You should come see me at TekX. It’ll be a lot of fun.

This weekend we saw The Lightning Thief. Although I figured they’d take some liberties with the story, I didn’t expect them to make such sweeping changes. I suppose that if I hadn’t read it, I would have quite enjoyed it. It was great in the special effects department. But their choices of what scenes to leave out and which ones to dwell on interminably, and which characters to combine and leave out, were perplexing, and rather dissatisfying.

As usual, I recommend that you read the book instead.

The resolution in Congress branding the 1915 killing of Armenians as “genocide” has me very irritated with those turkeys in Congress. Our national attitude that we are the arbitrators of Good and Evil in the world would be comic if it wasn’t so horribly hypocritical.

If Japan were to pass a resolution condemning Hiroshima as genocide, or Germany to condemn Dresden as genocide, or India to condemn the Jallianwala Bagh massacre as genocide (look that one up, kiddies!) there would be an immediate response, a breaking of political relations, and we’d probably do something absurd like call frankfurters “freedom sausages”

Presumably, to the folks in Congress, this is about Speaking The Truth, and that’s the extent of it. For the folks at Boeing who will lose Turkey’s contract, and for our young men and women in Iraq who will no longer have the support of Turkish soldiers, it’s not about Making A Statement, and Sending A Message.

Something that I appreciate about President Obama is the way that he respects the sovereignty of other nations and treats them (well, mostly) as though they were equals. This resolution undermines that, and calls Turkey a small child that needs to be scolded. Our posture as the Great White Father is no longer convincing (if it ever was) and merely shows us up as ignorant, self-focused, and arrogant.

Furthermore, it was 95 years ago, and done under the authority of the Ottoman Empire, which was overthrown in 1923. That is, the Turkish people have *already* determined, as a nation, that the Ottomans were the Bad Guys, and tossed them out. What do we hope to accomplish that they haven’t already done?

This week has been quite a trial, but, looking back on it, it seems that all the things that went wrong were about stuff that we own and rely on. And could probably do fine without, if we had to.

The Jeep has been acting flaky for some time. We had it worked on a few weeks ago, and they fixed something (new radiator) but not actually what we took it in for, which was that sometimes it just quits. Sometimes this happens when we’re stopped. Sometimes when we’re moving. Kind of scary when we’re moving. Well, on Monday it quit while we were miles from home, but started up again. And on Tuesday it quit and wouldn’t start again.

Turns out it was a loose wire, which took hours to find and seconds to fix.

The van has been out of service for some time – the brakes don’t work.

Also, for the last few weeks, my laptop has been flaky. Long pauses in the middle of doing fairly mundane things. It became evident on Monday that my hard drive was on the way out. Perhaps if I had caught that a while back, I could have isolated the bad blocks and fixed the problem, but I didn’t find it until it was pretty far advanced. On Tuesday, it got critical, and on Wednesday, I spent most of the day trying to get files copied off of it so that I could take it in for service.

Oh, wait. No cars.

Taxis are few and far between in Lexington, and there wasn’t anybody nearby and handy to give me a ride. But I called Mr. Taxi, and they promised someone would be there in 10-15 minutes. It took 50.

When I got to Elan Technologies – the only certified Apple repair place in Lexington – the guy behind the counter treated me almost with contempt, or, at least, as though I was an enormous inconvenience to him, rather than as though I was there to help him pay his mortgage. Few things bug me as much as dismissive customer service. I’d almost rather someone be rude than just ignore me. Anyways, he promised that maybe, if nothing more important came up, he’d try to have a look at it by Friday. But, you know, maybe not. We’re awful busy. With, you know, important stuff. Bye now.

So most of this week I’ve been working on Maria’s laptop, for which I don’t have a VGA adapter, so it’s been on a 13″ screen, while I’m mostly used to working on the 27″ screen.

But, all of this is surmountable. The Jeep is fixed, and I expect I’ll have my laptop back some time this month. Or, you know, maybe next month, if nothing more important comes up.