Category: Rant

Heavy Stuff, Don’t Read

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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Petty annoyance of the day

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.

I don’t believe it!

‘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.

Just Answer the Question, Dammit!

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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Bad Job Experiences, Number 9 in a Series

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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