Tales of Shaved Goats

There’s something about people in more well-to-do areas of North America that annoys me a lot.  Everytime I go to see the 4th of July fireworks, there’s always a ton of people who think that by putting a blanket on the ground and a few chairs that they now somehow hold a lease to that piece of land.  However, they always neglect to actually sit and keep an eye on their stuff.  My philosophy has always been this:  if your ass isn’t there, you have no claim to it.  I have been tempted on more than one occassion to take random blankets and chairs and remove them, and dump them in a much less attractive fireworks-viewing location.  The only thing that stopped me from doing so is the fact that I was still thankfully able to find a spot to sit in, though it wasn’t always the most comfortable.  What would it take to have this behavior stop?  Maybe some petty thieves from the city coming around and stealing whatever nobody kept an eye on.  Oh hey, good idea in fact…

I was recently participating in a discussion about the public school education system in the USA recently on Slashdot.  The basic premise of the article being discussed is how the No Child Left Behind Act actually leaves the advanced students behind.  I’ve seen a number of people who are of the opinion that if a child is sufficiently advanced academically, that said child can entertain himself when he finishes his work in a mere fraction of the time allotted to his classmates.  This does not make sense, because it tries to force children into yet another mold.  Not every child wants to entertain themselves.  Some children are very advanced but crave the guidance of a teacher or other elder.  I have experienced this firsthand in my life as well when I was a child.

I never wanted to be just sitting for 20 minutes at the end of the test, and I was one of the highly advanced children in my class. I was not allowed to do anything except sit still at my desk by my 2nd grade teacher. I was not allowed to doodle, read a book, or anything else.

I was sick of being taught how to do simple addition and subtraction by time I was halfway through 2nd grade that I started to refuse to do the same bull over and over again. Maybe a lot of the people in the world only remember things if it’s been pounded into their heads with a metaphorical sledgehammer, but I wanted to move on. The problem is that my refusal to do work was taken by the school board to be reflective of my not being ready to move on because I was being insubordinate, and they even wanted to put me in the behavioral disorder program because I had started causing trouble in class for the teachers.

Interestingly enough, I’ve read studies about the behavioral disorder program at public schools in the USA, and most show a high percentage of male students in the program. This percentage is very disproportionate - I believe the average was said to be between 70-90% of the students in the average BD program were boys. I’ve also read that the average boy is characterized as being more likely to be insubordinate and require justification for doing work than the average female student, and this is interpreted by the educators as something abnormal instead of something that is inherent and normal.

In the end, my parents fought tooth and nail with the school board and kept me out of the BD program. Unfortunately, they could not get the school to shoot me up a grade because I refused to do my homework. (A vicious cycle that perpetuated until I finished high school. I didn’t do redundant homework year after year, but they wouldn’t advance me because I didn’t do my homework. Test scores were inconsequential to them.)

The public school system in Illinois, and quite probably most (if not the rest) of the USA, is the factory mentality. Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall Part II (from the movie version of The Wall) makes me think a lot about our school system here. Send the kids down the conveyor belts and turn them into hamburger meat. One size does not fit all; it never has, and it never will. The problem with Honors classes and *some* “gifted” programs is that they entailed more work, but not more thought and learning. Work does not necessarily equate learning.

I was lucky that at the same time I was having problems with most of the teachers in my normal classes, the “gifted” program at my grade and junior high schools did provide new material for us. We learned a bit about chemistry already in grade school such as titration and chemical properties of common compounds that we use on a day to day basis. In 7th and 8th grades we were already dissecting frogs, fetal pigs, and sharks and learning about the anatomy in far more detail than the rest of our classmates. The classes that I behaved the best in were the classes that I was most challenged in. I rarely if ever gave my “gifted” program teachers any problems at all.

Since I’m many years out of k-12, and because of stupid laws such as NCLB, I fear that in many places these programs for the advanced students have been cut in order to use more resources on the remedial students. If so, the dumbing down of America continues.  This can and will have detrimental effects on American society.

I am very saddened to tell the tale of a once fully independent person whose greatest fear is now being realized, though we are unsure yet as to whether she is aware of such.  Her greatest fear is to become a vegetable, an invalid, and a dependent.  Due to her advanced age, she has already become part of this, but still retained some mobility, independence, and cognoscence.  To tell you the truth, she made it this far and didn’t give up on any of these attributes of life without a long hard fight.  As of yesterday at dinner time, she has suffered a massive stroke and is at the current time unable to move her entire left side.  She is also unable to respond to questions with spoken words.  It is likely that she will become a prisoner in her own body, trapped to rot away as a mere shadow of the person she once was.

