Rants and Revelations

Back when Maddy was dying of cancer, she wrote in her blog an account of an encounter with a surgeon at Thomas Jefferson University, in which she said that in her opinion, the surgeon was a jerk. Before she died, somebody claiming to NOT be the doctor in question, but connecting from an IP in Philadelphia, wrote a comment saying that her account was slanderous and that the doctor has “every legal right to take legal action to expunge his record”. Several people, including lawyers, wrote pointing out that Maddy’s impressions and opinions of the actions of this guy are NOT legally actionable, and suing a dying cancer patient is not a great way to prove to people that you’re NOT a jerk.

Well, I guess the doctor wasn’t going to be discouraged by little things like freedom of expression or how much of a jerk you have to be to legally harrass people into not calling you a jerk, so now, two days after I get back from helping to bury Maddy, I get an email from Stacey Meadows, the General Counsel of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. Evidently because Maddy’s blog is on my site, she is under the mistaken impression that I’m some sort of “moderator”. She’s demanding that I remove the post and the responses to it. I responded that I’m not a “moderator” of the site, Maddy wrote what she wanted on that site without my endorsement or approval, and that she should try serving papers on Maddy’s grave.

I’m sure she won’t let this go, so I guess it’s time to see if those lawyers who told Maddy that it wasn’t actionable are available.

I want to write separate blog entries about the following things from this weekend:

• The flight up, and the flight back
• Maddy’s interment and the rest of the activities on Saturday
• Sunday with my kids, including kayaking

but right now I’m just too god-damned tired and busy. Sorry.

AOPA Online - Proof AOPA Airport Watch concept works

Read this story. Then consider this: like most general aviation pilots, I have pledged to preserve the life of innocents even at the cost of my own. If somebody pulls a box cutter on me in the plane and tries to get me to do something that will endanger others, my FIRST and ONLY reaction will be to stop them, even if my only recourse is to crash the plane and kill everybody on board. If they then say “just kidding, we’re reporters”, that’s too bad - any terrorist could say the same thing.

Today is the 4000th day of the September that never ended.
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Today I wish hot fiery death upon my ISP, RoadRunner.
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This afternoon my elbows hurt more than they did before I went paddling yesterday, but less than they did after paddling last weekend.

And today’s target for slow lingering death is the young woman who sits right behind me. And the reason for her impending death is that she’s snapping her gum.

I seem to have a lot of kayaking entries recently. Maybe they need their own category - except all my categories start with the letter “R”, and I can’t think of a good R word for kayaking.

As you probably guessed, I went kayaking again today. I tried to take it easy, and so far my elbows are only a little bit sore.
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The Republican disinformation machine, and their wholy owned subsidiary Fox News have been spreading the lie that John Kerry is the most liberal senator. This site
John Kerry: The Most Liberal Senator? An Analysis sets the record straight.

I’ll rant about this American political assumption that being a liberal is considered political death some other time. Where I’m from being a liberal is a good thing.

Today I wish to hunt down everybody who makes an email virus scanner that sends back a message to the “From” address telling them that the message that they sent contained a virus, and all the morons who install these things without disabling this option, and kill them. Slowly.

Free clue: VIRUSES FORGE THE FROM ADDRESS, FUCKWADS! The “helpful” message ends up harrassing some innocent third party. And because you all feel you need to customize your “helpful” message some how, it’s impossible to filter these damn things out.

I get over 1000 pieces of spam a day, and all but one or two are filtered out by my spam filters. But I get 10 or more of these virus warnings a day, and most of them get through my filters. So most of the spam I have actually deal with in terms of seeing the “new mail” indication and opening up a mail client and reading it and deleting it are these messages.

Ok, everything wasn’t all sweetness and light. I went to bed with the rsync going on to the ext2 partition, and a cp -r going on to the VFAT partition. An hour or so later, I was awaked by my cell phone beeping to let me know that the program I have running on my Gradwell account to monitor my web sites was saying that my home box wasn’t serving up web pages.
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I bought a 200Gb hard drive ($141 with a $40 mail in rebate) and a USB external enclosure ($15). The idea was that I would have a hard drive that I could use as a backup for the 80Gb drive on the server, and also have some semi-portable storage so I could give Kodak back the 200Gb firewire drive I sort-of appropriated from them.
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I came home tonight to find my oldest step-daughter Stevie and her friend Lindsay had a tiny little sparrow in one of the spare bird cages downstairs. I guess even at 20 years old, the urge to help poor defenseless animals is still strong in young women. They’d found him hopping around the driveway. He was very very young and very tiny. He seemed almost paralysed with fear, not that I blame him. The girls had given him food and water, but he seemed too small for solid food.
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You know what would be cool? If there was a Mozilla plug-in where I could click a button on any text field and it would pop up my favourite text editor (in my case, vim, a graphical vi clone) to edit the text field, instead of using the built-in editor.

The main reason I’d like to use my own editor is that the built-in editor is too mouse-intensive. I like vi because I can navigate with home-row keys.

The other reason is that I’m continually hitting vi command keys, which does entirely the wrong thing in Mozilla.

:wq

This morning my elbows are hurting. And they’re not responding to ibuprohen either. This feels like the start of the two years of elbow pain that I got after trying for a week to paddle a canoe for exercise. I guess my plans to try a different kayak some evening this week had better go on-hold. Perhaps forever.

Dammit, why can’t I catch a break? All I want out of life is for something fun I can do that will give me some exercise so I don’t die of a heart attack when I’m 45. IS THAT TOO FUCKING MUCH TO ASK FOR, GOD?