aubreyturner.org

Weird Al Yankovic has finally released a new CD.  Poodle Hat will be out on May 20th.  My copy is already on preorder at Amazon.

We learned today that the top U.S. officials in Iraq are being replaced, including General Jay Garner.

Senior U.S. officials say they are unhappy with the pace of reconstruction in Iraq and the negative media attention that has been getting. By replacing the top tier of the U.S. civil authority in Iraq, as well as several other senior members of the civil administration team, the Bush administration hopes to speed up Iraq’s post-war recovery.

The installation of former State Department official Paul Bremer as chief of reconstruction efforts, supplanting retired General Jay Garner, is only the tip of an abrupt wider shakeup affecting many of the senior-most officials in the U.S. civil administration in Iraq.

While the reasons given above may well be the truth, this makes me wonder if something more was about to come to light.

Baker’s job with COLSA was to inspect the work being done on a major segment of the missile-defense program. “He would eventually discover a handful of contract arrangements that ‘smelled of shenanigans.’ Each of them involved work being performed by SY Technology, a California-based defense contractor. … ”

Another thing the arrangements had in common was that each involved a contract being negotiated on a sole-source basis, rather than through competitive bidding. And SY Technology had been taken over a few years back by retired three-star Gen. Jay Garner.

Baker says he was first alerted to the questionable contract arrangements in late December 2001.

That month, the Space and Missile Defense Command announced it intended to award SY Technology a five-year contract in the amount of $48 million. The defense command claimed the contract was being negotiated on a sole-source basis because SY Technology was uniquely qualified to do the work. Baker disputed the notion, saying dozens of other contractors were equally qualified.

Maybe there’s nothing to all of this, but I don’t like coincidences.

It turns out that the call for tlhIngan (Klingon) interpreters was a joke of sorts.  Of course, the computer industry has been ready to deal with this sort of situation for a couple of years.  The Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) has assigned it the language tag i-klingon for use in locale-sensitive code.

Klingon is interesting in that it is an actual language that can be used for real communication.  The writers of Star Trek wanted it to make sense, so they consulted a linguist (Dr Marc Okrand) .  After the publication of The Klingon Dictionary: English-Klingon Klingon-English in 1992, some people got together and created The Klingon Language Institute .

As they say, you haven’t read Hamlet until you’ve read it in the original Klingon. 

A word of caution—the Klingon Language Institute seems to be run off the world’s slowest server, so some of those links above may take a while to open.

From what I can see, though, the most important phrase you can know in tlhIngan is “nuqDaq yuch Dapol”, which translates as “Where do you keep the chocolate?”

I wonder what the tlhIngan phrase for “Trek geek” is…

Qapla’

It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required to accept the judge’s view of the law, against their own opinion, judgement, and conscience.
   —John Adams

I had a discussion Friday afternoon with a friend of mine concerning her sister.  I’d noticed that she had seemed depressed the last couple of times I’d talked to her, and she has also been acting kind of erratic for the past couple of weeks.  She just got out of a bad (and abusive) relationship and moved in with my friend.  Now she’s already talking about moving out (she’s only been there about three weeks).  And she’s already got some guy she’s interested in (she said something about him being a musician).  This all seems way too soon, given all that she’s been through already.  She also complained to me that she’s broke until her next paycheck on the 15th, yet she had money to go out drinking on Wednesday night (and to spend on her car).

My friend told me that her sister had stopped taking her anti-depressants.  She complained that she didn’t have the money for them.  My friend is also concerned that her sister may be on drugs (which is where her money may be going).  I guess this puts a lot of her behavior into perspective, but it’s really sad to see someone with so much potential waste it this way.  I know that she’s intelligent and capable of doing a lot of things, but she just doesn’t seem to believe that she can do them (and now she doesn’t seem that interested in it either).

Sorry if this post was a bit confusing, but I intentionally tried to avoid naming either my friend or her sister (or to give enough information to identify them).

This made me furious.  These useless pieces of crap need to be rounded up and shown to the door.  And we need to make sure that not one red cent of our money goes to these sorry bastards.  All they seem to be good for is sitting around berating the military and preening for each other.  If they had any concern for the people they’re supposed to be helping they’d be out there actually doing something instead of wasting endless time griping at the military for their supposed abuses.

It’s funny (in a humorless, droll sort of way) that the military is doing more to help than these NGOs who are supposed to be in the business of helping people.

Damn useless pricks.

I decided yesterday morning that I would go to see X2.  I’m usually not a big fan of movies based on comic book characters, and I was only marginally interested in the X-Men series.  But I saw the original X-Men movie and it was pretty good.  I’d also heard a lot of good things about X2 from various bloggers, so I was hopeful that it would at least be interesting. 

