thunkgeek.com

Erica and I saw 50 First Dates Friday night and I just wanted to congratulate the writers of that movie for not giving it a hollywood ending. The movie was good, not great, quite funny in places, but what most impressed me was that the heroin didn’t magically recover from her problem at the end. She has to deal with it presumably for the rest of her life, which in terms of most movies, and especially comedies, is unheard of. Did it have a happy ending? Of course,… but it wasn’t the typical “Everybody is now suddenly perfect, nobody has to deal with any issues… roll credits.” Good job!

So, I’ve been reading about the 9/11 hearings and I have to say I am flabbergasted. The families of victims are now blaming the deaths of their loved ones on Rudy Giuliani and the very policemen and firemen that the entire country praised for their spectacular bravery and fortitude just 2 and 1/2 years ago. I understand that these families have suffered and will continue to suffer. I understand that they lost loved ones. I understand that many of them lost livelihoods. I understand that their lives will never be the same. But for heaven’s sake, jumbo jets crashed into two high rise office towers. Do they understand that? The men and women who responded on that day and in the aftermath are hands down and bar none some of the bravest and most admirable men and women who have ever lived. I don’t care how carefully you plan for any disaster, people are going to get injured and people are going to die when something like this happens. I thank God that we have men and women in this country who are willing to risk their own lives to rescue as many others as they possibly can when everything around them is crashing down on their heads and everyone around them is thinking only of his/her own safety. Does anyone remember hearing death count estimates in the range of 10,000 that day? I do. How many died in the end? The official death count according to cbsnews.com was 2,976. That is a staggering number in itself. Can you imagine two thousand nine hundred and seventy-six coffins together? However, it is in part due to the efforts of the Mayor and Emergency Services Personnell of New York City that we don’t have to think about even more coffins than that. People need to grow up a little in this country. Stop slinging blame. Stop punishing the innocent. Start fixing problems.

Just upgraded to MovableType 3.0D and it looks pretty decent so far. Haven’t found any problems except of course with my custom plugins that now unfortunately do not work right. The only one that would be visibly missing from the site is the music line at the bottom of posts when I was listening to something. Not too big a deal. Looks like they’ve made a few subtle but important changes and enhancements. Cool.

My mom dropped off a couple of things we had left at her house the other day and related the following to me.

My youngest brother bought an oldish Geo Prizm sedan. He drove it for a while and the engine siezed on him. My parents bought the car from him and replaced the engine. They did this so that my brother who is returning from Brazil in November would have something to drive temporarily after he got home. He wouldn’t have anything otherwise because they sold his car after he left. My mom was driving the prizm because my other brother has her Chevy Tahoe and her horse trailer and is using the combination to move some things out of her garage and into his house. My sister-in-law (the wife of the brother with the Tahoe) usually drives the Prizm because her Beretta was in need of repair. They got it fixed though so my parents could buy it for my youngest brother (who used to own the Prizm). And they say never mix business with family.

So we thought all was good in the land of spam and virus filtering. Then we signed up a customer who thought it would be a good deal to offload their mail to us because they were getting so much spam it was making their server crash. ‘Course they didn’t tell us that they were getting that much garbage. They probably had now actual idea just how much spam they were getting, actually. It took our load balanced system of five servers and basically thrashed it. Within a few hours load had more than tripled as far as the number of messages coming into the servers. Then they can’t handle the amount of mail coming in it ends up sticking in a queue directory till it can be sent through. The total queue size on the system shot up to about 300,000 messages within a day or so. Of course, once you get that many messages it becomes a burden on the server just to list the contents of the directory so it can work on sending them out. Add that to the already increased load of all the new incoming mail and you have five servers completely bogged down with trash. And, you know, that is the worst aspect of the whole problem… if this were legitimate mail coming in a an increased rate that would be ok. But to bog down everybody’s mail because some loser out there thinks the way to market his product that nobody wants is to send a million pieces of email that, again, nobody wants is just ludicrous. I hate to think how many hours of each day over the past month and a half or so I have spent tinkering with this. What a waste!

And just in case any spammers are reading this… get a life you morons.

I had a thought last night as I was about to fall asleep, and another this morning in the shower. The first was the dawning in my head of the idea that the press and the world in general is making far too much of the fact that prisoners were mistreated/abused in Iraqi and Afghan prisons by U.S soldiers. Let me temper that with this: I find the revelation of said abuses abhorrent and disgusting, just as most others do. However, the fact that so much is being made of it irks me. It’s a well known fact that just about every American prisoner in foreign military prisons (whether as a prisoner of war or otherwise) gets mistreated, yet we see very few headlines on the fact. Heck, we don’t even see this amount of press coverage when a prisoner gets mistreated in our own penal system right here at home, do we? Every official face in front of a camera the past week has said that those responsible will be found, prosecuted and punished. That’s enough for me. The fact that it’s not enough for the press and John Kerry must be the clearest indicator yet that it’s an election year. What it has to do with the President is beyond me… sure he’s the commander-in-chief but I’m fairly certain he didn’t place a phone call to Pvt Gomer Pyle in Iraq and order him to beat Mohammed over in cell block 3 to death.

