October 2004 Archive

Welcome to the Archive for October 2004! What you will find here may be old. It may scare you. It may even scare me! More importantly, you might find links that no longer work, and *gasp* information that is no longer, or possibly never was, accurate in any way. Don't rely on this information to save your life!

October 2004 Archive

Saturday, October 16, 2004

[Comments: 0] 3:57 AM - thank-goodness-it's-frid...-er-saturday

Well, I made it my first two full days, but my sleeping schedule missed the mark both days. I am running on empty, and I keep running anyway. It's amazing that even works, but I am going to fall over within a couple hours if I don't accept that it is time to go to bed.

This week has been good for a variety of reasons. The start of my full time job is certainly one. I have to adjust to get into the "I have a real job mode," but this isn't the first adjustment I've ever made in my life and it certainly won't be the last.

I'll probably touch more on my week later when I actually have a regular level of cognitive capacity...

Just to clarify my current condition: I have corrected this post three times so far, and the second time I made the correction completely wrong. :)

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

[Comments: 0] 5:35 PM - woe-are-my-sleeping-habits

Tomorrow marks my first day as a full-time employee ever. It does seem arbitrary to start on a Thursday, but the school board meets and approves these things on a Wednesday, so it just works out that way.

So now I work from 8 AM to 4 PM. I'm still in the habit of going to bed between 2 and 3 AM, which when getting up at 9:15 every morning is doable (6 - 7 hours of sleep). However, now I'm going to be getting up at 7 AM! If I go to bed at 3 AM, I'll only have 4 hours of sleep, and I can't handle that! :)

I'm going to start targeting to go to bed between 12:30 and 1:30 AM. That's still not quite as much sleep as I'd really like, but I don't think I can get myself to bed before that without taking baby steps in the right direction. :)

Of course, my natural tendency to be a night owl is about to be permanently damaged. At least I don't have to get up as early as I did when I was still in high school! (Though I am technically back in the high school I graduated from.)

Sunday, October 10, 2004

[Comments: 1] 5:03 PM - are-all-conservatives-this-misinformed

Here's a new rant for everyone. I'm a liberal... not a Democrat by any direct rule, but I feel like I should respond to someone else's blog, to demonstrate how completely misinformed people can be. I am of the opinion that most of the people that support Bush do so because they have allowed themselves to become mislead by the information they've been given, rather than taking a step back and considering all the facts involved. Of course, some people support Bush because they support his stance on domestic issues. Those that honestly do, though I still disagree with them, I can understand and respect their opinions. I am not concerned about these people. My response below is to someone that I feel has been buried in too much crap to climb out and look around. :)

I'm censoring these quotes, not because I really feel they need to be, but I'm not attacking his inability to make his argument without resorting to meaningless insults, and it really doesn't help to be distracted by them.

Quoth Steve B:

- Bush lied and sent us to war for the wrong reason.

[BULL]. Hussein was producing WMD's like crazy until the Gulf war. He murdered tens of thousands of his own people, including the Kurds. Who's the one lying now, you [insult #1]?

First few sentences are correct. The final question doesn't actually make any sense.

Saddam ousted the U.N. weapons inspectors, which lead the world to believe he was planning to reinstate his weapons production. This later turned out to be true, as indicated in the Duelfer report, which stated that restarting his weapons program was second in priority next to ending UN sanctions imposed on Iraq after the war.

We went into iraq believing that Saddam had WMDs. That was why we claimed we had to disarm Saddam. We found none. He had none. Sanctions were working. If we had kept the inspectors there and the sanctions in place they would have continued to work. Bush was wrong when he said sanctions weren't working. Our intelligence said otherwise. Now perhaps Bush was right to go to war on account of what our intelligence said, but he went without world support. I still don't believe that even with the WMD evidence we thought we had, Saddam was ever a serious threat to this country or that he would have been any time in the near future. The world mostly didn't agree that Iraq had those WMDs and posed a serious threat so long as inspectors were still inspecting (which they were). They were right, and we were wrong.

The problem? Bush claims that if he had known Saddam had no WMDs he would do everything again exactly as he had, and that is the epitome of foolishness. Our strategy was flawed and it's depressing to think that he would do the same thing he did, knowing full-well he was wrong about the entire nature of the situation.

- We're in Iraq only for the oil.
[BULL]. Little do these [insult #2] know that we have yet to take a single drop of oil from Iraq. Why would we need it? We get plenty of oil from Saudi-Arabia.

Reasonable people do not make this assertion. We don't know what Bush's motivations were for sure, but if we assume the reasons were as he and his administration repeatedly said before we went into Iraq, we went in using information that later was proven mostly incorrect.

- Soldiers are getting killed for no reason.
[censored] NO. All you ever hear from liberal news sources is typically "2 US soliders killed in car bombing today". That's what I call a bias. What ever happened to the 300,000 new schools, colleges, and hospitals just opened? Apparently that's not important to them. Iraqi people are happier today than at any other point in their lives.

The fact is that we shifted much of our reconstruction funding to security because we can't settle down the country enough to commit to reconstruction projects. That 300,000 number is an excessive exaggeration to no less than a factor of 1000. It is likely that thousands of US citizens and citizens from other nations haved died in a war that could have been avoided simply by making absolutely certain that the strict sanctions on Iraq were not lifted. Doesn't that seem like a waste?

[Comments: 0] 2:51 AM - without-a-trace

Since GeoURL has stopped working and seems to be long dead, I've dropped the link from the footer. Hopefully no one will be particularly upset about that.

I know I said I was going to bed. I'll probably get there eventually.

[Comments: 0] 2:23 AM - tweaky-tweaky

I tried to make the spook style work better in Internet Explorer, but it won't happen because Internet Explorer is stupid! If you have not yet learned this fact of life, it's time you thought about some - of - your - alternatives.

The opacity support simply doesn't bother to work on certain objects for no apparent reason, and failed PNG alpha layer support has forced me to use a JPEG for the background image. Fortunately, since I use multiviews, Mozilla still gets served the PNG image. Mozilla's accept header gives PNG a higher priority than other images. Opera does not do this, so Opera users will receive the JPEG file.

I don't think there are really any more tweaks to be made to the Spook style, though I will certainly look into any suggestions people give me.

I also learned through a bit of my stupidity that with the Coranto addon I use for comments, if the comments page has any posts on it, it simply chooses not to process the blocks marked as Perl code in the "original post" template, and was thusly printing both the web site review data and the department name on comments pages with at least one comment. Rather than figure out why iSay is broken, I actually opted code the template properly, and now things work the way I thought they should. :)

Maybe later on I will fix iSay and submit a patch back to the developer, like I had done with a previous fix.

Anyway, I ought to sleep before it's time to wake up.

Thursday, October 7, 2004

[Comments: 2] 3:09 AM - happy-halloween

I threw together a Halloween stylesheet for the site called "Spook." Feel free to take it for a spin using the dropdown list in the navigation menu.

It's not done yet, and most notably looks like crap in Internet Explorer. I should be able to resolve some of those issues via workarounds. It looks fair in Opera, except for the fact that without Opacity support, you can't see the background image through the page content. I also intend to tweak some parts of the stylesheet that may be green on account of the fact I used the Green theme as a template. :)

I suggest you try it out in Firefox for now and feel free to comment on how it looks!