Patrick’s Rants

The latest “craze” of celebrity poker (which has caused a huge increase in poker type spam) spawns a round of celebrity poker that includes Gary Coleman and Jack from Jack in the Box. Different shots of Jack in the different commercials are designed to show certain expressions - limited by the fact that Jack’s head is a round ball with a cone nose. The last shot of the commercial shows no eyes or mouth on the Jack head. The poker “color-commentator” says, “now that’s a poker face.” Indeed it is.

A while ago a friend of mine got a job at a new company doing all of their computer administration. In the process he had to help come up with a job title that did not include the term “Admin, Administrator” or anything else that might be “mistaken” for a manager or supervisor of the system users. Reading this post on slashdot.org reminded me of our conversations discussing the possible job titles that didn’t include “admin”. Unfortunately his supervisor did not find “Technology Overlord” to be an appropriate title. Maybe “Master of the Devices” from the link would have worked better.

We’ve all heard the statement “jury of your peers”, that is we believe that we will be judged by a jury of our peers if accused of a crime. I wonder where that notion comes from. It’s not in the US Constitution. The Constitution states:

“…an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed…”

That would appear to be a jury of impartial people. Why then does then idea of a jury of our peers permeate society? A jury of our peers would never convict anyone. Think about it. Some people get off sure, but imagine if OJ had a jury of former NFL playing, B-grade movie actors. What if Michael had a jury of face-lifted, bleached skin fading pop stars? Or if Martha had a jury of stock trading towel peddling home fashion divas? How about Scott Peterson having a jury filled with cheating husbands accused of killing their wives who were arrested with $10,000 cash on the way to the Mexican border?
Jury of your peers indeed. The best you can hope for is an impartial jury. Stop saying “jury of your peers” because it doesn’t exist or we would never convict anyone.

I just upgraded this server by running yum update. The update was over 150mb. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t keeping up with my patches - I did manage to get upgraded to Fedora Core 4. Of course it wasn’t without some minor hitches. First I didn’t have a library which caused things to fail partway through. Nothing like looking at a console from across town and the machine is not upgrading. Fortunately there is a tool named rpm2cpio that allows you to unpack an rpm file. In my case it required the installation of libselinux because the developers chose to link to it (and not include that requirement in the rpm file so you can’t tell you need it until you break it)
Of course, with any upgrade there are “hitches”. They also changed the default directories where libraries are stored for php. That meant that libraries weren’t loaded and all my extra php stuff didn’t work. Easy fix.
The next one (so far) is my login for my email. It’s looking for ssl certificates that I haven’t created…. great. Another fix coming up.
Great. Now I’m running the latest and greatest versions - FC4. So let’s see if there is anything else broken

If you are ever in Flagstaff, driving North on Milton Rd just coming into town off of I-17 just after 7am you might see an interesting character walking up the road, yellow back pack strapped securely to his back, his attention seemingly buried so deeply in a book that he holds open in front of him while he walks that you might wonder if he even sees where he is going. His name is Tim, and he works all night long at a hotel - a night auditor. Sometimes though you might see him at other times during the day. Tim deflty maneuvers his way down the road without ever appearing to look up from his current read. Just the other day he was crossing in front of Barnes and Noble and I thought I saw him glance over as I was cranking my shiny bus around the corner. Of course since I have never seen his expression change - ever - I’m not even sure that he noticed.

January 20, 2009
Hang in there America.

I got a job driving a school bus… not really what I thought I would be doing, but that’s what I’m doing. At any rate I noted that tourists were taking photos of everything. The other day someone was taking a photo of me driving the school bus down the street. What the heck could be so interesting about a school bus anyway?

For two days in a row now I have had to dodge shutter bugs trying to take photos of something from in the roadway. Saturday morning there were people standing in Rt 66 trying to get snapshots of the Historical signs on Rt 66. You see it was Rt 66 Days and there were people from all over the place in town. There is a nearly blind curve on Rt 66 here in Flagstaff when you are travelling East. Just past that blind curve some idiot was standing a couple of feet in the roadway trying to get a snapshot of the sign. Across the street - actually on the sidewalk - was another photo snappist his lens pointed to the same Rt 66 sign.
This morning - Sunday - I had to dodge some guy who apparently decided that while his vehicle was fueling up at the gas pumps that he should step out into the flow of traffic, to the fast lane no less, and take a snapshot of the road facing first North toward the mountains and then South toward the I-17 on ramp.
Further driving on Rt 66 I saw a couple of joggers stop to take a picture of a train. Dunno what’s so interesting about a train - in Flagstaff you just wait a few minutes and there is another one.

Wellbutrin XL is an anti-depressent being advertised as having a “low risk of sexual side effects”. So which is worse? Having sex impairing side effects or being depressed? Personally being impaired would be depressing. That kind of drug wouldn’t cure my depression. So it has a low risk of sexual side effects. Just a tiny bit of research finds an article from 2000 that seems to indicate it’s not just a low risk, but that it has sexual benefits. Now that’s a double anti-depressant!

A friend of mine and his son work for insurance companies as contractor’s doing onsite storm damage claims. He has been assigned to work on Katrina. This is from a recent email:

the good news is i found a room , for one night
Thursday night in Mobil, the
bad news is we started trying to find gas for the
truck every 100 miles or
so on the way down . we arrived in Jackson
Mississippi with about 60 left in
the tank. no gas in town and of course no rooms
to be had , no gas no leave
town for anybody. spoke with some cops guarding
a shell station to keep
some fuel for emergency use. they informed me
that the wal mart about 8
miles up the road had 8000 gallons left and would
open at 6 in the morning.
since we were going to have to spend the night in
the truck we elected to
spend it in line at the wal mart. we were lucky
arrived about 10pm and were
only about 70 cars back. filled up about 7am .
went for breakfast and
spent a couple hours on the phone trying to get
more info. not pleased with
the answers I was getting. could not find a
place to stay in Mobil , no
assurance that I would be able to get more gas ,
and even if I could get it
would only be able to drive back to about
Jackson. could see no gain in
being in Mobil or back in Jackson and living in
the cab of my truck . not
wanting to become part of the problem instead of
part of the solution, I
decided to go north. now in Branson mo.
shopping for a motor home and more
gas capacity.