The odd thing is that this person is not of blood relation to me.  Instead, it is as if I was adopted freely into her family with a marriage amongst my elders.  She used to take me to the parks, the shows, the theatres, the concerts, and the museums when I was but a little one.  She treated me as though I was a grandson by birth and not as an orphan looking for handouts.  It really pains me to see her ripped of her dignity and ability to interact with others.

I feel guilty that I wish that if she is unable to make a full recovery to her prior state (a highly unlikely case) that she will return to gan Eden and not be forced to remain here on earth in a cage of a gehenom (hell).  Is it right that I feel this way?  Is it selfish?

Which brings me to ask other questions that have very likely been asked by countless other souls.  When does saving life actually not save it?  How does one define life?  Is life simply having a heartbeat and some cellular metabolism?  Unfortunately there is no clear cut answer, as it is a highly subjective matter (see the fights constantly going on to this day over abortion in the USA).  It does not comfort me knowing that my grandmother is likely to be a fraction of the greatness she once was, and forced to suffer for the remainder of her days, though she will biologically be considered alive.

I have noticed something in the past year.  All of the HP business desktops that my clients have purchased in the past year have not come with recovery CDs/DVDs nor did they come with the Windows CDs/DVDs either.  Instead, they want you to use their utility to make a braindead recovery utility disc(s) that flatlines the machine and repartitions it the way it has been scripted to do so, regardless of what partition(s) might be there that don’t belong to Vista.

Is this a new ploy by Microsoft to keep purchasers of new computer equipment from demanding a refund for their unopened copies of the current flavor of Windows?  Perhaps.  It seems all too convenient that it does draw my suspicion.  The only alternative reason that I can think of would be a cost-cutting strategy by HP.  However, given the low cost for CD and DVD media for a company the size of HP, I find that to be the lesser likely of the two scenarios.

What I can tell you is that the advanced user is paying the price for this.  I personally run both the copy of Vista that came on my new HP TX1410US notebook and Slamd64 Linux.  The problem with this scenario is getting some free hard disk space for some new partitions.  Since there are no driver discs and OS discs included, the idea of manually reinstalling Vista on the machine and defining your own size for the Vista partition is scrapped.  Then I tried using Ghost to image the drive to a USB connected drive.  Again, no dice when the machine froze while trying to load the drivers for the USB device.  Stupid old DOS application…

It turns out after about a full day of banging my head on the wall trying to find some way to image out the drives and running the braindead recovery procedure from HP only to find no advanced options available, that I came across another method.  Vista’s disk manager has a sometimes functional feature that will allow you to shrink and extend partitions (provided there is space to perform such a function).  This 240 GB hard disk partition for Vista had 222GB of free space on it.  So I went in to shrink it, and it let me chop off about 80GB.  I then tried GParted on the machine, as that was not enough of a drop in size.  GParted kept reporting to me that there was some problem in the NTFS $BITMAP file, and would not allow me to resize.  I went back into Vista, created a new partition, and moved the pagefile to that new partition.  I then rebooted into GParted, and this time I could shrink it.  It, unlike Vista’s built-in tool, allowed me to shrink it a whole lot more, and now I have 80GB for Vista and the rest for Linux.  This all cost me almost 2 full days worth of work though.

The pain doesn’t end yet, though.  I spent another day trying to figure out why the machine was locking up very randomly while trying to install Slamd64.  I even tried recent versions of Kubuntu and had the same random freezing.  I was just about to pack the machine up and take it back to the store (or the field from Office Space) when a friend of mine provided me with some invaluable information.  It seems that there is a big problem with the APIC on this machine in Linux.  Even a BIOS update to current (F.1D) couldn’t solve.  This problem exists even in kernel 2.6.24.x…  I had to give acpi_balance_irqs and noapic as parameters to isolinux and LILO in order to have the system run stably.  It has ever since, but I lament over losing out on the APIC functions for IRQ handling.  I can only hope that between the Linux kernel developers and HP that a fix for this will be forthcoming.

