aubreyturner.org

It appears that Rachel Lucas has found her calling.  I hope that she is successful in finding funding and getting help for this project.  I sent her a donation to help out.

I’ve spent this weekend at my mother’s house.  One of my aunts came up for Thanksgiving and she’d been doing research into our family tree (on my mother’s side) and she showed us a lot of pictures and documents that she’d found.  We scanned some of them and burned her a CD so that she can prepare a book on the family.  A lot of history is being lost and she’s trying to capture it before everyone who knows it is gone.  I think that this allowed Rachel’s project to resonate with me more than it might have at some other time. 

Regardless of the timing, though, it’s something that’s important and I wish her the best of luck.

A looming deadline and some last minute BS (did I mention that I hate Function Point counting?) have prompted me to try to get some things out of the way before the Thanksgiving holiday.  This is the first chance I’ve had to go online since last night.  Blog activity will be curtailed a bit until after the weekend.

Some random thoughts:

• Why do furnaces pick the coldest day of the year (with a looming freeze) to quit?  Fortunately it’s fixed now, but it was a bit chilly in the bunker this morning.  Of course it could be worse (thank goodness I don’t live up North where it really gets cold, like Minnesota, for instance).
• Has anyone else noticed that the Christmas commercials started really, really early this year?  I’m being dragged kicking, screaming, cursing, and fuming into the holiday spirit (or at least I will be by Friday—I refuse to start before Thanksgiving).
• I swear if I hear one more commercial touting “Our best deal of the season” I’m going to break something (damn Kohl’s must have used that phrase 17 times in a 30 second commercial the other day).
• Surprisingly, I actually like some Christmas music.  I’m not religious, but the music can be quite nice (actually, a lot of religious music is that way).  However, as I’m going through my CDs and ripping them I’ve realized that I prefer comedy Christmas music.  I like it when somebody comes up with a really twisted rendition of an old standard (like Bob Rivers’ Walkin’ Round in Women’s Underwear).
• I have to admit that I’m a doofus, since I haven’t fired my new rifle yet.  I keep getting overtaken by other crap and forgetting to reserve time in the rifle tube at Bass Pro.  By the time I got around to calling them yesterday, it was already booked through Wednesday.  They had plenty of openings on Thursday, though (well, duh, everyone’s going to be out of town or otherwise occupied).  Oh well, I just attribute it to the pre-holiday rush.

If I don’t get back before the end of the week, everyone have a good Thanksgiving.  Go forth and eat lots of turkey or whatever your favorite is.  Just remember to zip your pants back up before getting up to go flop in front of the football game (those of you who are well experienced in the traditions of Thanksgiving know what I’m talking about).

What’s weird was that they were in different vehicles and neither knew the other was going to be on the road that day.  It’s the sort of thing that makes you pause for a minute to contemplate whether there just may be larger forces at work.

Link

Darn, I didn’t get done last night until around 3:30a.m.  I woke up this morning feeling like I had a hangover.  I’m paying the price, but I didn’t get to have any fun 🙁 .  I guess I don’t bounce back like I used to.

Once I dragged my sorry butt out of bed I had to take care of those pesky Sunday chores and I also decided to finally do that SuSE 8.1 upgrade.  Suffice it to say that it did not go well.  I only recently got this system fully operational and secured (I may have to rant at SuSE later since their stupid firewall script was broken out of the box).  I don’t think 8.1 was ready for prime time.

I’m now a member of The Liberty Dogs.  I expect that I’ll have more to say on the Department of Homeland Security and the Total Information Awareness initiative.  I’m also glad to see that my logo is getting around. 

More to come later, but now I’m off to bed as I have to be up at 6:00am.

It’s way past my bedtime (it takes a lot of energy to be a contrary curmudgeon and I need my sleep), but I’m sitting here killing time waiting for an instant message or a phone call.  Our infrastructure people are making a change that affects one of the applications that I work on and I have to be here to perform a quick test to make sure everything still works when they’re done.  Of course they can only make these changes late on a Saturday night.  Oh well, I guess that’s what they pay me for, so I can’t complain too much.

Anyhoo, while killing time I went to visit Spleenville and was informed of The Liberty Dogs, which is dedicated to watching the Department of Homeland Security (the very name of which has an almost Orwellian or perhaps Nazi overtone—like how they used to refer to Germany as the Fatherland).  I’m glad they’re doing this, because this new department definitely bears watching.

Maybe they’d be interested in the images that I created earlier.  Of course, I’m still learning to work with the GIMP, so maybe others could do better.  I just grabbed the image off the DARPA website and added the slash-circle and text over it (which isn’t as straight-forward as it sounds).

I read a recent editorial by Kathleen Parker about the new “Total Information Awareness” initiative.  As she so eloquently put it, “Not no, but hell no!”  I decided that it was about time that we had an image that expressed our displeasure with this steaming pile of crap. 

Here they are.  Feel free to download these images and distribute them. 

Large (400×400, 27853 bytes):

Small (150×150, 6475 bytes):

Update:  Here’s the link to their website: http://www.darpa.mil/iao/.  At the bottom of the page they give iao_info@darpa.mil as the address for sending questions or comments.  Perhaps they need a good dose of email from the people who pay their salaries.

We computer geeks often use language in strange ways.  For example, if something is broken, it might be because it has absorbed a bogon (which is an elementary particle of “bogusness”).  When I read this headline over at Emperor Misha’s site I was immediately reminded of this.  I therefore propose a new term:

goron: (n) An extremely massive particle of cluelessness.  Capable of extreme damage to people and institutions.  Until the year 1992 was only thought to be theoretical.  Discovery was confirmed in Florida in late 2000.

