I made the mistake of venturing forth to finish up my Christmas shopping today.  My original assumption that people would be at work and that maybe things wouldn’t be as crowded was quickly beaten into a bloody pulp by the harsh club of reality.  To liven things up a bit it’s also been raining off and on all day.  My supply of good will towards men has been severely depleted by various offenses against good manners, common sense, and good driving habits.  Here are a few annoyances, peeves, and plaintive whines (in no particular order):

• Why is it so damn hard for some people to use their turn signals?  They drive along and come to a complete stop in the road and then, at the last second, dart into a side street.  Is it that they don’t want anyone to know where they’re going?  Is it that big of a damn secret that they have to put me at risk of getting rear-ended by some dipnut who has been tailgating me because of their slow ass?
• I’m driving a 5600 lb. blue Chevrolet Avalanche with daytime running lights.  I know I can be seen.  Why, then, do people insist on pulling out in front of me and then driving 10 miles under?  And why do they wait until I’m almost upon them to pull out (when they’ve been sitting there for 5 or 10 seconds)?
• What sadistic bastard designed KB Toys?  Who decided to put the shelves so damn close together?  There’s no room to move in there.
• If you’re buying groceries at WalMart, take them to one of the main registers.  Let those of us just buying wrapping paper and gift bags have the ones in the Christmas department.  They don’t have room back there for all that crap you’re buying and it slows everyone down (although WalMart could do us all a favor and open ALL the damn registers in the front of the store instead of letting them get 10 deep).
• If you and your companion or whatever or walking down the aisle in a store, consider that other people may want to get by.  Especially if you’re just yakking and strolling with no particular purpose.  Some of us know what we want and where to find it.
• Swinging wide to turn went out of style years ago.  Even SUVs don’t need that damn much room to turn.  If I can make that turn without swinging out, then I know you don’t need to do it in your puny little Toyota.  It’ll also save on misunderstandings where I thought that you were going to sideswipe me.
• See that yellow stripy looking thing on the street?  It’s a lane marker.  Do cell phones suddenly make them invisible?  Quit yakkin’ and start drivin’.
• Rushing up and pulling into my lane at the last second, just before I have to stop at the light, is a game fraught with peril, especially if you’re driving a little econobox.  Perhaps you should consider that just maybe I know what I’m doing and I left that space there for something silly like braking distance and not as an invitation for you.
• Following me closely as I’m walking is a bad idea.  It’s an even worse idea to be obvious about it.  Don’t be surprised if I stop or suddenly dive into a store.  I live in condition yellow and your actions are making my danger detectors twitch.  Trust me, I’m a bad mark and trying to rob me is a really bad idea (you won’t get shot, unless you pull a weapon on me, but I’m not going to make it easy for you).

It’s almost like people are so caught up in their own little concerns that they’ve forgotten basic common sense and all consideration for others.  If there’s one thing that I hate about this time of year it’s the rudeness and “me first” attitude that seems to come out.  The season of good will toward man only seems to last until the first traffic backup or until the last Zip Zap car is gone.  I try really hard to be considerate of others, but it’s been a real test of patience this year.

The driving that I saw today was so horrible that I decided that I didn’t want any further part of it.  I came home and I’m going to stay here until early tomorrow morning, when I’m going to head to East Texas.  Maybe most of these bad drivers won’t be out that early in the morning.  I just hope it doesn’t snow tonight.  We don’t usually get snow here in this part of Texas.  When it snows it’s always accompanied by a layer of ice.  It’s the ice that makes things really interesting.

Someone entered a comment in an old post of mine from October 9th.  I’d noticed in my referrer logs that I had been getting three or four hits a day on the above “Bushism” post.  The poster called the President an “imbercile” (sic).

I hereby propose a new rule of internet discussion:

Godwin’s Bush corollary:
Calling President Bush a moron or imbecile means automatic loss of argument.

Update: I want to clarify that I’m not a supporter of President Bush.  I’m just sick and tired of the meanspiritedness surrounding the so-called public discourse about him.

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.

Sometimes the mind makes associations between seemingly unrelated items.  Our local cable system sells local advertising which the city of Denton uses to push various bits of propaganda.  Since the local utilities are run by the city, we’re often treated to various exhortations to conserve energy.  One of which is the recommendation to set your thermostat to 78 in the summer and 68 in the winter.  This led me to consider the issues of pessimism, left-wingers, and terrorism.

