Friday, December 24, 2004

I don’t know what the problem was for most of today, but the site was down - I couldn’t log in to my control panel at all. My host fixed whatever was wrong, but the cause is still a mystery to me.

*sigh*

Today marks the 1200th day since the US was attacked by Al Qaeda in New York and Washington. If you take a look at the ticker I have in my sidebar, you’ll see the countdown (for some reason the script won’t work in a post).

This Christmas we should be grateful for the men and women who have put and are putting their lives on the line to protect us, to fight the fight for us, and to bring democracy and liberty to two formerly oppressed peoples in Afghanistan and Iraq. I know that I am.

Thank you and may God bless you and your families this Christmas.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

ECD, MD, and I have taken to saying, “I’m anti...” to a lot of random things. To the three of us it’s a funny little joke, but I have to stop myself from using it and the accompanying hand gestures when I’m around, say, my family. Because it’s pretty self-explanatory, but it comes across as a little harsh to those who don’t understand the underlying story, which is as follows:

MD is a faithful Catholic and never misses Sunday AM mass. A couple of years ago, she was at mass when there was a rather virulent flu bug going around and when the passing of the peace portion of the service came, she turned to the woman next to her and raised her hands up in the universal “don’t hurt me, Mr. Bank Robber” mode and exclaimed, “I’m anti!” Immediately, she realized how this would be perceived, but it was too late and the nice lady who wanted to shake MD’s hand was offended and had turned away. MD’s reasons were sound - she didn’t want to gather up the nice lady’s germs and whomever else’s that lady had fondled that morning, but still...her methods were a little, shall we say, anti?

So several weeks ago, ECD and MD were talking about something and MD raised her hands and said, “I’m anti!” To which, ECD laughed hard and I looked on, clueless. They explained it to me and the three of us have been “I’m anti"ing ever since.

I share this boring story with ya’ll because I’ve had to backspace through that phrase several times lately. I figured it was better to just explain it and go with it than self-censor anymore.

Ith has a fun Christmas meme. I’d answer at her blog, but Websense blocks me out of her comments and trackback pages.

* Do you spend the holiday at your place, or somewhere else? We spend Christmas day at my parents’ home.

* What’s your Christmas Dinner main course? Roast beef with Yorkshire Pudding and all the veggie trimmings.

* What’s the dessert? Usually we have Chocolate-Eggnog pie, pumpkin pie, Christmas cookies, and whatever else my mother decides to bake.

* Do you eat early or late? That depends on your definition of early/late - we usually eat the meal at around 4pm or so.

* What gift was your favourite when you were a child? Family vacation to Disneyland and southern Cali

* As an adult? Too many to name. I’m pretty stoked about the Tivo this year.

* What are you hoping to get from Santa this year? ROTK EE DVD

* Any unique tradition you have? With the addition of the new generation our traditions are changing. We used to open gifts on Christmas Eve after church. I think we’re moving that to Christmas morning now with the little ones. My father always recites Luke 2 and we try to always watch It’s a Wonderful Life.

This post is for the TAR6 people - next week’s episode (Dec 28) is a clip show - no tasks, no Philimination - just scenes from the first 6 legs that got left on the cutting room floor.  No quiz this week as a result - I can’t be bothered with trying to come up with clever questions on the kinds of nutty things we might see that didn’t make the regular episodes (How many times does Jonathan berate Victoria? How many times does Hayden say, “Baby”? etc.). I’m thinking the next week might be more of the same - CBS may want to get through the holidays completely before continuing leg 6 to the Pit Stop and Philimination. But I’ll keep ya’ll posted.

So you’re free from quizzing this week! Relax. Enjoy the madness that will be the clip show.

Bryan retells of his family’s encounter with the family Brown at a local Target. Very funny. With pictures, although none taken with their camera.

