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March 26, 2003
Need to name a military operation?
Try out this random military operation name generator.
I got Operation Inflexible Sucker Punch, Operation Bisexual Rocket, and Operation Underwear-staining Saber.
Courtesy of Dazz.
Posted by KinCross at 09:10 PM | Comments (0)
A More Eloquent Remark
Jason Kottke, a fellow New Yorker, has this to say about the war:
"Summing up, Bush bad, war bad, this war not so bad even though bad Bush reasons also bad."Although this really does sum up Jason's statements regarding the war, the rest of it is quite insightful.
Courtesy of Missanthropy, via Xkot.
Posted by KinCross at 09:01 PM | Comments (0)
Respect, for a teacher
I have a tremendous respect for teachers. It's something I've had for a long time. I'd like to attribute it to my upbringing and the importance of education that was instilled in me then, even if I've forgotten some of the lessons since I left home. I share a house with a teacher, and I've seen her classroom. It's so different from any classroom I ever remembered being in. For one, it's an inner city classroom with a host of inner city problems that are just so remote from my suburban childhood and magnet school adolescence. The work and passion--that bears repeating, the WORK and PASSION--that these teachers have to put in to teach their kids and make ends meet under the ever present axe of state and federal governments that place unreasonable demands with little support and the threat of budgetary cuts is absolutely astounding.
And that makes this, this, and this account about one teacher's ordeal over a missing student of hers difficult to swallow. The world is indeed a hard and callous place.
Courtesy (indirectly) of Dazz, who had actually linked to a VSD of Osama bin Laden that was just below the above link.
Edited to account for LiveJournal's post nomenclature.
Posted by KinCross at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)
Where am I?
Ever wake up from a dream--one where everything was so vivid and coherent that you thought it *was* your real life--only to find yourself sitting in your bed and looking around at the world wondering, "Where am I? What world is this?"
For a long time, I eschewed the news. This wasn't hard, since I didn't bother hooking up the TV to anything other than an Xbox (later the DVD player and a PlayStation 2) after I moved. I didn't listen to the radio. I didn't read newspapers, online or off. I kept on blogs sporadically. I had a period of depression where looking out at the world really just made me feel worse, so I drew in on myself, which is typical of my defence mechanisms. Things just stayed flat and didn't get better.
Then a friend of a friend visited from Baltimore. He's a lot like me in temperament and humour, so we got along fine and ended up hanging out a lot for a couple of weeks. That helped draw me out from my shell. Right about the time he left was when I lost the use of my computer. For the next three weeks, I spent a lot of time out of the house, visiting friends, camping out in stores, imprinting my ass on a lounge chair at a Starbuck's in Union Square. I spent more money than I should have, but somewhere in there, I got some retail therapy. That's when I started reading the paper, almost religiously every day.
Where am I? What world is this?
I have to echo a sentiment that Doyce voiced earlier in the week or maybe it was last week: I'm of two minds about this whole Persian Gulf War II thing. On second, thought, I've got thirds and fourths on that. While my initial reaction to the whole thing was decidedly anti-war and still is, generally, there are so many arguments:
Saddam Hussein has, time and time again, show his belligerence in dealing with UN weapons inspectors and his horrible treatment of the people under his rule, with the Kurds and the Shiites in particular. Without little need for imagination, you can take that EVIL sticker and slap it on his forehead.
However, he hasn't done anything in twelve years. He's been a non-threat or a low-level one at best since 1991. Whatever talk there is of weapons of mass destruction is fraught with maybes and uncertainties that couldn't even be considered "circumstantial" in a court of law. The links that the Bush Administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al'Qaeda are more tenuous than the drooling afterthoughts of a Ron Jeremy money shot.
Add to that the rather apparent "Shotgun Diplomacy" that this Administration seems to prefer and the whole thing really raises my hackles. Ever since it came into power, the Bush Administration has done nothing but systematically destroy any international goodwill that previous administrations had created. Kyoto Protocol, Star Wars, GATT... and then the strong-arming of other nations to bend them to the will of the US, which ultimately led to the US chickening out of even putting up the UN resolution to legitimize the invasion of Iraq.
As if that wasn't enough, the Bush Administration has decided to do all of this when the US economy is very weak, with foreign capital and investment fleeing the country, with a large trade deficit, and with a budget deficit of $300 billion dollars (not including the price tag of war, which was recently set at $75 billion for the next six months). Now, I'm not expert market analyst--Hell, I didn't even take economics in high school or university--but even the crackhead on the street can tell you that you can't buy rock without a Jackson. The economy is going down the tubes and the President wants to spend money he doesn't have... money he doesn't have because he gave away most of the money that the last President gave him on tax cuts for his wealthy friends.
