Debate Prep

Posted by Thomas Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:02:30 +0000

Mr/Mrs. Presidential Candidate:

What is the single greatest action the United States should do tomorrow to directly reduce the United States’ contribution to the global warming crisis?

If your foreign policy were to return the United States to a time when we were respected around the world, how do you propose to mend ties to our allies, to rebuild old bridges and build new ones, and to reach out at a time when our friends are few and far between?

I wonder would Al Gore take another shot at the Vice Presidency to further his global warming message? Surely the second highest office in the land would be the best place to further his cause…

Which is the greatest folly, that the electorate imposes the expectation that one person can solve all of the United States problems, or that all of the politicians’ opiate laden bullet points, detailing their nine-point plans, can save us all from impending doom?

Other major policy issues in the upcoming presidential race that I’m to lazy to postulate questions about:
privacy, war on drugs, healthcare, social security, education, war in iraq, foreign policy, energy policy, nuclear energy, terrorism, fear

And, to top it off, what we really need:
unification of the two halves of our country; a leader to unite the people, to bring a sense of nationalism back to the masses, a single common goal, worthy of a national charge, benefiting the United States and the world

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I really don’t know what to title this one

Posted by Thomas Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:08:53 +0000

The weather has been nice enough the past two days that I’ve gone riding in the afternoon. Yesterday, some dude in a car as it was passing yelled out to me, “Hey, Lance, get off the road!”. Odd.

I have been worrying somewhat about the root partition of the new server I’ve been working on for Wesley. It started out as ~250MB, which is fine, but if you have a couple of kernels installed, /lib/modules start eats up the space quickly. So today, I set out to alleviate the space problem. All of the partitions, except for boot, are on LVM. So it was simply a matter of resizing. The partitions are all ext3 for penultimate safety reasons. Since I tried once to shrink /home and failed, I just removed the logical volume, increased the root partition and resized the filesystem. It was easier than I ever imagined. Like three commands and it was done. I could simply remove /home because there as almost no data on it, so I just backed it up and restored it. The hardest part of the whole process was waiting on the ext3 format of a 218GB drive (it’s rather slow and the format itself uses up 188MB, but that’s for another post/rant). Chalk one up for a good decision to endure the extra overhead of LVM.

In other technological news, I installed Sun’s java instead of the crappy gcj on the box that runs my Azureus now. It had been flaky as of late, going for a while and then dying. I didn’t even realize it was using the gnu java, so I installed and hopefully it’ll be happier now.

I was going to rant about OpenID and how I don’t get it and how it’s the latest meme and the fashionable fad. And I was going to cite this’s guys post. But then he reneged on his stance and wrote this. There remains something that I don’t like about it, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

I also finally watched “The Da Vinci Code” this afternoon. I had put it off forever, but after I heard a roundabout endorsement as a good movie, I decided to watch it. As a whole, I’d say that it was better than I expected. Even given the risque content, I can’t deny that the story really was decent.

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New Bathmat

Posted by Thomas Sat, 24 Feb 2007 23:15:34 +0000

I went to Wal-Mart this afternoon to buy one thing, a bathmat. I got it. I hate it. It’s too dark for the floor. It calls too much attention to itself…

You should already know that I saw “Children of Men”. I didn’t get it. I didn’t like it. Why have people called it the best movie since sliced bread? Someone please illuminate me!

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Credit Card Applications

Posted by Thomas Fri, 23 Feb 2007 20:44:08 +0000

Today’s mail consisted of bills and credit card applications. Both are quite ordinary, save one credit card application that was forwarded to me from Texas. Yes, my Mother took the time to put the “Validation required within 7 days”, Bank of America, unopened credit card application into a new envelope and forward it via snail mail to me in Georgia. And no, I’ve never held a BoA account at that address. From the looks of it upon opening, they got my info from the Association…

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Logistics

Posted by Thomas Wed, 21 Feb 2007 01:37:32 +0000

I don’t know how your brain works, but I’m often curious about mine. I have been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do when I grow up. And it bothers me some that I haven’t figured it out yet, and it bothers me even more that I don’t feel like I’ve really crossed anything out either. I don’t think that I want to be a manager, and I don’t think that I want to be a project manager, but how can I know for sure without going down a long road of actually being or half being one of those things for some period of time to know for sure? I dunno. But, back to brains. I consider myself to be a pretty logical person. I like logic, and logic likes me. But there is this general field call logicstics. And, I’m pretty sure that I don’t like logistics and logistics doesn’t like me. But why would that be. If I’m logical and it’s logical, shouldn’t we get along? I assume that there’s just something about it that my brain doesn’t naturally gravitate toward. Perhaps any psyche majors reading can chime in… I recall even during middle school, having issues with these sorts of problems. I was in GT (Gifted and Talented — yes I’m a dork) during middle school. And I distinctly remember the teacher (Mrs. Pelfrey(sp)), giving us these certain tests. They went something like, five people live in a five story apartment complex. No two people live on the same floor. Each tenant owns a pet. Et cetera, et cetera. (example). I never “got” those puzzles, even today, I despise them. Which I assume the same disdain I have towards those puzzles is the same disdain I have for the “if I move X, that frees up space S1. If I need to free up S2 to accommodate constraint C, Y must be moved before X, blah, blah, blah”. I just don’t care about those types of problems. To me, there’s no fun in them. My brain just doesn’t gravitate towards them. Maybe I just see them as mundane, without adventure, and a lackluster creative problem solving outlet.

