I’m heading up there for the day tomorrow, so probably no blogging starting in the morning, until Friday.
Category Archives: Administrative
Back To California From DC
I got in late last night, maybe more blogging later, but I’ve got a lot of catch-up to do with work.
Bloggus Interruptus
I flew from LA to DC to meet Patricia for Valentine’s Day. I may have better things to do than blog for a couple days.
On Not Being A Dove
A long but fascinating essay from the late John Updike. I found this passage quite interesting:
The protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of [the president] by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world. They were full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders, the business-suited hirelings drearily pondering geopolitics and its bloody necessities down in Washington. The protesters were spitting on the cops who were trying to keep their property—the USA and its many amenities—intact. A common report in this riotous era was of slum-dwellers throwing rocks and bottles at the firemen come to put out fires; the peace marchers, the upper-middle-class housewives pushing baby carriages along in candlelit processions, seemed to me to be behaving identically, without the excuse of being slum-dwellers.
Emphasis mine.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. They weren’t anti-war — they were just on the other side.
Sniffle
Yeah, blogging’s light. I’m busy with the work I’m doing out in LA, plus I’m coming down with a cold, which often happens when I travel. As long as I hermit up at home I can go months without getting sick, but exposure to all of the exotic bugs in airplanes and with new people tends to get to me.
Rough Night
So, after being up for about twenty-two hours, I got to bed about 11 Pacific. I got a call about quarter after one informing me that my luggage had arrived at LAX (no mention of where it had arrived from). I said, yes, please deliver it.
A while later, I got another call telling me that they were at the condo. I got the luggage (I thought) after a long and unnecessary dispute over the proper amount of the tip to the delivery guy, who (at the risk of seeming racist) seemed to be in both accent and appearance Middle Eastern. I ended up giving him more than I should have from cash that I hadn’t realized I had. Then (at least so I thought) back to bed.
About 2:40 AM, there was a knocking on the door downstairs. I thought “now what?” and ignored it, hoping that it was one of the other doors. But it persisted. I got up, and there was a guy claiming to be delivering my luggage. He said he would have just left it outside, but didn’t know if it was a good neighborhood for that.
He was right. He did have my luggage. The other delivery had apparently been an annoying dream. I took delivery (with no tip) and went back to bed, hoping that it had been real this time. In the morning, it turned out to have been.
And note, I really couldn’t have twattweeted this:
Lugj l8t to LA. Got urly morn call to delivr from LAX. Got nther call was here. Rgu bout tip. Was dream. Real dlvry l8tr. Finely got sleep LOL.
See, it’s just not the same.
More Ignorance On “Certification”
Clark Lindsey deconstructs the latest argument that human spaceflight vehicles must be “certified.”
And yes, I have arrived safely in LA. Without my luggage (meant to last a month). Again.
At least this time it wasn’t a non-stop, so they have the excuse of missing the connection in Dallas.
Off To CA
I have a 6:15 AM flight to LA in the morning, and am packing. I’ll have to deal with my computer problem when I get back. For now, I grabbed some data off the drives and put it on my file server so I could transfer it to my laptop, which will get me through the trip, which will be for the whole month of February (though I may come back for a weekend). Anyway, blogging may be light until tomorrow night.
Insane Commenters
Robert Oler has attempted to comment a few times over the past few weeks, but Word Press seems to be smart enough to not allow them through. I thought that I’d note this latest attempt, on this post, though:
well Rand ….you are the guy who believes in the Falwell theory of HRC murdering people…
Note first that it is a complete non sequitur in the context of the post.
Note second that this is nutty. I don’t even know what the “Fallwell theory of HRC murdering people” is, let alone believe in it. Robert apparently bought a copy of The Clinton Chronicles and then somehow has projected his fascination with it on to me (someone who has never even seen it).
I’m not sure why he engages in this kind of lunacy, but it is nice to have blog software that is smarter than him, so in general we don’t have to view it.
Thank You, Redmond
I just did a Microsoft security update on my Windows 2000 machine, and now it bluescreens (something I hadn’t seen on this machine in years) when it reboots. I booted into safe mode, and removed the update (I think I removed the right one — I’m assuming that the latest one would be highest number, but that might not be right). It still won’t boot. I’m posting this from my Fedora box.
Any ideas?
[Late afternoon update]
Great. Now it blue screens going into Safe Mode.
I’ll have to find my setup disk, but I doubt if I’ll have time before I go to CA on Monday.