Patrick’s Rants

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It has taken me over a year to finish reading, George Carlin’s, “When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?“. This is the first book by Carlin that I have purchased and read.

As a boy, I had a collection of Carlin stand up tapes that I listened to and I couldn’t help but hear his voice in my head as I read the words on the page. This was part of the reason that it has taken me so long to finally get all the way through to the end. Reading Carlin is like watching a stand up routine, it jumps from one topic to the next, the disjointedness is a little jarring when it’s not performed - something that is nearly seemless in conversation is noticeably unattached in the written word.
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Over the weekend I decided that it was time to upgrade software on the office firewall. Not a big deal, I upgrade software on the firewall once every two weeks, sometimes every week. This time, the kernel was part of the upgrade and when entered the command to reboot it never came back up. Since I wasn’t at the office while attempting the upgrade, I could no longer log in. I was forced to drive to the office, plug in a monitor and a keyboard (this thing normally just runs) and see what was what. As it turns out, the machine didn’t like the new kernel for some reason and it was hung on the login screen.

No problem, I’ll just whip out my Knoppix CD and fix it. Dang! This machine doesn’t have an option to boot from CD. Ok, Tom’s Root Boot disk to the rescue! That’s when I learned that Tom’s doesn’t support Resiserfs and I couldn’t get the hard drive mounted so that it could be fixed. I tried various combinations, tried following the error messages on the screen to get into the system to no avail. I was thouroughly frustrated. (I never did get a boot disk to work properly with this machine)

I grabbed the firewall box and box that I had sitting there that was going to be the Asterix PBX server. I lugged both of those home and began (re)installing Slackware on the soon-to-be new firewall machine. I was reinstalling so that I could have a “regular” filesystem, one that can be read by Tom’s or any other really tiny floppy based recovery disk the next time I have a problem like this. So install the OS, copy some configuration files from the other hard drive (that I could now read from the new machine) and get ready to move the network cards to the new machine - so that I could boot from the CD Rom drive - and, oh shit! The newer machine only has PCI slots, the older machine only has ISA slots. Those NICs aren’t gonna move. So I removed the hard drive from the new machine to the old machine. Oh look, it boots up.

It’s a good thing I didn’t do what I wanted to do to that poor old box. I was going to “boot it” across the alley, probably a few times. And when I was done with that I was going to throw it into the dumpster from as far away as I could - and if I missed, I was going to try again. I know what you’re thinking, that poor hunk of encased-steel (yeah, it’s that old) IBM never did anything to you, and what about environmentally friendly disposal of the components? I realize that machine didn’t cause my problems, I did. But it’s just not as satisfying to take that old box over to the recycle center. Really.

According to RichardDawkins.net - The Official Richard Dawkins Website, a teacher in New Jersey told his class that they belonged in hell for not believing in Jesus. A young man recorded these lunatic rantings and he and his attorney father approached the school to have the teacher apologize for teaching unprovable non-science.

The teacher lied in a meeting with the school principal, the student and his father, stating that his remarks were taken out of context which is when the existance of the recordings was revealed. So far, it does not seem that this teacher is backing down from his statements, the school is slow to respond and the next step is the school board. This really should skip to the courts, but the boy’s father is an attorney so he’s taking it down the path that he believes is right.

I wrote about Sam Harris’, Letter to a Christian Nation
before I read his earlier book, “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.“ Harris examines what he calls “faith-based religion” with a critical eye. And no religion is exempt. Muslim, Christian, Judaism all are reviewed with but a single requirement, show me the proof. All religions require a belief in the unproven - absolute faith in the books their religions are based upon without demanding proof. An example Harris uses is one where a man hears that his wife is having an affair. A reasonable man would search for proof of the allegation. The same man does not question a single word of the bible. Why is it reasonable and rational to question if one’s wife is having an affair, to look for evidence and proof while at the same time believing that Moses held up a stick and the entire Red Sea made way for him? These are the kinds of questions Harris asks.

Simply stated, Harris contends that we would all be better off if we slough off the dogma of religion and do right by others just to do right by others, not to be praised in an uproved afterlife. Such glory -seeking merely reeks of man made greed, not religous altruism.

A review of a book as in depth as Harris’ would take nearly as many pages as the book itself. Instead, I can only recommend you read this book with an open mind. Harris dedicates nearly a quarter of “Faith” to supporting documentation and research.

