All posts by rbowen

… but I wouldn’t want to paint it.

On Saturday, we painted a HUGE map of the USA on Sarah’s school parking lot. Kentucky was about 2.5 feet across, to give you some idea of the scale.

Most folks ignored the instructions to start in the middle and work out, so by the end, I was playing twister to paint Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. And I got lots of paint on me due to certain people insisting on painting south Texas before north Texas.

So, today, I hurt all over. For some reason, I didn’t suffer much yesterday, but today my legs and back hurt, and my shoulders are so tight you could bounce a paint can off of them. But the map looks absolutely wonderful, so I suppose it was worth it.

UNKNOWN CALLER

Over the last 48 hours, I have received about 50 calls from UNKNOWN CALLER. Since I make a firm practice of not answering these calls (I *despise* talking to telemarketers, primarily because I don’t know how to say “No” to them, and because they waste huge amounts of time getting to the point, and invariably call when I’m doing something important) I let the answering machine get it. None of them have left a message, leading me to believe that the choice not to answer was the right one. Still, it’s annoying. What’s most annoying about it is how late in the evening they are calling. I kinda think that 7pm, maybe 8, is about the latest any decent marker should be calling. Many of these have been after 8, some as late as 9:30. That’s just not right.

The purpose of law

What is the purpose of law? I find myself having this little internal conversation every time I run the red light at Shillito Park and W Reynolds Road. The purpose of law, as I understand it, is to protect the freedom of citizens. Or, as John Adams put it, to secure the maximum amount of happiness for the maximum number of people. That is, certain freedoms (like the freedom to drive anywhere I want) must be curtailed in order to protect certain other freedoms (such as the freedom not to be squished like a frog in an intersection). And so, as I wait for 4 minutes at a red light while no traffic flows in the other direction, I have to wonder what freedom is being protected in exchange for my impatience and annoyance at waiting, apparently, for nothing. I have no answer to this. So I’m often likely to run the light, when it is abundantly clear to me that there is no harm done by my doing so. I expect that one of these days it will get me in trouble.

UN in the Congo

Three months later, the UN is
in the D.R. Congo with the ability to actually use force to stop the “tit-for-tat massacres” that have been going on since May. It’s good to know that we pay millions of dollars into such an efficient organization.

Maybe, one of these days, we’ll actually see the UN doing its job on a regular basis so that the US doesn’t have to.

While I’m certainly no big fan of Woodrow Wilson’s vision for the world, I do like to see folks doing what they say that they are going to do.

Is the flood of spam over?

As abruptly as it started, the flood of inbound spam seems to have stopped. The only thing that I actually did that might be related was to switch my secondary MX from sendmail to postfix and put some spam filtering stuff on there. Apparently a lot of the spam that I was getting was rejected by my primary, but accepted by my secondary and then forwarded back to the primary with the added credibility of coming from a trusted host. Or something like that.

Either that, or the sobig.f virus hit its timeout, and quit sending. Or perhaps mrtg broke and isn’t reporting stats right.

*NOT* recommended financial practices

I just spent the last 3 hours balancing my checkbook. Why did it take so long? Well, because I had not done it since May. Why not? Well, I suppose it was a combination of lack of time and terror of finding out that I was one paycheck away from being on the street.

I do not recommend this as a standard financial practice. It’s better to know. Although there were some times that I think if I knew how close I was, I’d have been under even more stress than I was.

Amazingly, everything came out just fine, and everything was balanced and accounted for.

Lord of the Rings, Warner Brothers edition

I meant to mention – I checked out the old Warner Bros LotR movie from the public library and watched it earlier this week. It was truly dreadful. The animation was terrible. The story telling was terrible. Everything was terrible. I’m amazed that they bothered to make a DVD of it. I’d have thought that they would rather the entire embarrassing thing be forgotten forever.

It was animated, but apparently they had taken live footage and animated on top of it for some of the scenes. This did not work particularly well.

It’s hard to express how utterly terrible it was. Just awful. Think bad saturday morning cartoons, but without the relief of cereal commercials.

That’s NOT funny any more

I’m trying to teach my daughter that humor tends not to enjoy an economy of scale. Which is to say that a funny line from a movie will tend not to be funny the 112th time it is repeated in any given 5 minute period.

Paraguay

Yesterday, when I came out of Walmart, there were two ladies peering at Rocinante, which now has a Paraguay license plate on it, given to me by my brother. They were getting into an ancient, beat-up Jeep Cherokee parked right next to me. When I got to the Jeep, they asked where Paraguay was. After I described where it is, one of the ladies said, “Can you drive there from here?” Initially, I assumed that she was asking if I had driven from there, and that was why I had the license plate. However, after I told her that you can, indeed, drive there from here, a funny thing happened. The other lady started trying to talk her out of it, as though this was the sort of thing that had happened before. There’s got to be a fascinating story in there somewhere, and I wish I had had more time to stay and chat.