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Valentine’s Day: Bad Gift Ideas

Posted by Thomas Mon, 19 Feb 2007 11:02:58 +0000

A better list there never was.

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Ski Trip Postmortem

Posted by Thomas Fri, 09 Feb 2007 23:31:08 +0000

While the ski trip overall was very good, i.e. the skiing was good and the partying was good, I seemed to have caught some sort of illness. I woke up this morning feeling a little nauseous, but didn’t think too much about it. Later I realized the my throat was getting more and more sore, and that I was getting progressively more and more nauseous. So, I finally realized I was in the process of getting sick. My throat is sore and feels all scratchy. I have a small, dry cough mostly, with the occasional real cough. I’ve been loosening mucus in my throat all day when I clear my throat, which is the cause of me feeling pretty much horrible the entire day. I’ve napped a bunch during the day’s travel, so that I think has helped some, as after the flight, I didn’t feel quite as bad as when I began the flight (I pretty much slept all the way from Boston to Atlanta). So, I will definitely be sleeping a bunch over the weekend, taking copious drugs, and drinking lots of water (I’m nursing a Nalgene at the moment). We’ll see how it goes…

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Potential Presidential Sound Bites

Posted by Thomas Fri, 09 Feb 2007 23:20:46 +0000

This is the terrorism stance I would use if I were running for president:

“It’s time to chill the f*ck out. To quote some old dude, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. Enough said, next question.”

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Movies Update

Posted by Thomas Sun, 04 Feb 2007 20:01:24 +0000

In addition to all of that (you are reading this in chronological order, aren’t you?) I’ve watched my Netflix movies, too. “The Puffy Chair” sucked. Even with it being an indie film and all, the dialog, plot, and character development just wasn’t there. Next I watched “Clerks 2” which I thought was great and their best film yet. Them being the director/production staff. I didn’t really get the original too much (I don’t get a lot of the really indie genre), but this one was a little more normal of a story (if you can call it “normal”), so for me it was more enjoyable. It just wasn’t out as far as the first, so easier for me to watch and enjoy. Then, I watched “Wordplay”. After having watched “The Puffy Chair” I wasn’t really in the mood for another independent documentary, but it was surprisingly good. I would definitely recommend both “Clerks 2” and “Wordplay” to anybody, but stay away from “The Puffy Chair”.

Both of my sisters have now recommended to me that I become a movie critic. I’m not sure what I think about that.

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Weekend Update

Posted by Thomas Sun, 04 Feb 2007 19:53:54 +0000

I placed an order for 2 of these just now. With shipping my total was ~$40. Did I pay too much? I know it’s eclectic and all, and since it’s from the UK, I doubt I’ll run into someone else who has them, but paying for shipping them across the pond is a little much. I effectively used some b-day money, so it’s not like it was simple out of pocket money, but money given with the expressed purpose of being used to buy something I normally wouldn’t, which this easily falls into the category of. I guess that between this and my Fry’s run yesterday, I don’t want to lull myself into a buying spree.

The Fry’s buying spree was a new server for Wesley. They’ve been having some problems with it as of late, and have an itch to replace and consolidate, so I’m scratching it for them. I think I might have overbought: 1 gb corsair ddr2, athlon 64 x2 3800+, black antec case w/ 450w ps, dual 250gb maxtors, ecs gforce6 mobo with gig nic, pci-e, and onboard video, pioneer dvd burner. As Cole said, “yeah, it might get kind of bored just routing packets”. Dual core, yeah, I think so. I’m pretty sure that it will be the most powerful computer at Wesley, but will be doing the least amount of real work. I bought some more dual port intel nics on ebay, so after the ski trip, I should have those. I’ll put them in, take a few days to install and configure, and then ship it off to them to physically install.

That’s right, a ski trip. Going with the company. Taking a few days off will be nice. :)

I’ve had two very strong memories surface over the past couple of days. During some internal monologue ramblings, I was taken back to the first few days of our family owning Baxter, and how each one of us kids took a night soothing the beast, as he was crying at night. The other was one night, Dr. Moore brought over to our house some copies of scales for the Tuba. I remembered this because I was watching Wordplay, and remembering romantically how I wished I still played regularly and was good, how practicing the fundamentals sucks, and that scales are part of those fundamentals, hence the memory. I was still pretty young and didn’t know him all that well, so it was a little nerve racking to have him do me a favor. I don’t even remember how it came to be that he was going to bring them over to us. Maybe it was right after I switched to Tuba or something. I honestly don’t recall.

Today I got a bunch of errands run. I paid rent, finally deposited some checks, paid a bill, went to Kroger to pick up a few things (crap, they’re still in the car…), and have caught up on laundry. Yay for checking things off a list! Unfortunately all of the Bank of America ATM’s were out of whack. Bummer. I still need to sign my lease renewal and fill out the rebate forms from the computer parts… I probably should do that now…

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