I just watched the season finale of The Sopranos and it seemed kind of flat compared to previous ones.  But what I found really interesting was what came on afterwards.  It was one of those HBO real life documentaries about a “cat house” in Nevada.  I set the Tivo to record it later, but I watched the first few minutes of it.  What caught my attention was that a mother brought her son to get him “devirginized”.  I’ve heard of fathers doing this kind of thing, but never a mother.  I actually felt embarassed for the guy.  It’s not bad enough that he’s at a whorehouse with his mother, but they had a camera in the room when he and his mother were initially meeting the woman he was to be with.

I just reread that last sentence and I realized that it sounds like I’m down on whorehouses.  As long as everyone consents I’m OK with it (it’s actually pretty practical in a way—but that’s probably a subject for another post).  I was really commenting on the fact that he was there with his mother.  Somehow, this just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing with which one’s mother should be involved (but then I guess I could be the one with the hangup).

I stumbled out of the bunker at a disgracefully late hour today (the time involved numbers with PM after them) to pick up my copy of the Denton Record-Chronicle (which was surprisingly still there—it’s often gone if I leave it past noon).  On the front page, in the center, was this article(requires registration) about some agriculture students at Krum High School whose goats and lambs were wounded or killed by dogs on November 16th.  Normally I wouldn’t have thought much more about it, but there is a quote from one of the students in the article that had steam coming out of my ears. 

Since the article requires registration, allow me to reproduce the first few paragraphs for your edification:

Students mourn livestock tragedy

12/07/2002

By JOSHUA A. BAUGH / Denton Record-Chronicle

KRUM – Several students in the Krum High School agriculture department are recovering from monetary and emotional losses caused by a pair of dogs that brutally wounded or killed 11 goats and lambs.

Several students who went to the high school barn to feed their animals on Nov. 16 found many of their animals maimed and others dead.

“When I came in, it was a horror scene,” said Kara Arnold, a senior who was supposed to make her first appearance showing lambs at a Future Farmers of America (FFA) state competition later this year. “There was blood everywhere.”

She described that Saturday morning as a tragic day. People were crying and calling others on mobile phones to inform them of the bad news.

“For us, it was like a small version of Sept. 11,” Kara said. “We never thought this would happen.” (emphasis added)
…

I don’t know what the hell they’re teaching the students in Krum, but to equate a dog attack on a few animals with the deaths of over 3,000 human beings is utterly mindboggling to me.  It makes me wonder if this poor girl has been indoctrinated by those idiots at PETA, because this sounds like the kind of crap they’d spew.

Damn!

My friends know that I’m usually not shy about venturing forth with my opinions.  However, for the past few days I’ve been kind of run down and out of it, which is one reason I haven’t posted much (the other is that I was trying to get some things done at work).  I think I was fighting off some kind of bug.  To give you an idea of the situation, I cancelled a trip to the shooting range on Thursday because I felt like I was getting the flu.  I have to be in a fairly bad way to pass up a trip to the range (but then I didn’t want to endanger anyone else, since I was feeling a bit dizzy).  However, I hope (knock wood) that I’ve squashed that bug now and I shall soon return to my normal state of pissed-offness (is that even a word?).

This site was down most of the day due to technical problems with the system that hosts it.

I’m usually fairly patient about these things, since I work in the IT industry and I know that things sometimes break.  But the key to managing it is to keep the customer informed about what’s happening.

My hosting company has an automated system that monitors the status of all of the services that run on the system.  I was able to determine from the status page that the site was completely down for about 30 minutes.  However, once the server processes were restarted, Apache was having problems because it did not have enough space in /tmp to create session files (or so it appears).  So despite their system thinking that the server was up and functional, it actually wasn’t.  This meant that I had to submit a problem request to get them to look at the problem again. 

I’ve been with this company for a couple of years now and I’m generally happy with their service.  However, I’m becoming concerned because this same problem happened about a month ago.  Having multiple occurrences of the same problem can be a sign of deeper process-related issues.

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).

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.

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.)

Michele at a small victory had a great response to the hate mail that she’s been getting.

I think it’s quite amusing that you Ashcroft-fearing people run around the streets screaming that the sky is falling because the Republicans are coming, the Republicans are coming, and you scream that our privacy is gone and the government is going to tell us how to live now, but god damn it people, what the hell do you think you’re doing with your slapping stickers on SUVs and throwing red paint on fur coats and frightening little children by telling them their milk is poison? Your disdain and snobbery at people who aren’t just like you is frightening. You think we should all drop the meat out of our mouths and stop having children and trade in our SUVs for gas-efficient but devoid of storage space tiny little cars and if we don’t we are the anti-christ. I got news for you, sweetheart. You are the scary ones. You are the ones who will make the sky fall someday. You, who think more of animals than people, who think more of terrorists and madmen than you do of the innocent people of your own countries, you who have become the useful idiots to the scary regimes of the world.

I’m in total agreement on this.  I’m constantly appalled by the horrible, meanspirited, nasty things that these people direct at anyone who doesn’t agree with them.  I try to keep a calm head on these things, but there’s a limit to my patience.  I was in a discussion about this very topic with a coworker today and I made this same point to him.  How often can you stand being called a murderer or being accused of being complicit in murder or teaching children to kill before you give up on trying to have a discourse with these people?  It’s unfortunate, because without respect or some common ground it will be increasingly difficult for the various factions to live with one another.

I finally broke down and made some changes around here.

One major change is that I redid the guns section using PHP so that if I want to change it in the future I only have to modify one template file.  Of course, I didn’t set out to write code, it just seemed to happen (I got sucked into the coder’s time warp).

I’m also contemplating a new masthead, but I’m going to have to improve my GIMP skills before I attempt anything more daring than a few simple effects (like what you see above).

Now, to finish up.  I still have to modify the archive and category templates.