I am so sick and tired of the comment spam. I’ve been getting nailed since last night. I’ve changed the name of the register.php file to something they couldn’t figure out. I’ve closed posts. I’ve closed commenting on posts. I’ve increased the timelock on commenting to 10 minutes. I refuse to close commenting all together - it’s the main reason I keep blogging - the interaction with my readers and friends. If I can’t get this to stop, I may just shut down the blog. Because this is not fun and I’m not enjoying this aspect of blogging at all. I spend more time deleting comments than I do reading blogs and writing to my own.

I know some of you know how to write scripts to your MySQL whatevers to make it stop, will one of you email me with explicit instructions on how to do that? Is that still working for you?

Will the rest of you hunt down these fiends and kill them, please?

UPDATE: I’ve temporarily renamed the comments page. Maybe that will halt this recent attack. I deleted 50+ comments before I got fed up. *sigh*

LATER: Changing the filename of the comments page had no effect - so that’s back to normal. The timelock helps more, so that will be increased to 15 minutes. I’m sorry for the inconvenience for my regular commenters. At this point I’m almost ready to give up the fight. The new EE blog will start from scratch on a new domain and I do not plan to import the posts from this blog to it. I’m going to let this one fester and die on the vine, sadly. I wonder how long it’ll take before all posts are completely overrun with comment spam?

LATERER: Hmmm, timelock does not really work after all. So that’s been reduced to 3 minutes to ward off ordinary spammers - you know, those phentermine folks. The p-o-k-e-r folks are botting me to death, although I almost appreciate the whimiscal philosophical quotes they leave along with their links.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

There’s a deputy whose vocabulary consists of a few words and the F-bomb. He intersperses the F-bomb liberally throughout his sentences. He’s a former Marine and blames in on his tenure in the USMC. I’ve known plenty of Marines and while they had a certain fondness for that particular word, they didn’t use it as much as this guy.

There was one day that he said it no less than a couple dozen times in one statement. We were sitting in the conference/lunch room and I was astounded at the number of times he used it and the varying forms it took - noun, verb, adverb, adjective, etc. So I challenged him.

ME: Do you realize how many times you just said the f-word?

HIM: I was in the Marines!

ME: That’s no excuse. You need to be aware of what you say to people. It’s not always appropriate to use that kind of language.

HIM: I don’t care.

ME: You should. Here’s a proposal - for every time you say the f-word in my presence you owe me a quarter.

HIM: I’ll be broke in a week!

ME: That’s the point of the exercise.

But he accepted the challenge and within a couple minutes of that acceptance he was handing over his first quarter. That was about a month ago and I’ve collected about $4 so far. He avoids me like the plague and on the occasions he can’t avoid me he tries to keep silent. It’s hilarious. Today alone, I’ve collected $1.50 from him.

A couple of weeks ago we were eating lunch and he said it. “A-hem,” I cleared my throat and put out my hand into which he placed two dimes and a nickel. Another deputy, who wasn’t there for the original conversation, wondered what was going on. “You’re not the church lady,” the criminal clerk explained.

So I’m known as the church lady (although I’m no where near as funny as The Church Lady, nor as sanctimonious) and I’m also known as the F-word Fairy.

FWIW, the money collected is paying for the candy I keep on my desk for those who deign to visit my office.

Training for Eternity is the blog of a chaplain deployed to Mosul, Iraq. He recounts his first-hand account of the aftermath of the attack on the mess tent from yesterday. It’s gut-wrenching.

“Mark" was put on a stretcher and laid along a wall. A small monitor on his hand would tell the nurses when he was dead. Even a cursory glance said it was inevitable. Mark had a head wound that left brain matter caked in his ear and all over the stretcher he was lying on. I knelt next to Mark and placed a hand on is chest. His heart was barely beating but it was beating so I put my face close to his ear to pray with him. If you’ve never smelled human brain matter it is something unforgettable. I had something of an internal struggle. He’s practically dead so why stay? He probably can’t hear anything! A prayer at that point seemed of little value. But I couldn’t risk it. I prayed for Mark and led him in the sinners prayer as best I could. There are few things in this life that will make you feel more helpless. After that, I needed some fresh air.

