Patrick’s Rants

Will Renzi get his due now?
Arizona GOP lawmaker indicted – CNN.com

#2 is at it again.

She received an email and then began telling me that the system was going to be down for maintenance. Before I took a look at the email, I understood that the “system” was going to be down for maintenance at 6 PM, which I thought was inconsiderate since I’m there until 7 PM and use the network fairly heavily (everything is in client-server architecture). She even made a big show of shutting her computer completely off at 5 PM so as to not mess up the maintenance being done.

The email sent out the users advised that the District Exchange server, hosted by NAU, was going to be offline for maintenance from 6 PM through midnight last night. We have been “forced” off of the Outlook clients for all of our users throughout the District and have to connect using WBA – the web interface. So, since I don’t generally connect to District email (I refused an email account) and even if I did the machines undergoing maintenance are not even contained within the District I left my computer running. I really hope I didn’t mess up the upgrade or whatever.

Ask Slashdot:

How to Convince Non-IT Friends that Privacy Matters?

The answer is you can’t:

Identity Theft Is Real

But I keep tilting at windmills none-the-less.

I just stumbled across a couple of sites that I hope will be able to get things really moving for me on my Sansa e250. I bought a MicroSD card and haven’t figured out how to put music on it yet, but it looks like the Rockbox project has a nice replacement for the firmware and there’s a nice “fluffy” article on linux.wordpress.com describing how to use the e200 on Linux. I say “fluffy” only because he didn’t point to the firmware zip files (which I would love to see. I bricked the last one I tried to update.)

I have been searching around for a free solution to a minor problem. The problem is snow days or snow delays. The school district posts snow day schedules online but there are lots of people who don’t bother to check the web site, or listen to the radio or watch TV including some of our own employees. A “simple” solution would be a system that first would alert our drivers that the schedule has been changed through text messaging. That way up to 80 phone calls could be averted in favor of 80 text messages. Advancing such a system to begin alerting parents would save hundreds if not thousands of phone calls answered,

“Transportation, school’s canceled”

whereby there is usually one of two responses. The first,

“Is it a two hour delay?”

“No. School’s canceled.”

“School’s canceled?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. OK.”

<click>
Or, just <click>
I envision a system that allows people to register their phone number with multiple levels, Transportation employees who tend to be up earlier and might need different kinds of alerts, other district employees and parents. I’ve found some programs that would allow some of this and others might be able to be bent to work, but nothing “out of the box” so to speak especially when you consider that I’m also thinking that a web based system would be best – and our web server is a Mandriva box so it has to be a *nix based solution… that kills the $29.95 solution from Notepage which looks like it covers most everything except, of course, the the fact that it runs on Windows . And digging a little more I notice that at least one solution has a per-pager licensing structure.
I suppose a package that will send a text to the phone through an email interface could work, but the mailing list solutions that I’m familiar with (Mailman) require some sort of two way authentication that may or may not work so well when we’re talking about phones and text messages.

If anyone has experience with a Linux based solution that isn’t too cumbersome, I’m interested in hearing about it.

Dr Rowan Williams says that the UK should adopt some aspects of Muslim law causing a fair amount of fallout. How can it not? To suggest that the same rules that jailed a woman over a teddy bear with some people calling for her death should be adopted as a parallel set of courts and that the belief in invisible beings should rule rational people is irrational. Remember, this law demands that unbelievers be killed. If you want to know where to draw the line, it’s before you allow this to creep in. I mean, you might even get arrested for being in Starbucks with men.

Sharia, according to the BBC.

I have recently spent some time reading an internet friend’s blog and come to the conclusion that life is not about the road not traveled but about the road actually traveled. We all make decisions about our lives on a day to day basis, some decisions are minor while others may have long lasting, but unforeseeable effects on us and those around us. It is every step forward that we make in this life, every minor decision that makes us who we are. It can be as simple as leaving a couple of minutes early for work one day and not being in a car accident or as profound as finding the next great mathematical theory. The tiny steps and missteps make us who we are.

The time you fell off your bicycle at four years old trying to learn how to balance, the time you ate a worm or a mud pie or even huddling with your friends in front of the hot window air conditioner exhaust shivering until the warm air dried you enough to throw off that towel and jump back into the chilly wading pool. These may just seem like fond memories of a long ago past, but they are more than that – they are part of the road map that makes you who you are.

I’m kidding of course, it’s not Microsoft that did this, they just made the “speculated tools” in the (so far) biggest bank meltdown in Europe.
How to lose $7.2bn with just a few Basic skills | The Register