Now that I’ve seen it, I’d have to agree with them.  Overall it was very good.  In fact, I stayed in my seat despite needing to go to the restroom for the last hour because I didn’t want to miss anything (not that you particularly needed to know that ).  And I didn’t expect to end up feeling bad about what happened to one of the characters at the end (I won’t say more, since it would give away too much for those who haven’t seen it). 

I also saw the trailers for The Hulk and Matrix Reloaded.  I’ll probably go to the new Matrix movie, even though I was disturbed by the first one (the scene where they showed all the people in the rows and rows of little pods freaked me out).  As for The Hulk, I’m not so sure.  It was directed by Ang Lee and it appears to be very action-oriented.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.  But I still may see it, if for no other reason that it has Jennifer Connelly.    And I may also want to go see The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as well.

Lately I’ve noticed an annoying trend where theaters are showing commercials as part of the trailers.  I’ve gotten used to seeing promotions for upcoming movies, but the commercials bother me for some reason that I have yet to try to fathom.  Anyway, that Powerade commercial based on The Matrix was very annoying.

I usually try to get to the store early enough on Sunday to beat the church crowd before they overrun the place.  I also try to avoid them because they seem to drive like maniacs.  I got out too late today, leaving right around noon, which means that some of the local churches were just getting out.  These people will pull out in front of you, dart across the road, speed up to get in front of you and then turn right (without signalling), and a whole host of sundry other traffic offenses.  There are three big churches that I have to pass by on the way to the store, and they’re all located within a block of each other.  It’s like running a gauntlet in that area.

What I’d like to know is just what the preachers are telling these people before they leave?  I can hear it now, “Ladies and gentlemen, please open to the book of NASCAR….”.

Last week I was called in to examine the code for a project that had just entered the test phase.  Apparently one of the developers was disgruntled and reported his “concerns” about the code quality to management.  That’s the sort of thing you come to expect from time to time, so it wouldn’t have been a big deal if that’s where it had stopped (coders are a prickly lot, and managing them has often been compared to herding cats).  Unfortunately, he also told someone who told an executive, which is when the excrement came into contact with the rotary airfoil device.   The project managers needed to be able to come up with something to appease upper management and convince them that the code was OK.  At this late phase, my thought was that the best proof of the code’s quality would be whether it passed testing or not, since the time to inspect the code was during the development phase (and they had done peer reviews, where the developer in question had ample chances to make his concerns known).  However, sometimes the appearance of doing something is more important that what is actually done.  Therefore, I was assigned to review the code.

The code consisted of 340 Java files, so there wasn’t a chance in hell that I could manually inspect those in the time I was given (I was given a week, but I was only able to spend about 50% of my time on this).  Fortunately, we have a site license for Jtest, which when combined with our own coding standards rules gives pretty thorough coverage of the code (including dynamic analysis to find uncaught runtime exceptions).  The only downside is that this kind of analysis is very nitpicky.  Those 340 Java files generated over 11,000 warning messages. 

Of course, that kind of number sounds very alarming at first.  And it’s not something that you want to feed to upper management, lest they get the wrong impression.  As an example, many of those messages have to do with indentation or style standards.  While I consider those important to readibility, they don’t materially detract from the code’s function.  So, I had to grovel through all of those messages and categorize them based on severity.  When I was done, it turns out that there were only a handful of items that were severe enough to consider errors (like using “=” instead of “==” in a control statement).

That’s the kind of mind numbing task that leaves you drained, so when I left work on Friday my eyes were glazed over.  I went home, grabbed a cigar and poured myself some Jack and cola and did absolutely nothing.  And I stayed away from the computer most of Saturday as well, which is why I hadn’t updated this site since Friday morning.  I just didn’t feel like I had anything worth saying.

I got busy with work, and I’d had trouble sleeping the night before, so I just didn’t feel like posting anything yesterday.  I feel a little guilty, because I’ve begun to feel like I should post something each day.

I’ve noticed that I seem to get instances of deja vu most often when I’m really tired.  Maybe that’s when my brain is most likely to form these random associations.  I had a really strong one yesterday.  For me, it’s most often a combination of emotion and vision that triggers it.  I was waiting for a code scan to complete and reading something online while waiting.  I was thinking that I really needed to get that code scan finished so I could report the results, but that this stupid slow computer wasn’t going to finish in time.  This, combined with the text on the screen, triggered a memory of the exact moment, and I was convinced that I’d been there before (or perhaps I’d dreamed it).  Or maybe my brain, in its sluggish state, confused the new memory with an old one.

I also had a weird coincidence this morning where I’d been thinking about sending an email to a friend of mine.  When I opened my email this morning, he’d already sent me one.  I’ve always wondered how that works.