Patrick’s Rants

It’s been four days since I decided to bring my Slackware firewall box completely up to date. It was running a 2.4.x Linux kernel and I really wanted to get it running a current 2.6.x kernel. All of my other Slack boxes around here have the 2.6.x kernel and are working decently (not perfectly, one of the laptops has some funkiness with X and one of the kid’s computers isn’t running X at all right now – I kind of chalked that up to X) Installing and running Slackware is not beyond me, I’ve done it numerous times. This time all I found was failure.
(more…)

You might find that the machines are less than perfect.
The Columbus Dispatch : County’s voting machines examined

Where my wife works management has decided that they want a single type face for all of their documents, Arial 12 pt. bold. She told me that she recently began bucking the “corporate line” and started mixing in Helvetica. I expect her to be called out it any moment now.

Bush is making a speech on TV…. I had to turn it off. It’s a wonder that anyone can listen to him at all, he sounds like a five year old learning to read, sounding out his words and repeating or changing the words that he’s trying to form. It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard, only not as pleasant.

The State of New Jersey was going to send some voting machines to Ed Felten to check out. The voting machine company, Sequoia Voting System sent him an email threatening to “protect their intellectual property rights” which you can read on Felten’s blog Freedom To Tinker.

The Brad Blog goes into more detail, even encouraging the readers to contact the New Jersey Attorney General to impress upon her the importance of elections that are open, error free and not subject to being subverted. Here’s my email:

I understand that your office has declined to order testing of electronic voting machines manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems. Based upon reports available across the internet, Sequoia machines have errors that may affect election outcomes. These machines need to be verified to ensure that democracy is not subverted. Your state, as most states, has open records laws. We should expect no less from our voting machines; that our vote is counted by observing the proper operation of the voting machines.

JP Morgan (Chase) has offered to purchase the “ailing” Bear Sterns for $2.00 per share. Bear Sterns is essentially imploding due to their exposure to risky mortgage lending practices, selling interest only loans to people who barely understood what they were getting. Bear Sterns will not be the last institution to fall. The stock price has gone from a one year high of nearly $160 per share to next to worthless. JP Morgan might be able to survive this, we will probably only know for sure in five to ten years.

A housing market slowdown and what arguably looks like a recession have contributed to record foreclosures as people who have nothing left walk away from their homes as the value slides down and their payments ratchet up. Numerous rate cuts by the Fed have done little to slow down the rate increases that have spilled into the revolving credit card market. The so-called stimulus package approved by the government will push part of next year’s tax refund into people’s hands today. That’s all well and good today but it’s an advance and it will have to be paid back. Unfortunately, people will not see it that way next year when their refunds are cut or their tax bill increased – it will look like the shell game that it is.

I’ve spent more time than I care to admit digging around an Access database since starting my new job. I’ve gone in and made changes to table structure, queries, reports, etc. Access is a great program. (heh- sure) I’ve learned that you can’t read Microsoft’s instructions and learn anything – that takes external web sites. I once wanted to be able to duplicate certain records in the database and Microsoft’s help excruciatingly detailed how to write a macro. A day later I found there is a built in function that requires as many as three lines of code instead of the 40+ that Microsoft’s web site was forcing me to write.
(more…)

I have a couple of posts that I have forgotten what it was I was going to write. This one is about the weird Scientologists. It’s mostly a collection of links, but man are there some weird stories at the end of this fishing line.
Church Calls Protesters ‘Cyber Terrorists’ (As opposed the the Xenu “real life terrorists”)
‘What Drives Me’: Tom Cruise’s True Mission This is no top gun mission – we’re talking real life.
Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack Something I would never condone. Exposure to the light is far worse for Scientology.
Check out the Operation Clambake site for a complete debunking of the bunkful “religion”. Don’t overlook Wikipedia’s Operation Clambake entry or the Slashdot story about the “emeter” being pulled from Ebay.

If you are blessed to not have to hear this blowhard from time to time, here’s a recap: Rush Limbaugh wants the Democratic race to drag on so he’s urging his listeners to do what he was vile in his oral spewing claiming Dems were doing to McCain, vote for the under dog.
CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive – Limbaugh urges listeners to vote for Clinton « – Blogs from CNN.com

It’s been a few days since I had a post about #2, so you may be wondering, “is it all OK, now?” The answer is no.

Last week I noticed a paper on the printer with a user name and password for Quickbooks (Intuit or whatever) for online tax preparation. “Hm,” I thought to myself, “#2 has signed up to file her taxes for free on the internet.”

The following day I noticed an envelope designed to hold W-2s lying on the floor next to the garbage can. I made the assumption that she had filed her taxes while being paid by the school district.

Yesterday, I noticed that she had a folder with her tax return sitting on her desk and in the afternoon I watched her log in and check the status of her electronic filing.

You know, it’s one thing if you browse a news web site from time to time, it’s another when you spend the amount of time that it takes to prepare a personal income tax return, print it out and check on it during the day. That’s aside from the amount of time that she spends surfing Craigslist for single men and headboards, checking the schedule for her other job, snacking every 30 minutes* and shuffling 3 inch piles of paper around to make herself look busy. I don’t have that kind of time at work.

*She claims – while wiping crumbs from her mouth leftover from her 10:30am “snack” – that when I get to work, 11:00am, is too early to eat lunch. Which is why she eats her lunch at her desk after 12:00pm when she returns from her lunch break. I guess before she comes to work is too early to eat breakfast too since she eats breakfast at her desk and then the aforementioned midmorning snack.