All the while, he's still pushing for another tax cut for the top 1% of the population amounting to $726 billion dollars that will do barely a thing for the bottom 60% of the population, the part of the population that needs it most. This seems patently ridiculous to me, and if I actually had cable or broadcast television, maybe I wouldn't be able to hear myself think over all of the propaganda or the pretty explosions on TV.
I am pro-troops. I support the fighting men and women that are in the Gulf now, fighting this war, but I am against the policies and commanders that put them there. Leading up to the war, there was a lot of talk about liberating Iraq and being met in the cities with the adulation and cheers of an Iraqi populace. It is with a sad kind of joy that I can look on the military planners and the Administration as they have to choke down on that crusty, old, slightly-overcooked pastry filled with crow. Honestly, how could anyone have expected that American troops would be welcomed in such a way. This isn't Berlin, nor is it Hitler. The conceit of the Administration for believing this projection is sadly indicative of the kind of arrogance that is distasteful to so many non-Americans in the first place.
I can't help but feel that the American incursion into Iraq will only anger the international community more. Sure, they'll pay lip service to stand behind the US, but it's the kind of support that a beauty queen gets on stage that turns into gossip and character assassinations once the lights are turned off. America is hated because it bungles its way into the affairs of other countries and if this war isn't the ultimate in interjecting American interests into another sovereign state, I don't know what is. The US has a lot of countries in the world by the short and curlies by dangling the threat of withdrawing foreign aid. I don't imagine too many people would be happy about being in that position.
I don't imagine the US population would like it much if some other country--let's say the UK--imposed itself on it and told it how to run its government. It's happened before and the result was revolution. Why, then, should the Bush Administration feel that it should impose its will on another nation? Bush calls it nation-building and liberation, but it reeks of conquest and imperialism. The extension of the US armed forces to serve national interest. Not defence, interest.
However he may try to legitimize the war through loopholes in previous UN resolutions, the sense is that the world community views this as the US going out on its own (with a couple of friends) to do whatever it wants. In this case, it smells of vendetta. Bush has set a very dangerous precedent in instigating this war: he has established the pre-emptive strike as a means of defence. While "the best defence is a good offence" may be good from such military strategists as Mel, the cook on "Alice," it hardly seems appropriate for the world's single hyperpower. It behooves the US to behave in a more civilized manner than being the bully that cows other nations into following its line or risk being trampled under its big feet.
In summary, the US has no more moral imperative to fight this war than it did five or ten years ago and it can hardly afford it given its current economy. By appearances, fighting this war with the current President cannot shake the spectre of vendetta for a conflict that was not resolved fully by the President's father. Dangerous international precedents are being set and the continuation of antagonism toward other nations by this Administration cannot bode well for future foreign relations.
In short, Bush taken the US and given it a really good swift kick down the slippery slope of wretched global citizenship and looks to be getting ready to give it another kick every step of the way.
I only pray that this conflict can end sooner, rather than later, so that the world I woke up in this morning wouldn't look so strange.
Well, what do you know? I found my street.
Posted by KinCross at 12:38 AM | Comments (0)
March 25, 2003
*taptap* Is this thing on?
Hi. My name is Ian. You may remember me from such blogs as Crouching Tiger Hidden Beaver and, well, Crouching Tiger Hidden Beaver.
I've been missing for awhile. A long time. I'd like to say I have a really cool story to tell about why I've been missing, but... well, why don't I just tell it and you can let me know.
On 6 February, my computer, one of the early PowerBook G4 titanium laptops that entered the market early 2001, experienced a kernel panic. It was something I had never seen before. It panicked on me over the course of several successive reboots before I gave up, since my friends showed up and we were going out to dinner. The next morning, it booted up fine, so I went back to business as usual.
On 13 February, I updated the OS to Mac OS X 10.2.4, which required a reboot, the first one that I had to do since my successful boot the previous Friday. After the reboot, I had the same problem as the previous week with repeated kernel panics shortly after login. Once or twice, it froze up on me before login.
