"President George W Bush was sent a public manifesto yesterday by Washington's hawks, demanding regime change in Syria and Iran and a Cuba-style military blockade of North Korea backed by planning for a pre-emptive strike on its nuclear sites. The manifesto, presented as a 'manual for victory' in the war on terror, also calls for Saudi Arabia and France to be treated not as allies but as rivals and possibly enemies."
"It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books are annotated in suspicious ways."
So, this is what it is like to live in a police state when even the books we read make us suspects? It's surreal in a creapy sort of way.
I finally got my free cable modem service hooked up. And I took advantage of moving my broadband from the phone line to the coax to move my WAP from the living room to the dining room, allowing for better more even coverage through the house. No more dead connections on the back porch. And I am getting over 2 meg for free instead of paying $50 a month for the 500k SBC was giving me. Right now I am a happy weirdo.
It's amazing to me how a really busy couple of weeks can drag on for so long!
This week and last week were just never going to end. Today doesn't even feel like Friday. I was hoping that December would be a nice, quiet time at work and allow me to get some old projects done. But, no, they keep finding new crap to heap onto my plate. It's just endless.
Home life has been pretty busy as well. The little time that I actually spend at home seems to zip by. When I am awake and alive, I'm either laid up with some pain, disease or fatigue, or I'm working my fingers to the bone on some project. When I wasn't sneezing, hacking or sleeping off the crud, I was laying around with one or both of my feet propped up as they have been killing me. When all of that cleared up, I am moving still unpacked boxes out of the living room to make room for new furniture.
Once again my yearly bonus was gone before I knew I had it. At least this year it went for something good: Couchzilla! We bought a new three piece sectional couch and I love it! I'll get some pics up soon. It's the best thing that's happened to me recently.
Well, that's enough bitching. I'm going to go back to being bored at work. You all have fun.
Okay, Win98 sucks too. I spent most of today doing a clean install of and downloading updates for Win2K.
Oh, and yesterday I started writing a new novel. It will be interesting to see if it just ends up in the scrap drawer with most of my projects or if I actually get a full first draft before I give up on it.
"BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- After months on the run from coalition forces, a disheveled Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hidden hole near a farmhouse and was captured without firing a shot, coalition authorities announced Sunday."
The bad news is that this probably means another four years of Shrub unless he manages to screw up royally before the election. No doubt Rove and Cheney will be keeping him on a short leash.
One thing I am sure of, writers write. There is no such thing as an aspiring writer. One either writes or one does not. One may aspire to be a published writer. One may aspire to make one's living by writing. But one cannot aspire to write. One either writes or one does not. One either loves it or needs it enough to find the time and make the effort or one does not. One does or one does not. There is no aspire. I have been a writer. I know they ecstasy and frustration that comes from sitting down every day and writing for good of or ill. With rare exception I have given that up in favor of watching TV, or reading, or classwork, or spending time with my loved ones. Often the things I have put before writing are valuable and, it could be argued, necessary for living the sort of life that gives a writer something to write about. Can I find a balance with the few free hours I have every day between living and writing? If I want to be a writer, I will have to.
"When President Bush delivers a speech recognizing the centenary of heavier-than-air-powered flight December 17, it is expected that he will proffer a bold vision of renewed space flight, with at its center a return to the moon, perhaps even establishment of a permanent presence there."
I thought things were going to work out for me. I thought I had prospects. I was the first one in the bag and that sounded like a good deal to me.
Turned out that I sat at the bottom of that bag in some overheated, rat infested gas station for three weeks. When someone finally did buy us, it was some bloated long-haul trucker who thought he looked like Elvis. Yeah, fat, trucker Elvis! Geez!
So, there I was, in the bottom of the bag, waiting. This guy happily munched through the whole bag. He dragged giant fists out of the bag, tossing them in his mouth as he roared down the road humming "Viva Las Vegas". With a mouthful of my crunchy cohorts it sounded more like "Weba Wost Baygis". My turn was soon, this would all be over. A few body tearing crunches, then a swan dive into a pool of churning, hydrochloric, cheese flavored-acid death.
There were only a few of us left. He grabbed up Ted, Larry and Spike all at once. Then he fished out Bobby and Stew. He nabbed Chuck, that guy had thousands of morbid jokes about getting stuck in the teeth and going down the wind pipe. I wasn't sorry to say goodbye to Chuck. Then, it was my turn, there was no one left. Just me. I was ready. I was brave.
Still brave, I waited. Brave and ready.
Yup. Brave. Still here.
Hello? Echo! Heeelllloooooo!!
Can you believe this idiot? He ate a nine and a half ounce bag and managed to leave me behind? How the heck do you do that? I sat in that bag on that seat for days. We drove all over the place. He'd get out, come back smelling like beer and I'd think, sure, here it comes. I mean, what goes better with beer? He wasn't going for it. He left me where I was, sliding around in that plastic bag, waiting to be sat on.
