House of the rising Moonglum

Did you know that the GAO just changed it’s name last week? I’ve always like the General Accounting Office, but I saw someone call it the Government Accountability Office last week. Arf? And now I see another article where they do the same, but note that the name change took effect last week. How odd is that. I actually like the old name better, because it implies “we’re just letting you know what’s going on” whereas the new one implies something a bit more pejorative. “We’re going to hold you accountable!” Too odd.

Jon Stewart ended their DNC coverage on a great note. “Listen to the speeches from this and the RNC in a month, and when you are done turn the TV off think about what they said, and make up your mind.”

Very cool stuff.

Just watched the daily show and saw Jon Stewart totally rip on the regular news agencies portrayal of Al Sharpton’s speech. That one correspondent “riffing on whatever you were riffing on” juxtaposed with Sharpton talking about how the black vote was bought with the blood of martyrs. Just beautiful. I’ll admit that Sharpton is a wacko, but that was a good speech he gave, and to say it had no depth just shows that you didn’t watch the speech. Still haven’t seen Kerry’s speech though.

Oh hey, I did see one interesting thing, they were interviewing “random black woman” about Sharpton’s speech, and she of course loved it, but thought that Obama was a phony! Talk about a tough crowd to please. I guess he’s not black enough for some. So much for his unifying message, though I suppose it is a bit different from Sharpton’s, so by comparison he could be seen as selling out. *sigh*

It doesn’t work you know. Just ask the Colombians. They understand that once you start down that path, it just leads to more and more kidnappings and violence. And while there may be some light at the end of their tunnel, that journey is just beginning in Iraq. I was going to post some long diatribe on Spain, the Philippines and Egypt. This would have noted in particular how the last two countries never give into the demands of their own home grown terrorists (see how abu Saayaf and the Muslim Brotherhood get treated in their home countries, hunted down and killed.) But those governments are totally willing to sow the seeds of that business in Iraq by paying off the kidnappers there. Well, I was going to do a big blog on that, but then Mohammed wrote pretty much the same thing yesterday, so why not just go read that instead? I will note though, that wile I agree with the logic behind the argument, I obviously can’t have the same sort of personal anger towards those countries, because I understand the political motivations behind their actions, and have not been personally hurt by them.

It appears that travel by sea is much more dangerous than previously thought. After doing some statistical review of wavers larger than 25 meters it looks like they are orders of magnitude more common than people thought. In fact they are beginning to think that they are the cause of many of the more than 200 ships larger that 200 meters sunk over the last 20 years. (And those are large ships.) This is just amazing research and will hopefully help prevent more ships from sinking in the future.

Well, the first launch of the two required to win the X-Prize will be launched on the 29th of September this year. In order to win, they need to do two launches within two weeks, carrying three people or their weight equivalent. SpaceShipOne of course will be the contender, but it looks like there may be some competition, though I somehow doubt it.

I just watched Obama’s keynnote address to the DNC, and it was truly a great moment in the history of speechmaking. I will probably make some effusive comments about it later, but for now suffice it to say that it was one of the best speeches I have ever heard. If you haven’t seen it, click the above link, click on day two part three, and fast forward to 35:30 and then be amazed for the next seventeen minutes.

انا جشح و انتا؟ هثيه زوجةي سو

Oh yeah! I can finally write arabic in my blog! The fact that the umlaut in the Hitler post came through made me think that it might be possible. Sweet. Y’all might start getting some updates on my arabic progress. But probably not.

The Motley Fool has some interesting thoughts on Google’s IPO. I was thinking that it might be fun to try to get onboard with that, but looking at what it may look like, I think that I might just skip.

Well, I just got a pretty amazing spam. The subject line was…

Cheep meds on the web! Get yours now. hitler.

Hitler? What was that for? Just to get my attention? Well it certainly worked. But then my mind started whirring. Were they calling me hitler? Did they verbize it, was it a command? Do they just like the word?

What a strange world we live in.

