The days are a blur

<< Certified... still! | Home | Math and The Beer Drinker >>

The days are a blur

I forgot how much I enjoy what I do for a living. I'm so heads-down on stuff right now that the days are flying by. Sometimes I forget to eat. Which is cool, because I could stand to skip a few meals :)

Some random thoughts for my neglected readership:

Why is it that Scheduled Tasks, the built-in facility in Windows 2000 and later for automating the execution of scripts, is itself unscriptable? No amount of WMI or ADSI scripting can cajole any information whatsoever from the Task Scheduler APIs. I found a perl script that can sometimes do it, but nobody really seems to know why it works on some machines and not on others. This is moronic.
Linux is growing on me. I blame my growing knowledge of the user interface. And the discovery of Pico as a vi replacement (Pico is included with the Pine email client). With pico, I can hit an arrow key on my keyboard and the cursor actually goes that way. I'm sorry, I shouldn't need a damn manual to figure out how to make the cursor move one space to the right (in vi it's like CTRL-V or something. I don't even have the patience to look it up now, so that I can properly flame the damn thing!). The cool thing I did last night was install Snort 2.1.1 onto one of my new $179 Fry's specials... from a terminal window on my main computer. That was pretty freaking cool. I even compiled all the sources, which was fun. Even though it took forever to compile MySql (it's only an 800Mhz machine, what do you want for $179?!?!).
Did terrorists actually manage to topple the government in Spain, or was that just a bad dream? That can only embolden the terrorists to try harder in other places where the electorate has proven less susceptable to bully tactics. The world thanks you, Spain, for the escalation in terrorism that you have just encouraged.
Is anyone fact-checking John Kerry these days? The guy will apparently say anything if it will get him elected, though I guess that's par for the course when it comes to politicians. The latest was Kerry saying how he supported tough sanctions on Cuba when he voted for the Helms-Burton legislation 8 years ago. Problem is, if you look at the facts, you'll discover that he actually voted against it. This guy does more waffling than the local IHOP on a Sunday morning. I can't tell what the hell he'd do if he actually made it into office. I bet there would be syrup involved though.

And I'm spent.

Print | posted @ Monday, March 15, 2004 10:16 PM

Comments on this entry:

# re: The days are a blur

by Chris Ashton at 3/26/2004 3:07 PM

If Spain were to stay, they would further incite terrorists, and if they were to leave, they would embolden them; a classic catch-22. Clearly the government of Spain needed to be held accountable for getting into this mess in the first place, over the objections of 90% of their electorate. And that's exactly what they did. Spain got the country into a war for what turned out to be false reasons, and Spain now realizes -- even if the US does not -- that a misused military creates enemies.

Never should second-guessing terrorist's reactions get in the way of doing the right thing. "But it might embolden the terrorists" is not an acceptable justification for continuing with a misguided and destructive course of action.

As far as John Kerry goes ... well, don't blame me, I voted for Dean. Kerry is too-nuanced-by-half sometimes. But flip-flopping still preferable to Bush, IMHO -- who starts out wrong and stays that way with single-minded zeal.

In defense of Kerry, Senate records are tricky things to interpret. Congress is about making deals, and congresscritters routinely vote against legislation they support because the process has watered it down or perverted its intent. The Kitty Cat Protection Act always comes with a rider that makes kicking dogs mandatory, so to speak. And actually Kerry is pro-embargo (I'm not, btw), and he voted for the Helms-Burton legislation twice, but not in its final form as it passed. Yes, it's not entirely truthful, but it's no more a lie than Bush's claim that he passed a patient's bill of rights in Texas in '97 (that he actually opposed up until it passed with a veto-proof margin, and then allowed to become law without his signature).