I was on the phone with Crystal getting info for her tax returns, and there's a crash in the background. Moments later, we hear a plaintive request from Logan:
Will you please not ground me for this?
His dad had promised to take him fishing. Logan was so excited, he pulled over a stepstool and pulled a fishing rod off of a shelf, but it fell and broke. Crystal wisely told him that his dad would decide about punishment.
Dutch pink and Italian blue
he is waiting there for you
my will has disappeared
now my confusion's oh so clear
By Pamela Hess
UPI Pentagon Ccorrespondent
Published 3/31/2004 12:37 PM
WASHINGTON, March 31 (UPI) -- The White House was worried about the damaging testimony of a former counter-terrorism chief to a commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks last week but was trying to let the issue die on its own, according to Pentagon briefing notes found at a Washington coffee shop.
"Stay inside the lines. We don't need to puff this (up). We need (to) be careful as hell about it," the handwritten notes say. "This thing will go away soon and what will keep it alive will be one of us going over the line."
By David McGuire
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, March 29, 2004; 8:06 PM
Internet music piracy has no negative effect on legitimate music sales, according to a study released today by two university researchers that contradicts the music industry's assertion that the illegal downloading of music online is taking a big bite out of its bottom line.
Analysis
By Mark Orchard
BBC, Washington
President George W Bush has made a habit and a trademark out of standing on principle.
He did so over the war in Iraq and over his tax cuts and he tried, ever so hard, to do the same over whether his National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, should testify in public before the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks.
On Tuesday, he lost the battle.
The White House realised that in this case the politics - and the political damage it was suffering - trumped its principles.
Carole called today - I guess she'd been out of town for a few days, and was returning some calls I made on Friday.
For no obvious reason, I've been feeling low since I talked to her. It's probably a combination of her, the heat, today's workload, and riding my motorcycle for the first time in a month or so, which can be disconcerting and enjoyable at the same time.
Chinese proverb: With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,62790,00.html
In January 2003, voting activist Bev Harris was holed up in the basement of her three-story house in Renton, Washington, searching the Internet for an electronic voting machine manual, when she made a startling discovery.
Clicking on a link for a file transfer protocol site belonging to voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems, Harris found about 40,000 unprotected computer files. They included source code for Diebold's AccuVote touch-screen voting machine, program files for its Global Election Management System tabulation software, a Texas voter-registration list with voters' names and addresses, and what appeared to be live vote data from 57 precincts in a 2002 California primary election.
MoveOn's ad explaining why Congress should censure President Bush.
I couldn't get my normal 6:30am appointment - 9:30 was all they had. After a quick hour of face time at the office, I got to the Red Cross a couple of minutes late.
The cute nurse from last time checked me in - gave me the best finger poke I've ever had. (Doesn't that sound lurid?) The finger poke is usually the worst part of donating. My BP was still too high at 142/90, but the combination of exercising, walking, and dumping the Hyzaar has me feeling a lot better overall. I should talk it over with the doctor.
I watched the first half of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The guy had just stolen the slave's heart when I was through. A lot of people think this is the weakest of the three, and the reason I hear most is that the Willie (Kate Capshaw) character isn't the strong-willed heroine of the other two films. There may be something to that, but I've always thought it was deserving of its place in the series.
Temple of Doom is also famous as the instigator of the PG-13 rating. Before its release in 1984, ratings jumped straight from PG to R (maybe M at that time). The heart removal scenes caused such a fuss that the MPAA instituted the PG-13 rating.
I recreated the MTAmazon/MTMacro setup I had in place before losing my server last week. This gives my Bookshelf entries a nice, consistent look, with a small image of the book cover and the book title (both linked to the appropriate Amazon page), along with the author's name(s).
And yes, I have a backup.
I have about 16 domain accounts right now. Half of them have their nameservers set to ns7.inetter.net and ns8.inetter.net; the other half use ns1.bcisys.com and ns2.bcisys.com.
I had to update the IP for ns1.bcisys.com and ns2.bcisys.com after moving to the new server. Unfortunately, the e-mail I got from Inetter had the wrong info. I finally figured it out on Friday, got the right info from Inetter, and updated my domain record accordingly. As of this morning, the domains that use ns1.bcisys.com and ns2.bcisys.com were resolving normally.
Alas, the domains set to ns7/ns8 would resolve only intermittently. I spent a lot of time with Jason on the support chat, trying to figure it out. He found that restarting bind would solve the problem. We both wondered why the bind problem didn't affect the private label nameserver, since both ns1.bcisys.com and ns7.inetter.net point to the same server.
Jason said he's going to ask the system admins to check things out in the morning. We'll see.
This is a standard late Grisham outing about the rural south, similar to The Summons - pleasant, a page-turner, but nothing special.
Well, I'm back - finally.
Back at the beginning of March, I decided it finally made sense to become a web host provider. I signed up for a reseller account with inetter.net, which gave me pretty much everything I was looking for: WHM access for setting up new accounts; each client account has direct cPanel access; a load of disk and bandwidth to work with, etc.
I started a gradual move of all the sites I handle onto the new host. It turns out there's quite a few: two for me, two for Carole, one for each of the kids, four for various AYSO programs. I consolidated all the domain registrations on godaddy.com, and started by moving bcisys.com to the new host. That went pretty well, so over a couple of weeks I got everything shuffled over.
