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GRAFFITI -- November 06, 2006 thru November 12, 2006 >> Link to the Current Week << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable.     About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.

MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
November 6, 2006

1251 - Good afternoon. Strong advertising against PG County Questions B, C, F, and G are running on the radio and television in the days leading up to the election. They make some amazing claims in these ads: Bad For County Government site. The funny thing is ... even these folks won't show you the text of the actual Ballot Questions, just like the PG County site. Apparently, I'm the only one who will. So if you want to decide for yourself, instead of letting advertising and rhetoric sway your vote, go read my post from last Friday. And tomorrow, get out the vote! GET OUT THE VOTE! Oh, here's what I wrote to those folks at the BFCG site:

Why won't you publish the full text of the ballot questions? Why won't the County Government site post the full text in a place where it's easily found? I had to dig through Microsoft Word documents on the County LIS site to find the full text.

Not posting the full text is a disservice to the voters you hope to sway with your rhetoric. Bad form. The good news is that I did.

Good luck with that promotion. I'm prompted to oppose your effort just because of how y'all handle yourselves. Making up claims and fear-mongering is no way to run a campaign.

Who's the primary funding source for your play, anyway?

Speaking of voting, I posted a link yesterday to Orson Scott Card's The Only Issue This Election Day, and recommended that you read it, and think about the issues he raises before making your final voting decisions tomorrow. It's a well written piece, and I find it provoking and moving. Worth a read, really. Thanks to Jerry for posting a link to it last week, where I found it.

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November 7, 2006

0640 - Good morning. Get out and VOTE!

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November 8, 2006

0928 - Good morning. Some tastes don't go together, and some words don't either. It doesn't matter how you twist and turn them, nor how you finesse or force them, the phrase Extreme Croquet just grates on the rawest of nerves. Still, it exists. And if Dave Lister were to play croquet, that's probably how he'd do it.

In other grating news, there are some things that can make a security-conscious (or at least attempting to be conscious, at this hour) sysadmin cry. This is one of them: Every Vista PC to get a domain name. From the article on Wikipedia: PNRP is a distributed name resolution protocol allowing Internet hosts to publish "peer names" and the corresponding IPv6 address. Other hosts can then resolve the name, retrieve the corresponding address, and establish peer-to-peer connections. Eeeek! Of course, there's IPv6 gateway/routers and other bits that need to be in place, all to allow a brand new 1.0 revision of the XP codebase serve bits to the Internets. What an insanely bad idea!

The vote modification machines at my precinct appeared to be working okay. The summary agreed with my votes. Did those get recorded properly, and counted correctly. There's no way to know, no way to recount. PAPER TRAIL, PEOPLE!!! In the meantime, it appears that the House is now Democrat, and the Senate is hard on its heels. Maryland's gone straight Dem, although Ehrlich hasn't conceded yet. Weird times ahead, people. Time for me to get back to work. Ciao!

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November 9, 2006

No Post....

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November 10, 2006

0749 - Good morning, more or less. Vimes, the home workstation, isn't booting at the moment. I violated one of my own rules a while back, and did an in-place upgrade of Kubuntu from 6.06 to 6.10. Seemed to work okay-ish, but there were glitches. Minor ones, but they bothered me. So I went for a clean slate finally last night. But I started too late, and I've got problems with boot device ordering. There's just something that's problematic about mixing IDE and SATA hard drives in a system. The BIOS wants to believe one boot order, the boot loader another, and the OS yet a third. So it's time to extract that old, small, slow 160G IDE drive, the last spinning IDE drive I have. But that's for later. If I'm *REALLY* lucky, I'll remember to pull this updated post down from the server and back into my home Master copy before I blow it away.

Anywhooo, it's the Federal holiday observed for Veterans Day, with tomorrow being the actual event. Take a minute or 20 out of your day to get in contact with the veterans in your life, and let them know how much you appreciate their service. And if that's YOU, too ... well, thanks! From me to you. Happy Friday.