I responded to this post about Total Information Awareness over at Emperor Misha’s site.  He read my rant about the same topic and decided to draft me into the Dept. of Hegemony by Force.  Cool.  I’ve never been part of a hegemonic force before.  Do we get to blow stuff up and wear snazzy uniforms?  (I’ll settle for the blowing stuff up part if the uniforms aren’t available.)

As far as I’m concerned, Without A Trace just vanished and I won’t be bothering to send out anyone to look for it.  It was an interesting premise, but it required a lot of suspension of disbelief to watch (the FBI doesn’t get involved in most missing person cases).  I only started watching it because it came after CSI (and I’m a sucker for crime shows).

Warning, spoilers ahead (just in case you haven’t seen the show).

Anyway, they went off the PC deep end last night with an episode about a Saudi medical student who went missing.  Before his disappearance he was turned down for a letter of recommendation to work at the CDC and his girlfriend rejects his marriage proposal.  In both cases, he sees it as prejudice against Arabs.

His coworkers think he’s a terrorist and some of the FBI agents think that he’s planning some kind of attack.  Of course the PC FBI agent cautions everyone not to jump the gun.  In the end, the doctor kills his friend and is seen at the hospital waving a gun and screaming that there’s a bomb in the building.  It turns out that his friend had been the one planning the attack and the killing was after he got into a fight trying to stop him.  He went to the hospital to warn people to get out.  However, in the last seconds, as one of the FBI agents is facing him, he fails to put his gun down and is killed by an FBI sniper.  We’re supposed to come away from this having learned our lesson that it is bad to profile people.

I realize that television is a notoriously unsubtle medium.  But this show just went over the top.  The writers’ contempt for all of us simplistic, racist, dunderheads out here in flyover country was so thick as to be palpable.  I realize that people have jumped to conclusions about terrorists before (sometimes with rash and horrible results), but I don’t need to be beaten about the head and shoulders to be reminded of it.  Maybe some Arabs and Muslims out there have gotten a bum deal since the terrorist attacks, but let’s get real here.  It wasn’t a bunch of little old ladies from Des Moines who flew those planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

It appears that DARPA is going forward with a prototype of a system that can monitor every purchase made in the United States.  The people behind this are exactly the kind of vermin that I expected to crawl out from under the woodwork when 9/11/01 hit.

I have a huge problem with this kind of all-encompassing database.  It allows the government to go snooping around in our private lives without any resonable suspicion that we’ve done anything wrong.  This goes against everything that our system represents.  Because of the abuses they suffered at the hands of the British, our founders established a system that requires the “authorities” to get a warrant if they want to dig through my life (although the courts have carved out some exceptions based on exigent circumstances).  The warrant must be based on some resonable evidence that I may actually be involved in some kind of crime.  I contend that this is in effect a search of our private financial records without a warrant (especially if the system is mining the data looking for patterns).  Further, I don’t give a damn how many so-called safeguards and reassurances that they make, the government is not trustworthy enough to have this level of access to our private information.

Further down in the article some lawyer (I’m not sure how he’s involved in this, but I find his trust in government disturbing) had this to say:

I find it somewhat counter intuitive that people are not concerned that telemarketers and insurance companies can acquire this data but feel tremendous trepidation if a government ventures into this arena. To me it just smacks of paranoia,” said David Rivkin, an attorney for Baker & Hostetler LLP.

I hate to break it to you, Mr. Rivkin, but not all of us are sheep.  I was already deeply concerned and upset that telemarketers and insurance companies and a whole host of other malefactors had access to this data.  The government concerns me even more because they could use innocent transactions to brand me a terrorist¹.  Once that happens, it’ll be damn near impossible to undo the damage.  If you think you can trust the government, just remember all the illegal wiretaps and surveillance done by the FBI during the J. Edgar Hoover years.  I can hear the objections, though: But we can trust the government now, it’s all under control.  I don’t trust them and I don’t trust any so-called “safeguards.”  But even if you could trust them, what about the next administration or the one after that?  The American people were promised in the 1930’s that the Social Security number would never be used for anything but Social Security.  Now you’re required to give up your SSN for damn near everything.  Government, like kudzu, expands into any available space and is darn near impossible to remove once it gets there.

And don’t give me that old crap about if you don’t have anything to hide, why would this bother you?  If you know or care so little about freedom that you can’t comprehend my objection to this, then you don’t belong to be a citizen of this country.  Harsh?  Damn skippy!  I’m sick and tired of this crap.  I’ve had enough. 

¹  Think I’m kidding?  I collect firearms.  Last week I withdrew $2000 before I went to the gun show over the weekend.  I purchased two guns there.  Consider this:

Aldridge said the database, which he called another “tool” in the war on terror, would look for telltale signs of suspicious consumer behavior.

Examples he cited were: sudden and large cash withdrawals, one-way air or rail travel, rental car transactions and purchases of firearms, chemicals or agents that could be used to produce biological or chemical weapons.

I guess that makes me a suspicious character under their scheme.  I object to them even knowing about this because it’s none of their damn business what I do with my money or what guns I buy unless they can cite some actual evidence that I’m involved in some kind of wrongdoing.  I don’t want government agents to show up at my door everytime I make a purchase at a gun show (or anywhere else for that matter).  Of course, some statist will probably scurry out to say, “But we all have to sacrifice some of our freedoms so we can be safe.”  Once again, this is utter crap.  Any society that values safety over freedom will have neither (that’s not just some catchy slogan, it’s cold hard truth, which has been demonstrated time and time again).  It is impossible to guarantee total safety.  I’d rather live free and cope with danger than be shackled in safety.