I was pretty happy with Inetter - help desk requests got processed promptly, and they have a live on-line support chat system that works pretty well. Based on my good experiences, I began shutting down the accounts on the old providers.
On Monday, none of the sites were available. Inetter told me they were having problems, so I let it go for a while. The problems persisted on Tuesday, when I got some sobering news from Inetter: the server that housed all my sites had been taken offline by their dedicated service provider because spammers had infiltrated the server. On top of that, they wiped the server before any backups could be made.
Ouch. I was totally screwed. I had backups of the individual sites, but they were stored on the bcisys.com account, which was also gone. The AYSO RvR site that I had invested 40 hours in was gone for good.
I was able to reclaim the data for most of the sites from the old ISP's. This account was restored after an extraordinary effort from my old provider, Blogomania, who found an old monthly backup of the site and the database and graciously provided it to me. I am very, very grateful to them for the help.
So, here's where I stand: a) the AYSO RvR site is gone - it was new and had only existed on the lost server, and there were no backups anywhere; b) goption is back to its state as of March 3rd. A lot of entries are gone, and the redesign of the Bookshelf category using MTAmazon was lost; c) most of the other sites are mostly static, and I was able to recover them from backups made on the old ISP's sites.
All in all - it could have been worse. Tuesday was not fun - I wigged out, and was barely able to function for a while. On top of the normal stress of the day job and a less-than-ideal report card for Justin, I was over the edge. I told one of the support guys from Inetter that it was days like these that made me glad I stopped drinking 26 years ago.
So, for now I'm staying with Inetter. They extended some goodies to help ease the blow, but it still sucks, big time.
Why he's right about Bush's negligence on terrorism.
By Fred Kaplan
Clarke: a credible critic
I have no doubt that Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council official who has launched a broadside against President Bush's counterterrorism policies, is telling the truth about every single charge. There are three reasons for this confidence.
First, his basic accusations are consistent with tales told by other officials, including some who had no significant dealings with Clarke.
Second, the White House's attempts at rebuttal have been extremely weak and contradictory. If Clarke were wrong, one would expect the comebacks—especially from Bush's aides, who excel at the counterstrike—to be stronger and more substantive.
Third, I went to graduate school with Clarke in the late 1970s, at MIT's political science department, and called him as an occasional source in the mid-'80s when he was in the State Department and I was a newspaper reporter. There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled (and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around all obstacles to make sure his views got through.
Today was an Uncle Brian day. But let's start with yesterday.
My sister's best friend from high school lives in Santa Clara, has 4 year old twin boys, is seven months pregnant (and not an easy pregnancy, at that, I'm told), and is moving from a condo to a house in San Jose. (And I thought my life was tough.) Carol, being the good person she is, arranged to fly up to spend some time with her, to help pack, take care of the twins, and generally help out. I volunteered to drive her to Burbank for her 7:40 flight to San Jose.
I'd been looking at PDA's to help with the day-to-day organizing, and saw a Fry's ad for a Sony TJ35 on sale at a very good price. Color screen, extra software goodies, and most importantly an MP3 player built in. After dropping Carol off, I headed down the street to the Fry's in Burbank to check it out.
I looked good - really good. The model is a couple years old, and earlier versions had some problems with the backlight failing, but for the money it seemed like a great deal. (Jason has appropriated my MPIO MP3 player, for what it's worth.) I took the plunge. I was on my own for dinner, but the Bob's Big Boy in Burbank was overflowing; I wound up having a turkey dinner at a Marie Calendar's in Toluca Lake.
Saturday morning was warm. Karen and Cary had a funeral to attend, and couldn't find anyone near them to take John to his little league baseball game. I'd been stressed out over the last few weekends working on my bedroom, and a baseball game sounded perfect.
Cary wound up dropping John off at the field for warm-ups, so I picked up Sam and Jake a little after 11:00am. Claremont has a really nice baseball complex, next to the MetroLink tracks off of College Avenue. Three big diamonds, and a perfect little tee ball field.
John walked his first time up. After a pop-up to short, he drew a throw as he went back to tag up, and took second on an error. He reached third on a couple of walks, and came home on a double to the wall in right center.
In his second at-bat, he ran the count to 3-2 (including a nice cut that went foul) before striking out swinging. He walked again in the top of the sixth, and scored on a double.
The day was unseasonably warm, perfect snow cone weather. I had a lime-only, but Jake was bolder, and had a lime/cherry mix. Sam and Jake shared a red Gatorade, and got silly with a cup of ice.
The team mom asked all the parents during the game if we could get ice cream after the game, and all but one or two said yes, but the coach called it off at the last minute. We went back to the Bowser home and played around. I left Sam in charge and headed out around 3:00pm.
I needed a memory stick for my PDA, and Fry's in Industry was mostly on the way home. The 256mb one I wanted was out of stock, so I settled for a 128mb stick with a rebate (which I may actually receive before Christmas, if I'm lucky).
Sheehan's Temple City High School soccer banquet was scheduled for 6:00 at the LOP Community Center. Carol had asked me to attend while she was up north. I sat with the Pedrotti's, and had a nice chat with Kim. I reminded Sheehan's coach, Darrel Topalian, that he was Jason's JV soccer coach; we decided that must have been in 1995. I took a lot of photos, but I'm still having problems getting them off of the SM card. They're viewable on the camera itself, but the reader doesn't recognize the card as valid. I haven't given up hope just yet.
I donated platelets on March 12th, but the full report got lost in the server crash.