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November 11, 2006

0754 - Veteran's Day. A big, heartfelt thanks goes out from me to all of our Veterans.

As promised, I got Vimes up and running with very little effort once I removed that problematic IDE drive. It also removes the problematic Windows partition from my life. As many of you know, I've referred to that as the gaming OS, but in reality, it's just been taking up space. A few of the games I "own", including Unreal Tournament, Doom 3, and Quake 4, all run under Linux, so I just haven't taken the time to reboot into the Windows partition in months. I do have VMware for the purpose when needing to do the actual Windows thing for testing access to work, etc. So I'm really not going to miss it, anyway.

I still have a few things left to install, like Cedega (and/or Crossover Office), VMware, as well as assorted odds and ends. Marcia's off to her writing class shortly, and the dogs are settling in for a long morning's nap. Have a great day!

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November 12, 2006

1455 - Good afternoon. A moderately uneventful day; here's the grab bag of useless status reports: The unseasonably warm weather is over, it's now rainy and cold. But that's outside. In here, Linda and Marcia are playing in the sewing and fabric rooms. Yesterday, I finished reading through and redlining Marcia's first draft of the whole book. Here on Vimes, I need to figure out how to get KDE and keychain to play well together.

But first, a moment to give thanks to the fallen...

• Maj. Douglas E. Sloan, 40, of Evans Mills, N.Y., died of injuries suffered when an IED detonated near his vehicle Oct. 31 in Wygal Valley, Afghanistan.
• Sgt. Charles J. McClain, 26, of Fort Riley, Kan., died of injuries suffered when an IED detonated near his vehicle Oct. 31 in Wygal Valley, Afghanistan.
• Pfc. Alex Oceguera, 19, of San Bernardino, Calif., died of injuries suffered when an IED detonated near his vehicle Oct. 31 in Wygal Valley, Afghanistan.
• Lt. Col. Paul J. Finken, 40, of Earling, Iowa, died Nov. 2 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an IED detonated near his vehicle.
• Lt. Col. Eric J. Kruger, 40, of Garland, Texas, died Nov. 2 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an IED detonated near his vehicle.
• Staff Sgt. Joseph A. Gage, 28, of Modesto, Calif., died Nov. 2 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an IED detonated near his vehicle.
• Spc. James L. Bridges, 22, of Buhl, Idaho, died Nov. 4 in Baghdad, Iraq, when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations.
• Cpl. Kyle W. Powell, 21, of Colorado Springs, Colo., died Nov. 4 from wounds suffered while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Cpl. Jose A. Galvan, 22, of San Antonio, Texas, died Nov. 5 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Spc. Douglas C. Desjardins, 24, of Mesa, Ariz., died Nov. 5 in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his M1A1 Abrams tank during combat operations.
• Lance Cpl. James E. Brown, 20, of Owensville, Ind., died Nov. 2 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Staff Sgt. Jason D. Whitehouse, 27, of Phoenix, Ariz., died Nov. 2 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• 2nd Lt. Mark C. Gelina, 33, of Moberly, Mo., died Nov. 4 from a non-hostile incident in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Pfc. Kevin J. Ellenburg, 20, of Middleburg, Fla., died Nov. 1 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
• Sgt. 1st Class William R. Brown, 30, of Fort Worth, Texas, died Nov. 6 in Sperwan-Gar, Afghanistan, of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his convoy vehicle.
• Chief Warrant Officer John R. Priestner, 42, of Pennsylvania, died Nov. 6 in Balad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when his AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed.
• Chief Warrant Officer Miles P. Henderson, 24, of Amarillo, Texas, died Nov. 6 in Balad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when his AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed.
• Lance Cpl. Ryan T. McCaughn, 19, of Manchester, N.H., died Nov. 7 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Sgt. Lucas T. White, 28, of Moses Lake, Wash., died Nov. 6 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered when his unit came in contact with enemy forces while on patrol.

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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

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