Ok, so I’m not going to be the first to review “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life & Times” since it was published back in 1994, but give me a break, I only just now got around to reading it all. James Flinn Garner redoes the classics, making them politically correct, concise and funny. This book was actually a gift from my mom a few years ago who sent it to me when I mentioned that I hadn’t read much “for fun” in a while. At only 79 pages it can be read in an afternoon or pick it up to read the two to three page tales when you have a minute before bed.

Bank Of America has a program that lets you keep your own money. If you use a debit card and have a savings account with them, they will round your debit card purchases up to the next dollar and put the “change” in your savings account. This amounts to an electronic change jar. Sure you might earn a little interest - probably very little, have you taken a look at what savings accounts are paying lately? - but it’s your money. It’s not like you are making money, although there is a slight incentive. For the first three months they will match your change jar. And after that all you have to do is leave the money in the account and they will add a whopping 5%.

I suppose that for people who hate to balance their check book not having to keep track of the $.05 might make life easier - except that they have to track it in the savings account now.

This just blows me away, I had to add a new catagory for this one. Stupid Ideas.

I’m supposed to help my mom move in December. I have asked for the time off of work, the plane tickets are booked, and the moving truck is reserved. So, I’m going to help mom move closer to me. Not close enough for the “pop in” but closer than she is right now that’s for sure. I see holidays as getting interesting. Since she’s only going to be down the road in Sedona I’m guessing that she’s going to want to see us more than once every three years or so. Add to that my mother in law lives in Phoenix close enough that she expects to see us several times a year. And let’s not forget that two of the kids have visitation with their dad’s side of the family. Planning is going to get really interesting.

Now about that trip that mom and I are taking. I had been mentally chewing whether I wanted to spend five or six days in the cab of a moving truck with my mom. I love my mom. We get along pretty well, but a whole week with someone can change your relationship in dramatic ways. I was trying to figure out how to bring this up to her when she emailed me a simple question, “Are you sure you want to drive across country with me in the truck?” My answer was a single word, “no”. I didn’t hear from mom for a couple of days after that, unusual only in that the emails and phone calls have gotten far more frequent in the last few weeks. She did give me an out. “I’m not feeling comfortable about towing the car all that way.” (I’ve done it twice - no big deal). The other reason was that we might not be on the same schedule for fuel, rest or food stops. So I don’t have to spend a week in the cab of a truck with mom wondering when the cat’s going to need to take a break (didn’t I mention that her cat was coming too?)

Still it should be fun.

One of the last things that “Terry” said to me was, “I hope I answered all your questions to your satisfaction.”

To which I responded, “No, you didn’t.” She was a little taken aback by my answer, but the fact of the matter is I wasn’t satisfied with the answers that I was given and Qwest, represented by Terry, was unable to give me the answers I wanted; I was pretty sure that they couldn’t before I called them. They sent me a letter stating that I could upgrade my DSL from 256Kbs to 1.5Mbs for the same price - with a qualifying “phone package”.

I have the basic DSL service with Qwest that costs $15.00/mo and have to use Qwest.net as my ISP for another $9.99/mo. For only $2.00/mo I could change my ISP to MSN and upgrade my speed. I would probably also have to buy a newer DSL modem and have to set the new one up (not that it’s that hard). So for $26.99/mo I could send my money to Bill Gates. No thanks. I run my own web server, email server and don’t read MSN “news” if I can at all help it, I didn’t need to switch, especially when Qwest can (presumably) flip a switch and up my speed - maybe they would have to change out the other end of my wire, the card in the Central Office, but it can be done without sending money to MSN, or AOL or any other ISP. And it could be done with very minimal downtime. With MSN who knows how long it would end up being down? Of course I know that they could do all of this because it I wanted to pay $31.99/mo it would be the way I want it. Unfortunately, MSN is probably subsidizing this in some fashion sending a kick-back to Qwest to the tune of around $5.00/mo, perhaps more.

So, when Qwest calls(or emails) me for the survey, I will certainly tell them that Terry, although she tried*, was no help whatsoever. Of course that is Qwest’s fault not Terry’s.

* - I assume that all of the time I spent on hold really was so she could talk to the techs about this.

My daughter walks into the classroom at day care after having just been on the playground. She’s holding her hand over her pocket, gently cupping it. She tells her teacher that he has her babies in there. Thinking that there might be one of those little dolls that these kids have these days the teacher asks to have a look. My daughter pulls her hand back to reveal the wiggle of red worms to her teacher - who promptly asks her to leave those babies outside.