The second thought is related to the first and had it’s genesis in this: I would like to spend some time away from the U.S. Now, I am a patriotic citizen. I am probably one of the most patriotic people you will ever meet, and I don’t mean self serving political candidate flag waving patriotism. I am a believe in the system even when it doesn’t work, try to get the right people into office because you know they will do “the right thing,” then kick em out if they don’t kind of patriot… a pledge allegiance and don’t you dare burn my flag, though I support your right to, kind of patriot. But, I would really like to get away from this country for a few months… go live in Singapore, or Fiji, or Europe. Why? I am sick of politics. I’m sick of every news story I read or hear being about how John Kerry thinks President Bush did such and such wrong. I’m sick of people hanging their every economic, social, medical, environmental, venereal, automotive and herbological problem on the President. Look, buddy, it’s not W’s fault that your lawn ain’t green this year! Now, I am not naive enough to think that moving to another country would get me away from politics. It’s a universal disease at this point. However, just a small change would do for me. Is there a country in this world where people rely on themselves for something instead of on their elected leaders? How about one where the elected leaders keep their promises? How about one where a candidate wishing to take the top spot manages to refrain from mudslinging and name calling? And how about one where you can measure the performance of the current President even against the lowly ruler of the previous head of state? Whatever you or I may personally feel on the subject of George W. Bush’s intellect, his integrity, his ethics or even his haircut, in my book he is a successful and honorable man even if simply for the fact that he has not a) boinked any interns in the oval office, b) lied about it to the entire country on national television c) managed to not get thrown out of office for said crimes and d) published a book about it. “There was a time when a uniform meant something,” as Jerry says to Superman, and there was a time when the President of the United States was a man to be respected, not just by virtue of his office but also by virtue of his character. So should I move to a different country? Probably not. My voice may be small and weak, but I have a voice and I will do my best to let it be heard.

I’m putting the finishing touches on our new traffic measurement system, including testing all the previous customers whose data and config I’ve had to convert over to it. It has been an exhausting process. Ugh!

Something sparked my memory tonight and I thought I’d post about this while it’s fresh. There’s a man running for Governor here whose name is Marty. He has billboards around with Marty! in big letter and picture of him and his slogan, whatever it is. To tell the truth I haven’t paid much attention so far. Anyway, there is one of these billboard quite close to where we live and, as we drove past it tonight, Christopher Lloyd shouting “Marty!” popped into my head. It wasn’t as you might suspect, however, one of his “Marty!” shouts from the Back to the Future series. Oh, no, my friends, for you are reading the words of a man of privilege, for I refer to a “Marty!” shouted from the back of a tiny stage nestled in the hills around Sundance, Utah. The stage is at the bottom of natural, though enlarged by the hand of man, bowl which faces a hill into which have been set railroad ties, forming terraces where people spread blankets and sit and watch live theater. How did Christopher Lloyd come to perform the role of Fagen in a sparse and modern production of Oliver! at the Sundance Summer Theater Series? That I can’t tell you, but I can tell you that it was a night I will not forget. It rained on spectators and stage… a fine misty sort of rain that made us put up our umbrellas but didn’t interrupt the performance. I hate to think what the play would have been like without Cristopher, because he carried the thing. That is not to say, however, that the rest of the performances weren’t top notch, just that his was so much fun to watch it dwarfed the others. And then, the defining moment… as he was exiting after a gathering of orphans had just been instructed in the art of the pick, a cell phone rang on stage. Everyone in the audience thought it random, yet Fagen pulled the phone from his pocket and answered, “Hello?” With a look of shock he sprang toward the wings and yelled, “Marty!”

I just witnessed a sight few are privileged to see. I took my kids for a Saturday morning walk around the neighborhood. On the way home we saw four people standing on the sidewalk and casually chatting… two young men, a teenage boy and a woman of about 22 or 23. As we approached I thought the two young men with their backs to me looked like they were dressed like mormon missionaries. One of them turned to see who was approaching and sure enough he had an LDS missionary nametag. We walked a bit closer and saw the foursome part ways, but to my surprise one of the young men walked of with the young woman and the other walked off with the teenager! Of course as we got closer I realized that only the young man walking with the teenager had a nametag. He must have been on a split with a prospective new missionary. Both the other young man and the woman had books and pamphlets in their hands. What had I been privy to, exactly? Nothing less than the meeting of representatives of the two great proselyting groups in this area: the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s a thing of legend and fable to anyone who has served a mission for the LDS church to witness what we always called the “JW Split:” a man and a woman proselyting together! I think most of us were secretly jealous. I had to chuckle as the two partnerships walked off down the same street. In this neighborhood one of those couples is gonna meet with very little success, I expect, and the other is going to meet with a whole lot of encouragement, but also, not much success.