The book I was reading on the bus on Monday, The Pentagon’s New Map: Blueprint for Action, has an odd word choice in it. The author constantly refers to combat forces who are actively shooting enemies or blowing up buildings as “Leviathan”, and refers to military forces who are building infrastructure, acting as police, and [...]

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Earlier, I was thinking about the legal system and what could be done to improve it. There are tens of thousands of laws on the books, and many of them probably don’t need to be there. Software projects that have been going on for years accumulate what we call “cruft”—bits of code that are not [...]

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Historic inauguration, with a pretty good speech and a lousy poem. Seriously, they should’ve gotten someone who’d won at least one poetry slam in there for the poetry part of it. Or KRS-One or Chuck D. Ah well. I don’t think anybody got a lot of work done while the swearing in and the speech [...]

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I was up very late at work on Tuesday night fixing minor problems and watching the election results. Whatever happens, it’ll be a very interesting 4 years. I hope the amount of WHARRGARBL from all political parties can be minimized, and that elected officials can put aside partisan piddling and actually work on solving problems [...]

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This is the early ballot that I filled out 2 weeks ago.  I hope that all eligible citizens of the USA vote today if they haven’t mailed in their ballots already, and choose the candidates they feel are best qualified to serve. I’m going to be working late on Tuesday.  They need some people to [...]

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Really, I am reminded of this image just about every time I see a public forum on the Net where people are talking about politics. The number of ad hominem attacks, baseless generalizations, completely ridiculous accusations, and statements that would be actionable or libelous if they were published on paper instead of the Net defies [...]

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There are too few sporks in life, but you have to have some sense of proportion. While this looks cool, it was probably a total pain to deal with. “Poly”: many. “Ticks”: bloodsucking arachnids. That’s what I thought while I was filling out my early ballot on Saturday. Also, some people planted signs at a [...]

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Of course, every rock band needs a drummer. Yes, that’s a peanut with a knife behind it on his shirt. The art creator has a lot of complex, pre-designed art elements, and comparatively few primitive elements. Oh well. Trivia: We were doing reasonably well when I left.  However, we had one question that no one [...]

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Cats hate being dressed up. If this one had opposable thumbs, he would’ve gone for his six-shooter. Apparently, it’s possible to completely hork up a Microsloth Exchange server by asking it to deliver 9 messages, each one about 30M in size, to 10 people. “Enterprise” e-mail system, my left hind arse. postfix, exim, sendmail, and [...]

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Excuse me, have you seen my toupee? It was around here somewhere. . . . There was going to be a get-together Friday night. I was thinking about going, but at about 7:15pm (15 minutes before it started), I got a helpdesk ticket. I spent about an hour trying a bunch of different things to [...]

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