Caturday, and the cats are all wearing camo. The sky in the East Valley got really cloudy and dark on Friday night, but there wasn’t any rain to speak of.

Friday was annoying in some ways. They wanted something done really quickly, I started working on it, I kept running into totally weird problems that should never have happened. Fortunately, we all decided to go out for lunch like we usually do on Fridays. Then after I got back from lunch, I took a good look at the code I was working on, and found that I was testing for $_POST['foo'] , which was not set to anything at all. Testing for a variable that was set made everything fail in a much more understandable and useful way, and it was relatively easy to fix all the problems after that. As the great ones of old said, “I hate this darn computer; I think that I will sell it. It never does a thing I want, only what I tell it.”

The main thing that I’ve learned from The Wages of Destruction is that waging a modern war is a really complicated and expensive proposition. And they don’t benefit the state that much unless the state is really good and really lucky, as Germany was when they rolled up France, Belgium, and the Netherlands in 1940. It’s no wonder that modern wars have given way to wars fought by guerillas who can blend in with the civilian population. Guerilla wars take a lot longer, but they’re a whole lot cheaper in terms of money.