dannyman.toldme.com

I work for a small company. When I started, we all went out to lunch. And when the next guy started, we all went out to lunch. And today, the new guy . . . well, just the developers are going out to lunch. This is actually very sensible, but I was kind of looking forward to a free lunch. Today, TANSTAAFL – There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Fortunately, Yayoi makes me lunch every day. Mmmm, sandwiches!

And, today is pay day. For the first time in my life, I have a six months of rent in a savings account. I think we should probably keep adding to this stockpile, on the off chance that we some day discover some affordable housing to buy. I am also looking forward to getting back in to the 401k game.

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Joe told me he made a deliberate effort to stop reading political blogs, and I said that I never really did bother to read political blogs, because they generally don’t go past provoking self-righteous outrage at the other side, and since about 2003 or so I have definitely had “outrage fatigue.”

But that doesn’t mean I still don’t pay attention, and that doesn’t mean that I am ignorant of the outrages. I get a trickle of the worst, usually from The New Yorker, and that’s when I feel compelled to re-tell the stories of the greatest outrage.

Amnesty International recently referred to Guantanamo and other prisons like it as “the gulag of our times” or words to that effect, and the Bush Administration and conservatives flipped out over that . . . (that outrage!) because really, our suspending the Geneva Conventions and inprisoning a classified number of people throughout the world based on classified intelligence without ever charging them with a crime is nothing at all like the Soviet gulag, where millions of Stalin’s own citizens were worked to their deaths.

And you know, they have a point, or maybe I was daydreaming about something else when I read the chapter in “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” that was similar to this passage, from Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker, May 30, 2005: (more…)

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A while back, I signed a petition for the American Family Association to oppose Ford’s support of gay people. I didn’t do this because I agree with them, but as a subversive act to put obviously bogus names on their petition. The idea being that if anyone ever reviewed their anti-gay petition, they would see that “Jesus McChrist” was definitely opposed to Ford’s gay ways.

Every time I see this e-mail, I get a little chuckle: (more…)

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I recently had a need for two quick temperature conversion algorithms in a Perl script. I asked Google, but did not immediately get a great answer, so here’s my answer:


# Two quick helper functions: CtoF and FtoC
sub CtoF { my $c = shift; $c =~ s/[^\d\.]//g; return (9/5)*($c+32); }
sub FtoC { my $f = shift; $f =~ s/[^\d\.]//g; return (5/9)*($f-32); }


The regex is to untaint the input datum, and could be eliminated if you know that your variable is clean. This code has been incorporated into a systems health and data trend monitoring script for FreeBSD. For the vaguely interested, here’s today’s perldoc: (more…)

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So, I was reading, yet again, of the Army’s difficulty in signing up soldiers to serve in Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places. The article wound down with the reminder that this could be alleviated somewhat, by allowing openly gay people to serve. And I started to concoct this little fantasy where somebody in San Francisco started signing up gay men, who pledge that they would serve in the military if allowed to do so. The thing catches on to other places and before you know it, you’ve got thousands of gay men who have pledged to serve.

But that’s not enough, right? So, they form companies (in the military sense) and start to drill on weekends as if they were the National Guard. Once they’ve gotten good, they organize a march on Washington, and suddenly the Mall is filled with the Pink Triangle Battalion. Squads of big beefy gay dudes are drilling in formation, on the mall, marching around the White House, the Capitol, and over to the Pentagon and back. “The military needs men, and we are ready.” The ranks could be filled out with fully uniformed veterans, who may be either gay, or simply “straight but not narrow minded.”

Or, if they really wanted to make a point, some of them could bivouac (Army camping) in some of the more far flung, shitty desert places of Texas, known for rabid conservatism. You get a company of armed, uniformed soldiers with pink triangles marching through your remote Texas town and first you’re like, “Hey! A military parade!” and then “Pink triangles … these are faggots!?” and then “Are those real guns?” and then “What are they doing here in Texas scaring the shit out of me, they should go to Iraq!”

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As recently observed at work:

(16:19:06) taras: for centuries, my clan has insisted on only naming their children with names that can be typed exclusively with the left hand, b/c we knew that one day we might be working with a left-hand-typing-only system administrator

For those who have never seen me type, let me tell you that the above is an apt description of yours truly.

(16:35:04) sara: dman: note that ‘sara’ can also be typed only w/ your left hand
(16:35:22) ***sara sucks up to the sysadmin

It’s good to be root.

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I bicycled in to work this morning.

Finally!

It is a very nice ride. Flat and scenic along a regional trail that on many maps still claims to the the Southern Pacific Railroad. In fact, when I got to Danville there was a beautiful train station with a Southern Pacific caboose sitting out next to it. Museum of the San Ramon Valley, it said.

The trip, one way, if I were in slightly better shape, would be nearly an hour. I got out the door late so it was more like an hour and thirty minutes.

I am no Joe Gross, but then he’s not dannyman, so I figure all is fair.

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Yayoi and I finished watching _2001_ last night.

“So he was kidnapped by black pillar.”

That’s as good an explanation of that movie as any other I have heard.

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Every holiday
Punctuates the paragraphs
Of life’s narrative

Memorial Day,
Indentation, for summer’s
Long hot sentences.

Pause, and gather breath,
Reverence for those stories
Concluded early.

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NoCal has different summer heat than the Midwest. Here, we have a limp, dry heat. It’s just heat. No drama, just hot. (more…)

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I get spam from Atlas, a maker of model train tracks, rolling stock, and other fun bits. Usually I chuck it in the SPAM folder but today I took a peek:

NOTICE! HO & N FORD TAURUS

We are sorry to inform you that the HO and N Ford Taurus models offered in the April mini-catalogs have been canceled due to insufficient orders to meet production minimums. All back orders will be canceled.

The Taurus has a reputation for being unappealing, but when even the model train enthusiasts turn their noses up, well, I have to chuckle.

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This weekend I started thinking that when the Republicans get around to the brazen cheating required to remove the filibuster, that the Democrats had damn well have somebody on the floor flibustering who, when told that they aren’t recognized to speak, answers back that the chair isn’t recognized to change the cloture rules as they just did, and they will keep speaking, because if you check your history book, you’ll see that Senators have been filibustering for two hundred years, and they aren’t about to stop simply because Bill Frist tells them to. I was hoping that maybe just maybe the Democrats would manage to get an image on television of the Capitol Police escorting a speaking senator off of the floor of the Senate. Something that would look very much like a Coup d’Etat, or at least something where the Democrats, outnumbered and outgunned, were seen to stick passionately to principles of national consensus, while Republicans ruthlessly took advantage of their power to push forward their own agenda.

Or, maybe when it came to a vote, enough Republicans would want to maintain the spirit of the Senate and not vote to start screwing with the filibuster. They’d be seen as reasonable people, willing to put the national interest before their party agenda.

Maybe not. This morning I woke up to the news that John McCain brokered a compromise on the filibuster, in that the Democrats will agree not to filibuster, thus preserving their right to filibuster.

Maybe instead of Red States and Blue States it should be Red States and Green States. The Red States eat red mad cow meat, drive pickup trucks, and believe that it is their way or no way. The Green States sip soy-cream lattes and prance around in their SUVs effeminately crying over how bad it is that the whole place is run by Reds and when the meat-eating Red Staters bark ever viler commands the Green Staters flutter their wrists and collapse on the ground in a cowardly heap and cry about the sad fact that life is hard and we’re just oh so misundertood. If only more people listened to Garrison Keillor . . .

Cowardly Democrats. No wonder I voted for Nader in 2000.

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