After 3 1/2 days of laboring, I finally have a notebook that I can use.

Whenever my clients complain that they are getting spam, I always ask them if they believe their penis size is too small (if they’re a female) or if they don’t like how small their boobs are (if they’re a male)…  That always gets a chuckle out of them.  But seriously, we use DSPAM (http://dspam.nuclearelephant.com) to filter e-mail, and once it’s fully trained (when it receives 2500 legitimate e-mails) we get very high accuracy.  Even now, for a newly opened e-mail account that still has 2461 messages to train yet, I’m already seeing more than 82% overall accuracy.

But indeed, the real issue here is not the filter.  The problem here is the concept of e-mail as we know it.  Basically, anything short of “you pay me to send your stuff to me” is unlikely to have any effect on spam, as spam is so profitable since there is near zero cost, and even with 0.1% of recipients purchasing or falling for scams, it is enough for the s[c/p]ammers to make huge incomes.

Unfortunately, it has become the burden of the recipient to pay for the costs involved in receiving all the unwanted crap and doing something with it.

I find myself asking these questions fairly often:
1.  How many people really abuse Xanax, Viagra, and these other drugs?
2.  How many people are insecure about the size and/or performance of their genitalia?
3.  How many people try to impress with fake rolexes?
4.  How many people fall for the 411 scams?

The impression you get is that it’s a lot of people for all these categories.  I can only hope in reality that the numbers are very small.

On Saturday night, we went to see the Live Nation Pink Floyd Laser show at the House of Blues in Chicago.  We had purchased tickets over a month ago, and I was rather looking forward to it.  Contrary to our original plans to show up early, we ended up instead arriving just a few minutes before the show (thank you, lovely Chicago traffic…).  I do not like events where I have to literally throw what little weight I have around in order to squeeze in.  My S.O. is only 5 feet (1.52 m) tall.  When we arrived, all the people standing at the front wherever you could actually see the screen were about as tall as me - around 6 feet (1.82 m).  Once you did fight your way in so you could see half of the screen above the stage, you could barely breathe…  literally.  I tried to be a nice guy and crouch a little so the people behind me could see, but I don’t know if it helped them or not.  As for the venue, I think that the House of Blues is extremely inconducive location.  Add to that the fact that the management decided to oversell, and the inconducivity is only exacerbated.  I remember seeing Pink Floyd laser shows at Triton College in the Chicago area and at the Tel Aviv University.  Both locations where much more suitable.  They basically used the planetarium theaters as the venue.  Just sit back and enjoy, and no need to worry about 10 foot gorillas blocking your view.

As for the show itself, it was enjoyable (for what could be seen).  The use of the viewing glasses made it feel like you weren’t missing as much of the screen as you were by multiplying whatever the lasers were doing.  They started off by doing the whole Dark Side of the Moon album for the first half of the show, and then for the second half they did “The Best of Pink Floyd”, which was mostly songs from The Wall.  The songs that did not come from The Wall came from Meddle, Wish You Were Here, and A Momentary Lapse of Reason.  I’m actually surprised that not one song came from The Division Bell.  I think the Division Bell is a better album than A Momentary Lapse of Reason, and that it sounds more like a team project than a David Gilmour project.  I’m also surprised that they didn’t play any songs from the Syd Barrett years, which while they are not my favorites, are a part of Floyd’s history and legacy.  Maybe they could add in another hour of material and have a wider coverage over all of Floyd’s years and not just focus on 1971-1979 and 1987.

All in all, I would rate the show a 6 of 10.  It’s hard to overcome the venue of choice, and the show itself gets Obscured by the Clouds or ends up on the Dark Side of the Moon - out of sight.

One thing that I don’t understand about the USA is how this whole concept of separation of religion and the state does not seem to exist anymore.  A former governor of Arkansas named Mike Huckabee has claimed to be a Christian Leader, and is a supporter of teaching the non-theory of creationism, is running for president.  He even won the Iowa caucus playing his cards heavily on religion.

CNN also got into the mix by running a show on December 24 or 25 this year which focused completely on “What Jesus would do” with regards to the politicians running for office.  I know what Jesus would have done now after knowing that Pontius Pilate would nail him to the wood…  he’d stay out of politics altogether.  But really, who cares what Jesus would do anyway?  Not all of us believe in him.  I believe he existed, but not that he was at all special.  As was said in The Hitchhiker’s  Guide to the Galaxy about Zaphod, “he’s just this guy, you know?”  Why is the media feeding this Christian right movement with these useless shows?