Well, I just meant to take a little half hour from work to do a little reading, and now it is a number of hours later and I have finished a book in one day. Well suffice ti to say I liked it. I have never read a Sherlock Holmes book before, and this one was great. It introduce all the characters, and gave some great insights. The thing that totally stunned me was the fact that it was such an anti Mormon tract. And it took us to Afghanistan as well. Pretty wild for a mystery that doesn’t really leave about four different rooms.

One thing that really caught me though was the fact that the book is basically the exact same thing as the Zero effect. Straight down to the odd affectations and trying to get the assistant to write up the memoirs of “the method”.

So apparently the US forces are still occasionally conducting raids in Iraq for various reasons. On these raids they like to have the Iraqi National Guard (ING used to be ICDC), or the Iraqi Police (IP) backing them up. This helps them get training, etc. Well this time the Iraqis were attacked while the raid was going on, and they responded. But they started their own operation against the insurgents for which the US forces provided protection. It will still be years away until Iraq is able to protect its entire country alone, but from the trauma of entire units fleeing the field, to having Iraqi units being the operating units in a nonplanned action is just great. And the fact that they are able to apparently interface well with the US units there bodes well for the future.

The Chicago Police Department claims that they don’t have a quota system, but when you sit in a line of traffic, and then go through a police checkpoint where they are looking for city stickers and seat belts, it really does make you wonder.

So, wordpress didn’t have any function for throwing up sets of comments, so I just did a little PHP hacking, and now the most recent comments are on the right again. I’ve almost recreated my old setup. The only thing to do now is update the css to include the calendar. That is going to be a little tricky because of the way that this style works, but I think I can do it. If you care, this is what I did to make the comments appear:

        <?php
        $comments =
                $wpdb->get_results(
                        "SELECT comment_author, comment_post_ID,
                          DATE_FORMAT(comment_date, '%a at %h:%i %p') AS `com_date`
                        FROM $tablecomments
                         LEFT JOIN $tableposts ON comment_post_id = id
                        WHERE $tableposts.post_status = 'publish'
                         AND $tablecomments.comment_approved = '1'
                         AND post_date < '".date("Y-m-d H:i:s")."'
                        ORDER BY comment_date DESC
                        LIMIT 5");
        if ($comments) {
                foreach ($comments as $comment) {
                    echo get_archives_link(
                      get_permalink($comment->comment_post_ID) . '#comments',
                      $comment->comment_author . ' ' . $comment->com_date );
                }
        }
        ?>

Hey Everyone, check out the sweet new name for this Blog. It’ll probably change again, but the new url made me need to put it up for a little while at least. The schiadugengis is coming for you! It walks at night!

So there is a little cleanup going on. Well more than a small little. But it is pretty smooth overall. One nice thing is that word press lets you know if you were going to blog something and it fell of the bottom of the stack. So I found these little gems. There was a while back when appatently I decided to become an alcoholic. And document it in my blog. Fortunately Mike moved away and I overcame that, but I thought I’d share the first five days of the “Drink a Day” plan with you all. I find it humorous.

Pastis and Ace of Base – The Sign
Tequila and The Cure – Lovesong
Sherry and no music
Apricot Brandy and Pink Floyd – The Wall
Vodka Martini (extra dry, shaken, not stirred) and the James Bond Theme

Hey Everyone,

In case you didn’t notice you were probably forwarded to a new site here. It’s not quite all set up yet, but will do for now. In any case the correct new link is:

http://lair.haggisnet.org/blog/

The old one will go down this weekend.

Hey Everyone, just wanted to let you know that the computer that hosts this site is giving up it’s day job and moving to Las Vegas. I’m going to rehost it at a new site tomorrow evening and will let you know then, what the new location is.

I’ve heard of hunters mounting the heads of the animals they killed on their wall, but in general if you are going to be killing a person, you shouldn’t keep the head around. Kinda makes it obvious who did it, not to mention grossing out any visitors who are going for some Ice Cream.

No, just me! I was just talking to Katherine in HP and she said that there was no rain there. And on me there are lakes falling out of the sky! I found this odd, and so I checked out the precipitation map. Freaky!