Last night, I half-fell asleep, and spent most of the evening in a very strange half-sleep state. I remember thinking of a lot of things that were terribly clever, and a lot of things that didn't make much sense, and I wish I had written some of it down -- all that's left is fleeting impressions. Perhaps that's as close as one can come to an altered state of perception without drugs.

Today should be a good day. Interesting things afoot at work, and my wireless ethernet card should arrive today, according to the FedEx tracker. One thing I've learned is that one should always go with the slowest shipping possible when ordering things -- it's turned out to always be as fast as 3-day shipping for me, and much cheaper. They always offer some 20-30 day shipping, and personally I think it's just a way for either UPS/FedEx or the involved company to rip people off. It's not like it's at all profitable for your stuff to be taking up space in a company or FedEx/UPS warehouse. What you're really buying, usually, is just priority in a queue, and unless the queue is fairly packed, ...

Anyhow, it'll be neat having working wireless on my laptop. Maybe eventually a driver for the builtin card will be released and I can sell the card or use it in one of my other systems..

Ahh, as usual, I have a bit to say on politics.. not much. It's amusing to watch BushJr (pretzels be unto him) flail around on the economy like a worm on a hot sidewalk. He's apparently blaming it all on the mess left by Clinton. Well, like our mayor in Pgh, he might be right -- that's the problems with these blame games -- if he gets elected again, and the economy doesn't get better, he'll simply say that the mess left was worse than he thought. Without access to economists and a lot of detailed (behind the scenes?) information about what the economy is doing, there's simply no way for me to have a reasonable opinion on whether BushJr is messing things up, or if he's cleaning it.. well, his advisors, anyhow. BushJr isn't particularly intelligent, but his advisors, while being people I mostly intensely dislike, are probably more intelligent than he is. Note that I am not an agnostic (in the sense of saying that it cannot be known, and that a moderately trusted conclusion is impossible) on this issue, I'm just saying that I don't know enough. And chances are, unless you've been doing some studying on the issue, you don't either. There's a lot of columnists around, one of whom has added me to their mailing list for some odd reason, who are calling for the local mayor to resign, saying that it's all his fault, while at the same time fighting every cut he makes to city services. It's fine to say "don't cut this", but it's a lot better to say "do cut that" -- cuts simply must be made until the problem is fixed. To phrase it biblically, in politics, you shouldn't blame people for taking the lesser of two evils unless there's a clear third path that's better yet. So, Mr. Rauterkus, do you actually have any ideas about how things should be done, or are rants all you can do? Maybe the mayor should resign, or be impeached, or whatever. I don't know, but you haven't shown any sign that he's ignoring better ways to do things.

The fanatics are riled up recently... an abortion center was bombed by some fundie, and he's up for execution. Amusingly, this is an area where I used to be on their side, but for different reasons. Now I have that nuanced position, and even after the brain has begun to develop, up through birth, I don't consider it to be equivilent of killing a full human (although after significant brain development, I still do think it should be criminal to abort, just with a lesser penalty). So, yeah, I'm not really bothered with the execution of the guy. If he wants to call himself a martyr, sure, that's great. He can call himself the grand poobah of mars if he likes. A week or so ago, someone hacked into a central site for spammers, grabbed their member list and associated content, and posted it for all to see. We now have phone numbers, postal addresses, and similar information on a lot of the spammers of the world. No doubt some of them are going to get harassed. I have no sympathy.