The USS Clueless is having connectivity problems.
The usual first reaction anytime this kind of thing happens is to replace the modem. Nor is that necessarily the wrong thing to do. The last time I had networking problems, last November, it turned out to be the modem. However, in that case it was a gradual degradation of service over a period of weeks. Nonetheless, the guy will hook into the wire outside and test the RF signal quality, and then he'll probably come in here and do the same, and then he'll probably replace the modem.
Back when it, er, still existed, Digital Equipment Corp. used a highly modular circuit-board design for their popular VAX machines. While this no doubt reduced maintenance costs, it led to a rather simplified view of hardware diagnosis and repair:
Swap out a board. See if the machine works. If not, swap out another board. Repeat as necessary.
Presumably, the boards were taken back to the mothership and diagnosed in more detail, and those components that were still serviceable went into the DEC Field Service Organ Bank. Still, it led to some interesting humor:
Q: How can you tell when a DEC field service tech has a flat tire?
A: He's changing all the tires one-by-one until the car works again.Q: How can you tell when a DEC field service tech has run out of gas?
A: He's changing all the tires one-by-one until the car works again.
For more on DEC field service, see the sad story of Mabel the swimming monkey. And remember to always mount a scratch monkey.
With Ahnold's entry into the California governor's race, the Democrats are making the same mistake that they made with Bush:
HE HAS NO POLITICAL EXPERIENCE. NO JOB SKILLS WHATSOEVER. HIS ABILITY TO SPEAK IS MARGINAL.PEOPLE! DO WE REALLY NEED TO ELECT ANOTHER REPUBLICAN MORON?
Yes, Schwarzenegger is a novice as a politician, or at least as a professional politician. But how shallow do you have to be to not see that he's a pretty smart operator? (Last Action Hero notwithstanding...) Do they really believe that anyone with a foreign accent is an idiot? (And will the Hispanic voters be pleased to hear that interpretation?)
The Democrats are in a particularly weak position: they can't seriously support Davis -- and the site linked above doesn't even try -- so they have to ask the electorate to trust them this time, even though they obviously screwed up last time.
WE BELIEVE THAT GRAY DAVIS IS PROBABLY THE WORST GOVERNOR CALIFORNIA HAS EVER HAD TO ENDURE. BUT WE ALSO BELIEVE THAT THE RECALL IS A SICK PERVERSION OF GOVERNMENT ... GREY DAVIS DESERVES A SPANKING, NOT A RECALL.
Now there's a sentiment that will motivate people to go out and pull the lever for Grey: yeah, he sucks, but he doesn't suck that badly...
(BTW, sorry about the SHOUTING in the quoted sections above, but it's in the original. And that's kind of the problem, isn't it? Like spoiled five-year-olds, they seem to think that everyone will come around and do what they want if they just state their desires LOUDLY ENOUGH.)
UPDATE: "Pundit" at WhatsAPundit.com had the good sense to run a whois on the domain, and found a bogus name, address, and phone number. (Although (555) 555-5555 is kind of appropriate, at least if you've seen the aforementioned Last Action Hero.) Why the anonymity?
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Marcus Cole: |
Not bad. Babylon 5 was a cool show (barring Season 5), and he was one of the coolest characters. And I agree with him about Susan Ivanova.
(Marcus: "When I joined the Rangers, they told me I had a lot of repressed anger." Lennier: "And now?" Marcus: "I'm not repressed anymore.")
We are Kevin of Blog. We are everywhere. Resistance in futile; you will be assimilated.
Good luck and quick thinking by Chris Wright: a plotline in his Help Desk comic happened to mesh with a breaking news story; what's a web cartoonist to do?
Take advantage of the situation, of course.
Ain't it grand? The serendipity of the real world and the comic strip plot is cool, but what's cooler still is that the medium allowed Chris to seize the moment in a way that wouldn't be possible in print, because of lead time. Even newspaper editorial cartoons have a day or two of lag, but Help Desk was johnny-on-the-spot within less that 24 hours of the lights going out.
And so are Cox and Forkum.
Rapid-response satire: the web's killer app.
The Wall Street Journal's John Fund writes on Arnold Schwarzenegger's difficulties in securing endorsements from fellow Republicans. It's due entirely to his refusal to take a position on any issues important to conservative -- except on those issues where he is known to disagree with social conservatives (as do I).
I remarked below that the Democrats -- some of them at least -- appeared to be making the same mistake that they made with Bush, underestimating his intelligence because he talks funny. One could infer from that that I supported Arnold. But inasmuch as it's any of my business as a Texan, I haven't really decided yet. I like the fact that he's entered the race just for the sake of seeing some good political theater; and as the BlogFather points out, simply shaking things up once in a while is a good thing in itself. No doubt he would be a better governor than Grey Davis, or Davis's interchangeable replacement part, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante; but fainter praise than that I cannot imagine.
I understand Arnold's position in this. He's at the head of the pack on the basis on name recognition and public affection alone. Start attaching policy positions to him -- any policy positions, conservative, liberal or otherwise -- and he alienates people who disagree, and creates an avenue of attack for his opponents. Absent policy, there's little to attack: his lack of government experience might be a hindrance in other circumstances, but it's an asset in a throw-the-bums-out election like this; and Californian voters who admired Bill Clinton's mojo will hardly be turned off by stories of womanizing. All that's left is the Kurt Waldheim thing, and that's pretty weak stuff.
Arnold's a Republican in a state where, to put it mildly, Republicanism isn't cool -- to say nothing of how his wife's family must feel about it. He must belong to the party for a pretty compelling reason. But he's pro-gay, pro-choice, and at least moderately anti-gun. So what is it that draws him to the GOP, if it's not social conservatism or gun rights?
Should the voters have to wait until after election day to find out?
(By the way, I tried researching Arnold's position on gun policy earlier, but Google let me down: lots of hits, but no answers. If anyone can point me to a reference on his previous statements on gun ownership, I'd be grateful.)
When I submitted this article to The Gender Genie, it told me I was a girl. Or at least that I write like one.
But then, so do Glenn Reynolds and Steven Den Beste.
The Sarge, though, is all man.
I'm trying something a little different. The monthly archives are now sorted chronologically in ascending order, rather than descending order; the earliest item appears at the top, not the latest item.
It's a small thing, but it seems more sensible. Whenever I hit someone's blog to try to catch up on what they've been writing, I prefer to do it chronologically, so I can see stories unfolding the same way the writer did. But that means reading from the top down within an item, but from the bottom up from one item to the next. Start at the top of an entry, scroll down as I read to the bottom, then farther back up tot he top of the next story, scroll down as I read to the bottom of that story, etc. It's a pain in the tuchus.
Not a big deal, since my archives are kind of scanty, but I'm hoping to start a trend. It's not that difficult to do, either. If you'r eusing Movable Type, edit the Date-Based Archive template, look for the <MTEntries> tag, and change it to <MTEntries sort_order="ascend">.
Let me know what you think. And if anyone has directions on how to do it with other blog software, let me know and I'll add it to this post.
Deskmerc makes an excellent point: amid the Baathist/Islamist campaign of sabotage and bombing in Iraq, we must ask a simple, obvious question: what the heck happened to the human shields, now that they're really needed?
He, ah, says it a little more colorfully than I do.