The Desert of the Real

The array that failed on me on Saturday finished rebuilding. Unfortunately, it failed to recover. The array data is completely corrupted, and we get to start over from scratch.
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Ugh. I hate working on weekends. Yet here I am with a day full of it. In the midst of running around trying to get the final work on the van completed, I got a call. As it turns out, one of our RAID arrays at work managed to get itself into an inconsistant state. So here I am, on the other side of Dallas from my home, waiting on the thing to finish rebuilding.

And after this, I get to go do some consulting. At least that part I do by choice though. Yet on top of this blowing my whole day it isn’t much comfort.

When I made that post yesterday I only made it here (where likely no-one will ever read it) because buzz doesn’t have comments enabled on his blog. It has been bothering me that despite my annoyance that I couldn’t respond in a meaningful way to his comments that I myself had not enabled them on my blog. Thus denying any readers who might’ve had the misfortune of being drawn into reading this thing a chance to reply, and potentially disagree with, my opinions.

My original reasons for not allowing comments are quite possibly the same as buzz’s reasons. It invites trouble. Too many people just get some weird thrill from spamming blog comments. I don’t want the overhead of having to clean them out, when the signal to noise ratio would likely be abysmal. However, because of what happened I have gone ahead and enabled comments anyway. If it proves to be a headache I might disable them again though, so don’t be surprised if that happens.

Update: Ok…I thought I had enabled them. And in fact I have according to the settings, but it is still not allowing comments. I’ll have to dig into this a little. I’m still running an alpha release so it could be a code issue. I’ll update again once I have it fixed.

Update Part 2: I figured it out. There’s a seperate option in each submission to allow comments, so those posts which were already made didn’t have it selected. I enabled them on the post in response to buzz, but the rest I’m just going to leave. I doubt anyone will be heartbroken about that. ;-)

Buzz (from #prosapologian) mentioned on his blog a disappointment in the media for their reporting on those who have given their lives in service to this country. He casts what I’m sure he feels are dispersions (since he called them a liberal) in accusing them of ‘hiding behind’ the first amendment and FOI act. He asks if we remember vietnam, and suggests that it was photos just such as these that turned the public against the war.

I don’t disgree with the last part. I’m sure it did. I do disagree with his assessement that that was a bad thing. Look, we all realize that casualties are going to happen in war. The problem with vietnam is that the number of our best and brightest that we were losing far outweighed the perceived benefits of continuing the fight. Particularly given the other problems surrounding that war.

If we, as a country, don’t think the war is worth the cost, then we shouldn’t be fighting it. Those boys aren’t over there fighting for bush, they’re fighting for us. This isn’t Bush’s private war, and he has no right to try to hide the cost from us, in dollars or lives.

As for the rest, I think the whole ‘we’re protecting the families’ line is a cock-n-bull story. It’s an attempt to make us all feel guilty for caring about the people who are dying over there. Those pictures were not in poor taste. They were not pictures of bodies. They were pictures of coffins, carrying the remains of our soldiers, fallen in battle. Draped with the flag and treated with the honor and respect due them. I’m sorry, when making decisions, we must always count the cost. ALWAYS. And just hearing numbers on the national news at night doesn’t cut it. People are numb to it, it doesn’t bring it home like seeing the wall of tears does, or arlington national cemetary, or indeed, the coffins of our fallen brothers.

I believe the families have a right to grieve in peace if they so choose, when performing their funerals and burial ceremonies. Yet for the time the government is involved, the media has a right, no, the responsibility to hold our government accountable. Would that they do it more often! You call it a liberal conspiracy to erode support for the war. I call it a conspiracy on the part of our government to hide the true cost of the war from us. Was it going on before? Yes. Heaven knows Clinton couldn’t afford for us to know there were people DYING in his absolutely pointless engagements. Does that make it ok? Absolutely not.

No. If you want my support for the war, then your reasons for declaring it, and your supporting arguments for why we need it, must outweigh the loss of life. I don’t think buzz in any way doesn’t care about our soldiers, so don’t think that’s what I’m trying to say. It’s quite apparent that quite the opposite is true, and he wants to do the right thing by them and by their families. We just disagree on how we go about it.

To my mind, these men have freely put their lives in our hands. They have voluntarily entered the service of this country, to protect our way of life, and in some cases to provide relief and help to others who do not share it. Fully prepared to give their life for this country if need be. The only thing they ask of us, is our support. Support does NOT mean blindly praising the government for whatever danger they choose to place our men in. When they are being put in harm’s way they depend on us to keep our government in line, to make sure that if they are to give their lives, that it is for something of value!

Yikes. This one is really bad. Been in the shop a week now. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it today. It’s costing me a small fortune. :-(

On the good news front, I finished my son’s new loftbed. Not bad considering I’m still a novice to carpentry and woodworking. It’s real solid, (a credit to the plans I followed, and not my skills I’m sure) and is sturdy enough for me to clamber around on. He loves it, which of course makes it worth the effort on its own. If any of you have need of a good loftbed or bunkbeds I heartily recommend oploftbed.com. They have a great product. The bolts kit they sell is also worth getting. Good quality bolts, and it comes with extras. One note, when doing the project pay close attention. In once place on the tall bed they listed the measurement from the wrong side of the board, which threw off the alignment and caused my bed to be wider at one end than the other. Make sure you’re on the lookout for that.

Watched this movie last night. It was really pretty good. They did a great job of keeping most of the hot-button issues out of the movie, to make it easier for everyone to enjoy and appreciate. The exception, of course, being gun control. (There’s a short scene in there where the primary antagonist takes a rather weak line of argumentation in a debate taken from the pro-gun playbook. “enforce the laws already on the books” etc. It was setup specifically so it could be torn apart. But what do you expect from hollywood?)

Anyway, that’s beside the point. The movie overall was still good in my opinion. The movie did a great job of reminding the viewer that politicians do not have any special skills or inherent qualities that make them qualified for the job. They are not special, they are not wiser than us, and they should not be revered as if they are. Nor should we be afraid to call them on it when they start shoveling it in so deep we need hip-waders.

I would love to say here that we should heed the implied message that if we want to change things, we can. That any of us could run and make things better. However, the sad reality is that we can’t really. While there’s no laws against third parties, or independant candidates, the deck is stacked very strongly against them. Making a run for office is a very serious and costly undertaking. Not just in funds, but in other, more important areas of your life as well. Last, but not least, lets be honest. What are the chances of the democratic or republican parties coming around to an average joe and really endorsing him for public office? I’d say you’ve got a better chance of getting hit by lightning. On a clear day.

Sheesh. More than two weeks without an entry. In my defense, I’ve been busy, but that’s not much of a defense, since if things are hopping in theory I should have something to write about. However, since I’m trying not to turn this into nothing but a play by play of my life, it really doesn’t work out that way.

On the (somewhat?) interesting front, I’ve nearly completed my oldest son’s new loft-bed. It’s been quite a project. The downside of working with wood, as opposed to writing code is that when you learn something new, or a better way of doing something, you can’t just scrap all the bad parts and start over. It’s been a fun project overall though, and the resulting bed is really solid. I was up bouncing around on it earlier trying to make sure it was stable.

Best of all though, my youngest son and I worked on it a lot together. Or rather, I worked, and he pretended to do all the things I was doing. Though he did help me get a lot of the bolts started. He’s got a very quick mind, and learns new terms and concepts quickly, so watching the learning process in him is always fun. Of course, he also thinks he knows everything already, it can be a challenge. He loves to tell my wife how to cook. (Nooo! Not like that! Argh!) Considering he’s only 3, he’s a fast study. Most kids don’t know everything till they’re in their teens. ;-)