But, I was spared even that kindness. No, he cleaned his truck up for some floosie he met on one of his beer breaks. I was shoved behind the seat with a few dozen Marlboro boxes, a few empty beer cans and a can of tuna. We kept driving. It got so cold I thought I'd snap! Then we drove more, once it was really windy, the doof left the windows cracked open. The wind caught my bag and I sailed and whipped around in the cab of that truck for twenty minutes straight. I thought sure I'd puke up my little, yellow guts!
When he got back in the truck and closed the windows, the bag settled right back down on the passenger's seat! It was like something out of Dante! Eat me, you freak! Just eat me! It's why I'm here, get it over with already! EAT ME!
For weeks more we drove on. Finally, one day, he stopped by the side of the road. He pushed me and the beer cans and other garbage out the door into a grassy ditch. He drove off in a haze of road grit. It didn't take long, the ants came in force. Finally.
Heaven isn't as cool as you'd think. Floating around on a cloud is about like being in that hot truck on that damn seat. Winged Pringles and Doritos flutter and dive through the clouds. The smell of Ultra-Super Hot salsa and Chili-Cheese sauce waft up from The Pit now and then, reminding me it could be worse. I pass my days remembering the truck and beer soaked Elvis-boy. Then, sometimes I think and I ask questions. Questions like: what if the The Big Guy ate me?
For the better part of the last year, I have been playing with Windows XP on my laptop. After all that time, I can say I officially hate it and look forward to the day when I have the cash to build a Linux box or get a Powerbook.
I have never been religious about my OS. As far as I was concerned, it was a tool, a means to an end. Windows had the most software, Mac had the neatest interface and Linux had power and adaptability. I just seemed to keep ending up with Windows systems. Outside of boredom with the same old interface and taste for Linux command line utilities, I felt no overwhelming desire to kill Windows until I eXPerienced XP.
It wasn't the cartoony interface. I felt it was a nice break from the past. It wasn't because it was evil. I feel evil has gotten a bad rap, on the whole. No, it was because of Windows File Protection. WFP is a feature added to Win2k and XP. The stated purpose was to prevent programs from overwriting critical system files and destabilizing the system. The problem was, the protection was extended to non-critical files.
I discovered this when I first installed Win2k. I am not fond of the default text editor that comes with Windows. For a while now, I have been making a habit of renaming my preferred editor notepad.exe and dropping it on top of the Windows version. When I tried it on Win2k, it didn't work. My text editor kept disappearing and being replaced by the Windows default. A little research I found out about WFP. Apparently Microsoft considers their crappy little text editor to be a critical system file. A little more research and I found the registry hack that turned off WFP. I was somewhat annoyed, but I could almost see some measure of wisdom in the system. If someone is looking up and using registry hacks, they either know they are doing or are morons destined to destroy their system anyway. Otherwise, keep the lusers from trashing their systems and blaming MS.
Then along came XP. I have a taste for the new and exciting, and I like to keep on top of new tech, so I went along and installed it. Along with XP came WFP and the oh so precious default text editor. So, I fired up regedit, did my hack and dropped my text editor on top of with default editor. Only, the hack did not work. MS had turned the hack off. Here I was, MS certified, years of experience as a tech and I was being forbidden from choosing my own text editor for my own bloody protection and now I was not even allowed to hack it out. A little research and I found a new hack. This involved actually using a hex editor to manually hack a .dll file to kill WFP. By the time I found out about this hack, MS had already included an update that modified the .dll to not allow for the hack. So, someone competent enough to find, download and install a hex editor, to actually research how to manually modify a .dll file, is not competent in MS's eyes to choose their own bloody, fucking text editor.
This is emblematic of an unhealthy world view in some sectors of the tech industry, the view that companies like MS, not computer owners, should be master and commander of computers. We as users should only be allowed to use our computers in the time and manner MS and company allow. And computer are turned from interactive to just another cultural sedative.
Then I look at the Linux and open source camp. Their very reason for being is freeing users to define their own computing experience. Don't like it? Hack it and make it behave. What a contrast it is, rather like comparing a totalitarian state with a democracy. It's like comparing dark to light, like comparing Shrub to Clinton.
Of course, at this point I have only two computers. One is a desktop that is mainly my wife's territory and she is happy with Win98. The other is my laptop. I have successfully loaded Linux onto it. But I could not get X top run. While there are some who live and die by the CLI (and don't get me wrong, I love the CLI), not having a GUI takes the fun out of downloading porn. So, for the moment I am stuck with Windows. But, at least I can use a more obedient version. I took advantage of a system crash (so much for stability) to do a clean install of pre-WFP Win98. It will have to do until I can get the cash together to get a box that knows I am the master,