On 15 February, I took it into a reputable local service center to have it inspected. Diagnosis was free, after all, as long as it wasn't a software problem. This was definitely not a software problem. They did a hardware consistency check on the machine and declared one of my memory chips bad. Actually, I think they declared the slot bad, not necessarily the chip. Either way, they removed the memory chip from my lower memory slot and gave the machine back to me. It booted up and logged in. Cool. Let's see how it goes.
I got about an hour's use out of it before it panicked again, and this time, it wouldn't even boot to a login screen. Got the bong, no video. I'm not sure what that translates to in the usual Intel lexicon, but I'd equate it to being something akin to "no POST". So I resolved to take the machine back to the service center on Monday.
Did I mention that Monday, 17 February, was the day of the blizzard in NYC? The service center was open and I went anyway, but none of the PowerBook technicians made it in that day, so my laptop sat around waiting for techs to get in Tuesday morning.
Tuesday the techs confirmed what I already knew: the thing won't boot. So, after getting some price checks on what it would cost to have them replace the motherboard vs. sending it to Apple to have them fix it, I had the thing sent to Apple for repair. The price was pretty much the same and Apple would replace any other bad components for the same price as the motherboard alone for the local service center. Turnaround was supposed to be ten business days. And so the wait began, starting on 18 February.
Sporadic contact was made with the local service center for status after two weeks had passed and continued through to last Tuesday, when it was determined that the laptop was full repaired with a few "buts." From what I've been able to determine so far, my laptop has now made the trip to and from Apple three times. The first time, they replaced the motherboard, but it came back and didn't boot, so it was returned. The second time, they replaced the motherboard again and the top case (figure that was cosmetic?). Still didn't boot properly. The third time, they replaced the motherboard, the processor, the kitchen sink, and the hard drive, and declared my one remaining chip bad. They pulled my old hard drive.
Excuse me? I paid a premium price to have the data safeguarded?
They sent the hard drive back to the local service center, which was unable to do an easy copy of data from the old drive to the new. So, as of last Tuesday, I had to decide whether or not I wanted them to perform data recovery on the hard drive. I opted to have the data recovered, at additional cost to me, because there was irreplaceable data on the drive that I hadn't backed up.
Then I get a call on Friday asking if I wanted to go ahead with the data recovery. The call woke me up, so I wasn't exactly thinking clearly. By thinking clearly, what I mean to say is that I wasn't awake enough to cuss out the tech or question why they hadn't started on Tuesday when I approved the data recovery; I had the service notes checked later, the one on Tuesday definitely indicated that data recovery was approved. In retrospect, maybe it was a good thing I was barely coherent because there's nothing like pissing off the guy that's supposed to be pulling your data off your old drive to ensure that you lose something important.
As of today, they're still working on it. I've been crippled in that I've had to resort to bumming computer time off of friends to even check my email. Email has to be done over a web interface that is disgustingly unwieldy. It got so desperate that I finally had to unpack an old Windows 98 PC and track copper cable to get back to some semblence of function. For two weeks, I was totally unable to job search, not that I missed much.
And when all's said and done, I'll probably be out nearly $1000.
In the meantime, my first two weeks of enforced Luddism I was really frazzled. I'm a computer junkie. Most of my entertainment is drawn from the computer, esp. since I didn't bother to get cable hooked up in my new apartment. Hell, I don't even have broadcast television here, which is a blessing and a curse. The time without my computer, which had been my stereo (MP3's and external speakers) and my DVD player really sucked. It sucked to the point that, in addition to the Windows PC, I also had to find and unpack the DVD player and a console or two to pass the time.
I started buying newspapers. New York Post and Daily News, at first, because they were light and easy to carry, but eventually switched to the New York Times. Now, I'm sure that I can get all the same information online, but I have to say that I really like the good old fashioned feel of newsprint in my hands. Besides, it's easier to lug around on the train when I'm bumping around the city. The New York Times became my good friend. And, for once, I felt informed enough to actually form opinions about all the stuff that's been going on around the world.
I got my MCSE 2000 (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, WIndows 2000). Started working on a CCNA (Certified Cisco Network Administrator).
Then the weather got nice and I started spending time in that really big room with the ceiling that changes colours. Pulled out the inline skates for the first skate of the season on Saturday with my friend, Danielle. Weather's been gorgeous the last few days and I've been out enjoying it as much as I can.
I'm still without my laptop, though, and I want to get it back soon so that I can do my taxes.
Oh, and if anyone out there knows of anyone looking for a network administrator, I'm still looking for a job.
Posted by KinCross at 10:10 PM | Comments (0)