Rants and Revelations

I have three blogs on this site. One of them is this one, my personal blog, which I set up first just to experiement with this whole blogging phenomenom, but I got hooked and continued to update it nearly daily. And when my friend Maddy got acute lymphatic lymphoma, I set up a blog for her to record her thoughts and feelings as a form of release and catharsis for her. When she got too sick to post, we added a couple of other authors to her blog so that the people who were visiting her in the hospital and talking to her on the phone could keep the rest of her friends updated. And when she died, I set up memorial blog site with an author userid and password that anybody could use to post memories of Maddy, and also to post announcements of things like the memorial service in Philadelphia last winter and the interment ceremony in Quebec this summer.

So while it’s my site, and non-commercial, I have multiple blogs and multiple authors. Well, SixAhead, the people who maintain the MovableType software that this blog runs on have decided that people like me need to be hit up for vast quantities on money. I could probably afford the money they want, but by the same token I don’t want to pay it. So now I’m looking for new blog software. I’ve heard good things about Textpattern and WordPress, but neither of them allows multiple blogs, so I’d have to set up instances. Not sure how that works. Also, one or both of them only supports MySQL, and I much prefer PostgresSQL.

This morning my network access was sucking rocks. Pinging upstream showed up to 80% packet loss. Resetting the router and the cable modem didn’t help. I called RoadRunner, and they had a recorded message saying that they were doing work and service might be intermittent until 8:00am. So I waited.
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Besides following the Giro D’Italia live on-line, one my favourite acitivites this time of year is watching our Kodak Birdcam 2004. And today, some (maybe as many as 3) of the 5 eggs have hatched. Woo hoo!

I’m evidently the last person in the universe to discover them, but I really enjoyed the P.G.Wodehouse book I listened to yesterday (”The Cat Nappers”) and I am now determined to read the whole lot.
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I can’t decide which I hate worse - the atrocities done at Abu Ghraib prison, or the apologists who think that torture, including rape, can be excused.

Even the erstwhile “Lean Left” gets it awfully, awfully wrong, linking rape and threats of rape with homophobia and sexuality. Rape isn’t sex. It’s merely the most degrading and damaging thing you can do to another person. Worse, far worse than murder, or maiming or physical torture or psychological torture.

What is going to appear below the cut line is pretty heavy, you probably don’t want to read it.

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I’m listening to an audio book right now. It’s P.G.Wodehouse’s “The Cat Burglars”. I’ve never actually read a Jeeves and Wooster book before, and I’m enjoying this one. But the narrator sounds disconcertingly like my ex-mother-in-law, in spite of the difference in genders. It’s a little bit jarring.

I’m watching my web server logs scroll by, and every minute, I see the following:

216.239.69.45 - - [10/May/2004:10:04:18 -0400] “GET /getlatest.glh?PV=6.0.5.27&OS=WIN&L=en-US, en, *&LID=1033&ch=120+90+0+0+0&ch=72+53+0+0+0&ch=52+739+0+0+0&ch=33+923+0+0+0&ch=73+166+0+0+0&ch=97+108+0+0+0&ch=118+14+0+0+0 HTTP/1.0″ 404 1063 “-” “RMA/1.0 (compatible; RealMedia)”


Now, if Google can be trusted, and believe me, it can, it appears that this bozo somehow has his DNS screwed up so that it thinks I’m channels.real.com.

If only I had some suitably BOFHly way of handling this - like causing his RealPlayer to suddenly scream at him to shut the fucking thing off.

Right now my nemisis is the FAA and DAFIF data that I use for my navaid.com waypoint generators. Doing airports and navaids are simple. The problem that’s bugging me right now are the various and sundry “waypoints”, and the ridiculously lax and inconsistent way the FAA and DAFIF files name them.
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‘I take full responsibility’

Stop the presses, something unprecedented has happened! Somebody from the G.W.Bush White House has not only taken responsibility for something, he’s even apologized!

Now if only Rumsfeld would do the traditional thing after a mistake this major, and resign. The only problem with that is that probably (shudder) Wolfowitz would take over.

Of course the real “taking full responsibility” are the poor innocent soldiers on the ground who are going to face a much bigger and more determined resistance/insurgency/uprising because of the actions of the scum who did this. I hope they make the people who took those pictures visit the families of every solider who dies from now on to say “It might be my fault your son or daughter died”.

And Rush Limbaugh can blow me.

I have a bunch of mailing lists that I maintain, and which operate using Mailman software.

I also have a person on a bunch of my lists whose ISP routinely will stop accepting email for several hours a day. The ISP that this ISP gets its email from sends these “your mail hasn’t been delivered for four hours, I’ll keep trying for 5 days” messages which were common back in the days of UUCP email, but pretty stupid now a days. Unfortunately Mailman treats these messages as bounces, even though they’re not. And if Mailman sees enough bounces, you get bounced off the mailing list.

The person in question doesn’t want to change to an ISP that is more reliable, for reasons that are really none of my business. The ISP that sends the warning adamantly refuses to stop sending them, saying they’re important. And I don’t want this person to drop off the lists - she’s a very positive contributor. So thus my dillemma.
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Ok, I stole the whole idea (as well as the faux Art Deco logo) from Andy, but I really like how this came out

paulart/DSCN1232 The only problem is that the Apple logo didn’t turn out very well. The one Andy sent me didn’t print all that well so I had to resize it, and that gave it some jaggies. I’d do my own, but I don’t feel like paying $25 for the Anna font for one job. Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t get it stuck down too well, so if I need to change it later it probably won’t be hard to do.

With the writing on the wall at Kodak, and Vicki and I were married so I now I had a green card, so I started looking for a full time gig. Not that I have any great preference for full time over contract, but I thought I might get a better gig this way.

And I was mostly right.
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You know, Ed was right. When I posted Number 8, I left off the stupidest thing that Kodak did to the Cineon project.
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Mom’s Cancer is extremely touching, extremely beautiful. Read it.