Schedule updates!

How annoying! I plan my entire week around the fact that today is the crazy day, that there's going to be no time between Kouryou-chan's dance class and Yamaraashi-chan's Tuesday dress rehearsal, only to find out that the dress rehearsal has been rescheduled to Saturday. Now I'm going to have to re-work my entire menu.

Ah well, I can make risotto with vegetables and pancetta tonight.

I had a funny moment on the bus yesterday. Cute college-age girl sitting next to me leans over and says, "Is that a Thinkpad? What kind?" I tell her it's a T-23. "Really? Does yours bluescreen a lot? Mine bluescreens all the time."

It was fun being able to say that mine never bluescreens. But then, I explained, I'm not running Windows. I was able to show her where on Word she could change the preferences to save her work every few minutes, since she seems to have a crash once or twice a day. She was running XP.

Bush's honor at Walter Reed

I believe George W. Bush is an honorable man.

That may seem like a shocking thing to say, but it's true. I believe George W. Bush is an honorable man. I don't think he's particularirly thoughtful or deep, I think he's way out of his depth in his current profession, but I believe that he has strong convinctions and holds to them to dignify and honor them. The problem is, his honor is as shallow as he is, thoughtless, inconsiderate, inflexible.

I believe that George W. Bush is frustrated and furious at the men who let Walter Reed and the other military medical centers and veterans care facilities fall into such terrible disrepute. But here's where things get sticky. Because two other points of honor with our president is that he believes government cannot operate as effectively as private corporations, and he believes that the people with whom he has surrounded himself are going to always tell him the truth.

Listening to the issues surrounding patient care at Walter Reed, I came to the conclusion that what we're looking at is not, as the Democrats have charged, a failure of leadership. Oh, I'm sure there's some of that going on as well: Rumsfeld didn't believe this would be nearly as hard as it turned out to be and didn't allocate the resources it needed. But there's more to it than that: the civilians in charge of Walter Reed did not honestly believe that medical care should be part of the military's role. That was for subcontractors. Government contractors for business outside of the military are notoriously inefficient because they know there's little competition for those who fill their jobs: those roles are filled either by those who survive off the government or they cease to exist.

Bush is shattered by his own shallowness. He is incapable of understanding that he wants two directly contradictory conditions: he wants people who loathe and revile government to run it, and he wants that government to run efficiently and well. It's okay when government doesn't run well for the forest service or welfare; it is a blight on his honor when it fails the men and women of the military. I believe that Bush honestly expected that the military medical system would "go well," just like the rest of the war. It is his inability to grasp that both the people he left in charge and the mindset he brings to the enterprise guarantee that it would not go well.

Oh, joy. It's a good thing my lover doesn't want to press charges.

In a bit of news that will surprise no one, juries don't understand sadomasochism, and so courts have the right to accept retroactively withdrawn consent as assault. S&M is illegal, at least in NY.

There's a lot of messiness in the case, but the outstanding point in the article is this:

Jodi testified she built up enough courage to leave Marcus in late 2001, but also conceded she continued to have contact with him, even going camping. She decided to go to the FBI when he refused to take her photos off the Internet.

He may have been a cad, but if he had her consent for the photographs and their display in the first place there's not much she can do about it. It would seem that she still had voluntary contact with him and was not being held or forced against the will.

Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

Sometimes, what I do feels like incantation. I wanted a word count on my "working directory" displays, which I maintain using python scripts. Once upon a time, this would have taken me a few lines. Maybe ten or so. And then I learned Ruby. I learned the difference between a fold, a filter, and a transform. And I learned when to do which.

def wc(f): return Numeric.sum([len(i.split()) for i in open(f, "r") if i])

I don't get paid enough for knowing this stuff.