Ironically, I have no problem with the fact that Israel is the Jewish State.  But perhaps it’s not all that ironic at all.  Despite the fact that there are movements in Israel that would love to have Halachah  as *the* law of the land, I can see it in a different light.  First off, even if they did push it into being *the* law of the land, there is a very vocal minority of Muslims, Christians, and Druze living there that would have to be granted their own governance over their own religious affairs (which is actually the way it is currently anyway).  Secondly, at least in Israel it’s Jews putting this onto other Jews.  It’s not Jews putting the rule of Halachah onto the Bahai that live in Haifa.  It’s not Jews teaching that the story of Bereshit (Genesis) is to be interpreted *literally* as the way that life came to exist.  In fact, I think it would be hard to find a yeshivah that would teach that the theory of evolution is unfounded because the Tana”ch says otherwise.  From my experience, the story of Bereshit is considered to be supplemental to the science that we have.  Thirdly, modern day Israel was established as a homeland for the Jews, which is in sharp contrast to the reasons behind the founding of the USA.

I hope that the upcoming elections this year will not disappoint me.  Here’s to hoping that a competent politician - one who truly understands the meaning of the separation of religion and state - is elected to be the next president.

Two days ago my 7 year old Solomon Islands Eclectus decided to do something she hasn’t done before in the nearly 7 years that I have had her as a pet.  I came around the cage that morning, took a glance in, and saw her sitting in her favorite spot on the bottom, next to…   an egg.  I immediately removed the egg from the cage so she won’t sit on it.  It’s not a huge problem if she continues to lay eggs every so often, but hopefully she won’t start laying them every week.  For a bird that is roughly the same size as an African Grey, she laid a pretty large egg.

One of these things is not like the others (guess which is hers):

About a year ago or so, I invested in a new vacuum cleaner. I went to Sam’s Club and came back with a Hoover Windtunnel 2. I noticed that almost all vacuums nowadays are made out of almost entirely plastic. The vacuum was operating quite well up until last night, when somebody inadvertently stepped on the rubber edge of the front of the unit, and ended up breaking 3 of the 4 plastic screw posts. These screws hold the brush in place so that you can properly vacuum a carpet. I am furious now, because I couldn’t vacuum up around the bird cage. I also wanted to vacuum the bedroom as the building maintenance crew had to tear out some of the drywall due to mold and ice crystals forming.

Now, to complicate things even more, I cannot seem to find the receipt for the purchase of the unit. It is going to make it difficult to get Hoover or Sam’s Club to fix or replace the unit without this very important piece of paper that proves that I bought the unit and didn’t fabricate it myself.

But still… has everything gotten so cheapened that just one wrong step breaks a $260.00 vacuum? Couldn’t even part of it be made of metal so that you don’t break screw posts? When I was a kid, we had a Kirby vacuum cleaner that lasted 15 to 20 years. The shell of the Kirby was made of an aluminum allow, and I could kick it as much as I want and was more likely to break my foot than the vacuum.

… a whole machine stopped by a single mistep…

Ok, so the Christmas season (and it really truly is in fact as long as a weather season in the Chicago area) is all but over (thank gawd!)….  It seems that the vast majority of shopping occurred at the very last minute. Heck, on the 20th, a drive that normally takes me about 10 minutes ended up taking me 40 instead.  The cause of the backup? The traffic was all heading to one of the local shopping centers.  I was and still am completely irate about it.  What on earth is the purpose of starting to advertise Christmas sales at the end of September if everybody just ends up waiting until the last 5 days prior to the holiday anyways?   It makes absolutely no sense to me at all. In fact, it just goes to show that stores could all start their big Christmas sales 2 weeks prior to the actual holiday, save a ton on advertising, and make it so that we don’t have to listen to Christmas music for up to two months prior to the holiday.   (Honestly, the music makes even some of the people who I know who do celebrate Christmas want to go postal after about a week of hearing it everywhere one would go.)

This is a plea for mercy; a plea for compassion. Starting next year, PLEASE don’t start up with Christmas crap until after Thanksgiving. I don’t want to see or hear a peep about Christmas until then.   I beg for all that is good and sane in this world, please consider it.