All posts by rbowen

Write every day

Numerous people, over the years, have encouraged me to write every day. And I really have tried. This is probably the closest I have ever come.

Strangely (dunno, maybe other folks do this too) my thought process seems to be very much akin to my writing process. I start with a thought, and I edit it, until I have a statement, or a passage, expressing an idea. Most frequently, I do this if I am going to speak to someone about something – I plan out exactly what I am going to say, and, for the most part, I stick to the script. This is why, I suppose, when I write and when I speak, I tend to use the same phrasing. Also, I suppose, it is why when I speak on a topic, people will often tell me that I seem to be lecturing. Incidentally, this is where I got the moniker DrBacchus in the first place. I was speaking to a fellow imbiber about the wine we were drinking, and he said I sounded like a college professor lecturing on some academic topic.

So writing in a medium like this, where the technology lets me put down my thoughts as they come to me, seems to be well suited to my way of thinking, and my way of writing.

And if, occasionally, I actually write something that other folks find worth reading, all the better, since I don’t expect to ever write the Great American Novel, or even the Great Apache Book, although I continue to strive for the latter.

So, there, I’ve done my writing for today. Now, perhaps later, I’ll actually write some of the stuff that I’m supposed to be writing, and for which they are paying me.

Saddam’s shields

These folks are going to Iraq, where they will (they think) prevent the war by being human shields. I suspect that our men and women in uniform, who are risking their lives for the safety of the American people, will be only too glad to help them along with their wish for martyrdom. Whether or not I am completely persuaded of the necessity and/or validity of our complaints against Iraq, I am completely persuaded that these folks are enemies of the United States, and should be treated as enemy combatants in the event of a war, and as treasonous traitors in the event that they return to the US once things have been resolved, whatever that resolution may be.

Downloading music

Although entirely too long, Salon.com Technology | Embrace file-sharing, or die, by John Snyder and Ben Snyder, is worth reading, or at least skimming. At a bare minimum, read the Thomas Jefferson quote.

Ever since the demise of Napster, I have not downloaded music from the Internet (except for a few isolated cases) and, in that period, I have purchased perhaps one CD. Prior to that, I was downloading music and buying CDs of stuff that I liked. Clearly, I’m not an isolated example of this, but this link between hearing a song and buying a CD is just as obvious as it at first seemed to me. I’m somewhat at a loss to see how the RIAA does not see this. I think that it is, perhaps, a generational thing, and the folks that are currently in control just can’t bring themselves to make that jump. While it is possible that the next generation of leaders will make this step, the current lack of movement would seem to doom the RIAA to forever be one generation behind the curve.

LPLUG February

Yesterday was the February meeting of the LPLUG. Doug DeYoung spoke about Linux security, the methodology of cracking into Linux machines. It was a very interesting presentation, and demonstrated how useful even the smallest piece of information can be to a cracker.

Hopefully we’ll have his presentation for the web site eventually, but I’m not sure if he’ll be anxious to give us that or not, since he gives this presentation a lot.

Top Stories!

I’m really having a lot of trouble understanding this. The top four stories on CNN.com right now are:

1) Turkey wants aid in writing
2) Teen gets second transplant
3) ‘The Bachelorette’ falls for fireman
4) North Korean fighter jet sparks alert in South

In that order. Apparently, the plot of a prime-time soap opera is more important than a possible war in the Korean peninsula.

I’m honestly baffled by this phenomenon – the idea that a supposedly unstaged television show (yeah, right) in which nobody has any talent, would capture the attention of the average American to such an extent that a (I thought) respectable news source like CNN would run this as their number 3 top story. Why does anyone care, even a little bit, about which one of a group of shallow men will be picked by this shallow woman? Yes, I suppose I can understand the “fairy tale” aspect of this all, but only slightly. Maybe the folks watching this are the same folks that watched those ghastly MTV reality shows back in the late 80s and early 90s.

So, as the US is trying as hard as it can to procure a staging ground for attacking Iraq, a teenager in Mexico struggles to stay alive after receiving the wrong organs in a transplant, and North Korea makes more threats to nuke South Korea, people really, honestly, seem to care which one of these guys will be picked for a marriage that will be broken up before the year is out. I suppose, maybe, it’s just a bit of escapism.

In upcoming news, the next thing we have to look forward to is the HotOrNot craze from 2 years ago coming to television. Makes me very nervous about what they’ll pull next year.

www.ready.gov

I just want to point out that http://www.ready.gov/ is running Apache. When you tell the entire nation they need to go to a web site, I guess you want to be running a real web server. 

riesling% HEAD ready.gov
200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Connection: Keep-Alive
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 23:56:50 GMT
Age: 1931
Server: Apache
Content-Length: 21554
Content-Type: text/html
Expires: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 00:27:15 GMT
Client-Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 23:58:27 GMT
Client-Response-Num: 1

Traffic lights

Dear City Council member,

Just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed the brief outage of the traffic lights around Lexington, following the ice storm of the past weekend. As you know, these intersections operated as 4-way stops while the lights were dark, and, in almost every case, this vastly improved traffic flow. In particular, at the intersection of Reynolds and Shillito, which is on my way to work most mornings, yesterday morning I waited about 12 seconds, as compared to my usual 3 minutes. Most mornings, I sit at that intersection anywhere from 2 to 4 minutes, while 3 or 4 cars drive through the intersection in the other direction. I then have about 25 seconds to get through the light before it change again, so if there are more than 3 of us, someone has to wait another light. But, while the lights were out, it was like old times, back before the unneeded and unwanted traffic light was added to the intersection.

Unfortunately, this morning the light was back in operation, and, once again, I sat for 4 minutes while 3 cars went past on Reynolds. The light on Clays Mill, however, was still out, so I managed to get right throught that intersection without the usual 2 minute wait. Yesterday, it took me 6 minutes to get my daughter to school, whereas, when the lights are working, I almost never make it in less than 12.

I noticed a number of other intersections, also, where traffic flow was a lot faster than usual, because the lights were out. I had always assumed that lights were intended to facilitate traffic flow, not hinder it. Clearly I was mistaken.

So, if you can arrange for the lights to be out more frequently, this would save me a great deal of time and frustration. If you could bring this up at the next city council meeting, this would be a great service to our community.

Thanks for your time.

More ice

It was quite interesting driving around today. There are a bzillion icecicles on everything. Cars are encased in an inch or more of ice. Trees are giant ice sculptures. The roads are not particularly bad, but every few miles there’s a branch hanging right down into the road, and this always seems to happen just as someone is coming in the other direction.

There was almost nobody on the roads today, which is just as well, and is probably the reason that I saw not one single accident. However, a small plane went down near somerset, and from the pictures, it was because of ice.

I need to get my printer working again, so that I can print some of the pictures I’ve taken. Although the printer was detected immediately, it does not seem to be printing anything but plain text correctly, and I just don’t have the patience to wrestle with it right now.

Ice Storm

There was an ice storm last night. Left quite a mess. There are a number of trees in the road, or branches that are overhanging the roads so low that I can’t drive under them. I took some pictures.