Good episode last night - with a surprise ending! My understanding is that next week’s episode is a recapper of the first 6 with footage not seen before. That should be interesting.

As usual, I took some notes that I’ll add later. For now, the quiz answers can be seen here and here are the standings:

Players—Quiz 6—Final Score

chrissw—70—590
Jared—80—575
Ace—140—520
kdeweb—135—510
SteenShell—95—475
Jaynee—60—465
Tara—70—460
jen—65—455
BigOrangeMichael—95—415
tygertyger—25—350
princess jami—60—325
fij—95—270
bryankelli—60—255

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

We just had a weird power outage in the office. I was sitting here reading email when my radio and lights went silent/dark. My printer went out and my typewriter as well. But my computer didn’t flicker and neither did my phone. The lights in the hall stayed on, but the lights in the foyer are out. Checking around the office, there are random things not working but others right next to them are normal. Our overall network is fine (as evidenced by my ability to post this), but I can’t access the financial system.

A call to the building manager indicated that we were the only ones affected by the problem.

Odd.

Spammers persist in leaving comments at four posts on which I have closed the commenting function. How they do it is beyond my technical know-how (please don’t try to explain it to me, I don’t really care). I’ve closed the posts all together, although I have no doubt that they’ll know how to access the posts anyway. Maybe this will slow them down enough though.

Just a reminder for my readers/commenters, I set the timelock on the comments to 5 minutes. Maybe you’ve already encountered that if you tried to post comments too close together. I’m sorry for that inconvenience.

I know I think too logically, but I’m still baffled at the reasoning for spamming old posts that no one reads anyway. Is it to aggravate the bloggers? Because they’re not endearing themselves to anyone, as far as I know. Don’t we all hate them passionately?

I take every warning from “experts” with many grains of salt. My skeptical attitude started as a kid when the warnings about eggs/cholesterol started. I was a 2-egg/day consumer and I wasn’t about to stop eating my favorite breakfast food. Turns out I was smart, because the “experts” have since recinded that warning - the amounts of cholesterol are neglible in eggs.

Then came the warnings about high fat foods, which common sense told me were to be eaten in moderation anyway. But alas, food producers came out with low-fat pseudo-foods that turned out to be less healthy than the natural, fat-laden, whole foods they were to replace. Hmmm...I’ll stick with butter, thanks.

Recently came the warnings about pain relievers Vioxx and Celebrex - seems that common sense would say that those in a risk group for heart problems should be careful about those drugs and that the other 90+% of the people who take those drugs are probably OK to continue. But we’re a reactionary lot, so they’re being taken from the shelves.

And now my pain reliever of choice, Aleve (aka naproxen), is on the list of “run away very quickly or it’ll kill you!” warnings from the FDA. I have two large bottles of the stuff - one at home and one at work. I plan to continue taking it when I have pain, because it works like nothing else does for me. I’m not in a risk group for heart attack or stroke, so I’m confident that I’m safe. I don’t take it daily and I’ve never taken it for more than a couple days at a time - except when I had that sprained ankle at Young Life camp and took it for almost a month, but that was a rare instance. It was take it and be able to do my job or not take it and be parked in a chair with my leg elevated all day long while my job didn’t get done. But that’s another story for another day.

My point is that we need to relax. Our litigious society has groomed a culture of reactionary nervous Nellies. None of these studies are set in stone and they never apply to all people. Common sense should dictate here, but sadly there are way too many people who lack that commodity. And so I predict that Aleve will at some point be withdrawn from the shelves of the local drug stores, much to my disappointment.

I caught some of the press conference with PM Blair and President Allawi in Baghdad this morning. Did anyone else catch when PM Blair finished answering a question about the elections and democracy and Britain’s involvement in Iraq (yadda, yadda, yadda) and the translator started to do her thing and he said something about “to translate or not to translate....” Then he paused and I think he thought it was an under-the-breath aside to Allawi, but the mic picked up what he said clearly:

The Iraqis’ get it, it’s the rest of the world…

UPDATE: Added the link later.