaire, and some answers were wrong- (the Daily Show made fun of this). Senators on both sides don’t like that. People are questioning whether she is qualified, and Chimpy is still saying she is.

Anda correction-last week I said that there are 13 years of peace to write the Constitution-WRONG. “This Day in History” had a snip on the battle of Yorktown this week-which ended the war in 1781. So, only 8 years to make the Constitution. Still much longer than Iraq…

Software. Back to my normal rate-Go-to fill out my games. I also found a nice tutorial online that I need to do again. I suck. Jabber-an IM server, Ruby-a hot new programming language, and River-a Java 3d wrapper. I finished setting up databases on my new Windows boxes. Open office came out-may or may not get it.

OK, here we are, mid-October. Yesterday was Yom Kippur. We’ve been reading Yom Kippur to the kids for the past week or so. Now it’s Halloween books. Samhain is coming. No idea what we’re doing. The school has rules about what to wear.

Here’s the recap-Friday-a school friend of Matt’s slept over. Got a carseat from storage, Erika messed up her shoulder, went to the gym. Church, home, caught a cold, played racquetball and swam with the kids. My racquetball skills are not bad-not great, though-I can hit well and low, but not all the time. Lunch with kids on Monday, more suffering from a cold, blue screens at work. Came home a bit early Thursday-Erika got sick. Parents are visiting tomorrow.

I love our country-I just hate the people who run it…Rove is testifying again the the Plame case, word is he’s going to get indicted, along with Libby. Judith Miller was there again about a “just found” notebook. This is just “business as usual”. Gannon/Guckert might get it too. And all of Chimpy’s photo ops…and the staged “chat with the troops” <sigh>

Some of the firefighters in the recent fire were ordered to stand behind Arnold for a photo op. Again, business as usual. Again, everyone involved is denying that an order was given. So, who’s lying? Or is it just hairsplitting taken to the nth degree?

There was a big earthquake in Pakistan, if you haven’t heard. The rescue/relief effort looks eerily similar to the one in New Orleans-but I haven’t noticed anyone talking about it. No one wants to admit that we live in a 3rd world country??? I saw a screed about that in the ‘net awhile back, but I can’t find it…

The Iraqi election is tomorrow-the drumbeat of violence continues. Everyone is saying civil war. At least they amended things to let changes get made later on. The Sunnis may actually participate. Ours took 13 years to craft…and it was during a relatively peaceful time. And we had brilliant guys on it. And things moved slower then. And there was no instant global media and travel and modern weaponry and a zillion other things complicating matters, not to mention an occupying military from the global hegemon (we had succeeded in throwing out the one that was there…) What does that mean? That it’s more complicated than Chimpy could ever imagine, even if he got a brain transplant from Einstein.

Apple released a video iPod. Rumors about this have been flying… And they’ve teamed with Disney to sell TV shows for 2 bucks. And the screen is microscopic. At least there’s a new iMac.

The Million Man March ii is this weekend. whoopee. The concept is laudable, but I don’t think this will have the impact that the organizers desire. The last one showed some small changes, but this isn’t the way to do it-black men need education, employment, and moral instruction rather than inspiring speeches.

Pretty much nobody likes Meiers. This is true on both sides of the fence. There are champions on both sides as well, and there’s some evidence that she’s a moderate. Having said that, Dobson says that Rove talked to him, and guaranteed that she had the right religious qualifications. Sounds like a religious litmus test, which is against the law.

IBM released RUP to Eclipse. This is a good thing. Having a solid, modern software development process be open source helps us all.

I went on a bit of a download tear-nosing around Carnegie-Mellon, UIUC and Stanford and Cal CS research departments…Here’s what I got: Alice-3d graphics programming tutorial,Winboard (gnu chess), crafty-I wanted to get a good chess player to complement the backgammon one (it was kicking my ASS-now I need go),Acme studio-visual software architecture editor,Panda 3d-a Python 3d rendering library,Nyquist-a souud synthesis language,Denim-UI design blackboard,Gauge-software metric and monitor system,Outpost-collaborative web design blackboard,Demais-multimedia design blackboard and Xina-web database IDE.

Another week (a month!!!) flashed past-just fast, fast, fast. I still marvel at this. I’ve been trying to find freelance work. If you need writing, graphic design, programming, website design, etc., let me know. Here’s my resume. Nothing yet, though. We’ll see.

Here’s what happened this week-not much. Matt took our camera to school-caused too much disruption. Lazy Saturday, went to the bank, grilled. Church, boys played upstairs, another party swimming, worked on the bare spots in our lawn. Erika has plantar fasciitis. She got sick Monday and I came home early, ran some errands with the kids. We saw Dennis Rodman at the Ralphs-he has a white Mercedes with flames-“wormcedes” on the back-whoopee. Everyone fell asleep early Tues., I went to the gym. We got a dresser for the kids.

The usual stuff happening-violence flaring up in “Mess’o’potamia” in the run up to the referendum-they thought they’d sneak in a law that would chill a no vote. Sorry-everyone from the UN said no… A bomber made it into the green zone.

Sun and Google are trying to cross-pollinate each other, Micro$oft and jBoss too. This may be a trend-if you don’t want to do an acquisition, partner. Beehive hit 1.0. Open source is really the way to go for infrastructure and tools-you only need to buy the truly value added stuff… Sun released starOffice and M$ is going to support PDF. And Massachusetts is going with openDoc, which freezes M$ out. Open source, open standards. Buh bye M$…

More bombings in the tourist section of Bali. This is sad, because Bali is such a nice place otherwise. Not a bad tactic, though-high-impact area, makes tourists scared to go there. Dunno how strategic it is-scaring tourists doesn’t foment revolution, and the repression of civil liberties is moot when you’re away from home. Thet’s why the WTC bombings were more effective-they curtailed civil liberties throughout the target nation. We can still see that now-both in New Orleans, and when Chimpy says he’ll send in the military to disasters and to effect quarantines in a flu epidemic. Then there’s the spreading interrogations and detentions. We’re sliding down that slope to fascism. More big disasters, lack of organized dissent, apathy. At least Chimpy’s numbers are low-all he has now is his base. And Rove is nowhere to be seen.

And that brings us to Harriet Meiers. If ever there was a more public display of cronyism, this is it. No judicial experience, close associate, just the wrong choice. No paper trail, and both sides of the aisle dislike this choice. It’s odd, though-she gave money to the Dems, switched sides, and is an evangelical. She’s basically a corporate lawyer, and probably vetted everything passing around the White House. This one will be fractious. His base may start leaving him because of this (probably not, though-they’re all sheeple anyways…)

Chimpy will veto a bill defining how prisoners should be treated. Why is this a big surprise? On related front, the BBC is reporting that Bush told the Palestinian ministers that God has told him to do everything. And the White House is loudly denying it. Why is this a big surprise?

DeLay got indicted on a count of money laundering, loudly proclaimed his innocence and attacked the prosecutor. Wait. Haven’t I heard this one before?

The monkey trial ii is going on-I read today that a witness testified that ID comes from creationism-not a good thing for the ID folks to hear… I agree with the contention that the only way to discredit ID is to stand up and offer clear arguments, but our country is such sheep that it’ll fall on deaf ears-most everyone already has an opinion and won’t change their minds-especially all the evangelical sheeple… Or are they lemmings?

OK, here’s the stuff I downoaded. I went looking for clock software-ds clock (not bad), close enough clock, clox, Clone Cleaner for finding duplicate files, Super PNG is a Photoshop plugin for PNG’s-not what I needed,kWiki-the wiki that runs SocialText.