Are most left-wingers horribly pessimistic?  Very often their response to a problem is to tell us to “learn to live with it.”  We’ve had many years of technological advances in heating and cooling efficiency.  What’s the point of having these devices if you aren’t going to be comfortable using them?  If they’re using too much energy, then let’s concentrate on making them more efficient.  But the idea of setting the temperature to uncomfortable levels seems like capitulation and pessimism to me.

But how does this relate to terrorism?  The same people that want us to stop driving SUVs and to be uncomfortable in our homes are the sames ones that tell us that Americans should “just learn to live with” terrorism. 

America has long had a “can do” attitude with regards to just about everything.  It may seem corny and old fashioned, but I believe in the ability of Americans to overcome obstacles.  We’re not the type of people to just sit back and “learn to live with” something.  Whatever the problem, American tenacity, ingenuity, and technology can usually find a solution. 

I think the problem is that some factions see our “can do” attitude as arrogance, especially among the elites in Europe (who have, unfortunately, infected many of the lefists in America).  As in, “Those simplistic American cowboys are going to screw everything up because they just don’t understand the complexities of the issue.”  They’ve been unable to stop the terrorists themselves and they are trying to live with it.  They can’t understand our worldview and they think that we don’t understand the problem.

We’ve decided that we’re not going to live with terrorism, which means rooting out the terrorists and bringing them to justice (or bringing justice to them, Hellfire style).  We’re fully aware of the scope of the problem.  But instead of saying, “it’s just too big, we can’t do it”, our response is “what will it take and how do we make it manageable?”

I’ll take American “can do” spirit over left-wing pessimism any time.

Thanks to Jeff over at Alphecca for the kind words.  His words (along with Eric S. Raymond’s essay on SF) got me to thinking about my politics and my occasional rants, especially when it comes to gun ownership.

I’ve had a statement of my politics incubating in the back of my head for a while now, and I think it’ll be ready soon.  My writing process resembles that of Stephen Den Beste.  Something will get in there and get processed in the background until it’s ready.  Once it’s done, it just flows out, with my conscious brain doing little more than managing the mechanics of spelling and grammar (and the physical medium; keyboard, pen, etc).

Of course the background subprocessor only works when given time.  My better writing is all done this way.  I use it a lot for work, and I plan for it when giving estimates for the design phase of a project.  If I force myself to write something the result will usually be suboptimal.  This also occurs when I get ticked off and go on a rant.  Reading over these things later can be kind of uncomfortable because the text doesn’t flow very well (and there may be some nasty typos, especially with the rants).  With design documents, I can usually correct it somewhere along the way (there will be a number of reviewers for the document who will point out problems).  But I’ve made the decision for this weblog that I will not make substantial revisions once I’ve hit the “Save” button in Movable Type (I may go back and fix spelling errors or add an update, although the update will be marked).

And now for something completely different….

My CD ripping party is still underway, but my CD-ROM drive has given up the ghost.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since that drive has been powered on almost continuously since May, 1999 (I think it’s only been down for a couple of weeks during that time).  The only time I take this system down is to modify the hardware or if there’s a power failure (one of the joys of Linux).  So I popped down to Best Buy and picked up an ATAPI DVD-ROM drive.  I also picked up a copy of SuSE 8.1 Professional.  I’ve been meaning to upgrade, and now I won’t have to mess with 6 CD-ROMs.  As a purely geek-driven activity, I may have to see about getting DVD movie playback working under Linux, although I might have to break some laws to do it (but if you don’t tell, I won’t ).

Someone once described a boat as a hole in the water into which you pour money.  For me it’s computers and guns.  I guess one could make similar analogies for them, but I’ll spare you (I started to, but it seemed kind of lame).

My next site upgrade will be to fix the picture pop-ups in my guns section.  They’re kind of lame right now (they just reference the JPG file directly).  It should be a simple but interesting exercise to whip up some PHP that’ll wrap the picture with some appropriate HTML (and to size the window to fit the picture).  I suppose I could hard-code that stuff, but that wouldn’t give me a chance to play with PHP’s image library and learn something new (why hard-code something in half an hour when you could spend 3 or 4 hours writing a program to do the same thing ).

This morning I took the Avalanche to the local Chevy dealer for an oil change.  They have a TV in the waiting room, which was set to the local ABC station, which was showing Good Morning America.

Every time I am exposed to that show my blood pressure levels start to creep up and I have to remember not to yell obscenities (especially when in a public place like this morning).  Why does GMA inspire such loathing from me?  Because I can never forgive socialist scumbags Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer for calling me and people like me (the NRA and gunowners) murderers and claiming that we were teaching children to kill.

In case you hadn’t noticed by now, this is an area where I will accept no compromise and give no quarter.  The right to keep and bear arms does not belong to the states (there is no such thing as a “right” of government under our system), it’s not about hunting, and it would exist regardless of the existence of the Second Amendment.  While I am a member of the NRA, I often find myself at odds with the national leadership because of their weak stance on the issues (and past compromises).  It’s too bad I haven’t found a no-compromise gun rights organization that isn’t saddled with right-wing conservative nonsense.  If GOA was a single-issue organization, I might support them more (although there are times when I join with them to oppose bad laws).

I know proponents of victim-disarmament often complain that something must be done and that we should compromise and we can’t simply oppose everything they’re trying to do for the children™—you have to be for something.  Indeed, that’s one of my complaints about the NRA.  Too much time spent reacting rather than pushing our agenda forward.  I stand for certain things, and those things all involve repealing the tremendous number (>20,000) of gun laws that we’ve been saddled with over the past 100 years or so.  The only laws we need with regards to guns are the ones about not harming or killing other people.  Everything else is covered by that already.

As for the issue of compromise, consider the first definition of the word:

A settlement of differences in which each side makes concessions.

I get upset everytime I hear one of these oily, disingenuous victim-disarmament proponents use this word.  The reason is that every time it comes up it really means that we have to give up more of our rights.  That’s why a compromise isn’t possible.  The other side hasn’t made any concessions (other than to maybe agree not to take as many of our rights this time; they’ll come back for the rest later).

Oh well, I didn’t set out to get into a rant about the evils of “gun-control,” so I’ll stop here before I get too worked up.

This weekend I decided to rearrange my office/computer room/workspace because I had added a new gun safe.  As part of this I dismantled my home network, including my cable modem.

When I went to put it all back together, I noticed that my Linux box wasn’t getting a response from the DHCP server.  I checked the cable modem and saw that the cable light was on and the data light was flashing.  However, the PC light was off and the hub¹ didn’t show a light for the cable modem.  I swapped the hub for a spare.  No luck.  Then I tried a different ethernet cable, in case the first one was bad.  Still no luck.

At this point I’m starting to think the cable modem has gone bad.  That sinking feeling starts to settle in as I’m thinking I’m about to be without internet access for an extended period of time.  Kind of like a junkie without a fix.

After a while (as I’m about to head out to buy a replacement cable modem), I remember that cable modems have the TX and RX wires reversed, so that they can use standard ethernet cables when connecting directly to a PC (rather than more expensive crossover cables).  To use them with a hub they have to be connected to the uplink port.  I moved the connection to the uplink port and all was well again.

Oh well, nothing of great importance.  But beware of acute dumbass attack when reassembling your network setup.

¹ I use a Linux PC as a masquerading firewall.  It has two ethernet cards, one goes to my internal 10/100 switch and the other goes to the 10Mbps hub that the cable modem is connected to.  I suppose I could ditch the hub and connect the firewall directly to the cable modem, but I like the flexibility of being able to plug in directly without rewiring if something goes wrong with the firewall.  One of these days I’m going to get a dedicated firewall and ditch the Linux firewall (Linux is fine, but I’m getting tired of building and maintaining PCs and their associated hardware).

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh often takes issue with Slate’s Bushism Of The Day.  And rightly so, because most of their “Bushisms” are carefully quoted to show the President in the worst possible light.

This time, however, I don’t see why this quote from the President is a “Bushism”.  It’s accurate (for once), and it makes sense (to me anyway).

Here’s the quote:

“Let me tell you my thoughts about tax relief. When your economy is kind of ooching along, it’s important to let people have more of their own money.”

It appears that the controversy is over the word “ooching”, which is apparently a sailing term.  I don’t know jack about sailing, but I understood what he was saying.  I don’t know if the President intended to use it in its sailing context, but down here in Texas, I’ve heard the term used a few times to mean something that is lurching or dragging itself along. 

I think maybe the people at Slate need to get out of New York City a bit more.  Or maybe it was actually that whole “their own money” bit that threw them (they aren’t used to the idea that tax money belongs to the people who actually earned it).

This is just a bit of friendly advice.  The “Jesus Saves” bumper sticker on the back of your vehicle won’t “save” you if you pull out in front of me on the highway.

It’s not smart to get in the way of an avalanche…..

Someone once said that you couldn’t go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

He was right.