It Can Stop Raining Now

Some day Science will invent a way to make the weather go where it is needed most. Some day we will terraform the Earth.

---

Had a fun time at Kanef's filk party Saturday night, and kicking myself because I couldn't think of anything to sing till we were disbanding. Next time for sure, a song which I learned from my big sister when I was maybe 7, called The Merry Minuet. She knew it as a Brownies campfire song, later discovered it was recorded by The Kingston Trio. I'd say it falls solidly in the filk genre, along with Tom Lehrer's So Long Mom, I'm Off To Drop The Bomb and Roy Zimmerman's Song of Many Deaths which The Limelighters re-arranged a bit and recorded as Until We Get It Right, after one of Zimmerman's The Foremen band members landed a spot in the Limelighters. Come to think of it, some of Alan Sherman's bits (Automation, One Hippopotami) come under the broad umbrella of Filk As We Know It™. 

---

Did some troubleshooting on the now-old PC and found that the built-in Intel RAID hardware went south just as I was transferring data across to the new PC. Nothing lost, just one of the two mirrored drives was reported as about to fail. The motherboard also has a Marvell RAID controller, so I plugged the drives into that and they were happy to be made into a mirrored array there.

So, if anyone wants a fairly high-powered system which was built for XP but can run Windows 7/64 bit, let me know. Some basic specs ( behind the cut )

and for $150 more, a refurbished Gateway 24" flat screen HD monitor which functions perfectly, but the refurb clueless bozos wrapped the bezel in something like Scotch tape, so the frame is kind of ugly. I tried using goop remover but that only made it uglier. Duct tape might be an answer.

---

Easy day at work today, verifying that a bunch of bugs we'd filed on a unit the last time it was here had been fixed. I spent most of my time watching movies and TV episodes all the way through, twice. Puccini For Beginners is a bit stylized and sometimes stilted, but there were enough LOL lines and clever director's moments to keep me interested. The cinematographer managed to make the leading lady, whom I am sure is adorable in person, look unappealing in a couple of dozen ways. And downright ugly a couple of times. The leading man (Justin Kirk) looks dorky with glasses on, and inexplicably appears without glasses in several scenes where one would have expected him to be wearing them. He's much more attractive (in a Jeff Goldblum kind of way) without them, IMHO. You be the judge:

]
Jeff	Justin

---

Was playing wih the iPhone this evening at the Starbucks closest to work, and it all of a sudden told me there was no SIM installed, which meant no phone functions. Wireless worked, and Google maps showed me where the nearest apple store was, so I turned off the phone and drove down there, but when I turned it on it worked again. Mentioned this to one of the staff, he said if it happens, just do a reset, and showed me how. It's not intuitive. I figured while I was there I should get a case for it, and he helped me find one. He stuck with me for the 10 minutes it took to decide, explaining the various attributes of the manymanymany different models. When I got home I discovered he'd sold me one for the wrong phone, and it was too small. Sigh.

Bought Documents To Go, which I'd had on the android. Good app for storing docs on the phone, except it only works over wireless, not through the USB port. Okay for home but not for the network in Starbucks, which apparently blocks that.

Very pleased with the vastly improved battery life.

---

Plans for Wednesday:
Work
Return the iPhone case
Sometime this week I need to get to the bank and swap a maimed dollar bill for a good one. And withdraw enough cash to pay for the model shoot this Saturday morning.

Yawn

Stayed up too early this morning trying to finish Chronicles of Riddick but gave up at about 2 am. Got out of bed the latest possible to make it to work before 9, but was delayed by my PC refusing to power down. After two tries at shutdown I gave up, did the 10-second power button trick; will have to figure it out tonight. I think it has something to do with the Documents2Go desktop app, because when I tried to set that up on my netbook, the main PC rebooted. Twice. Very strange. Or maybe it's because I plugged a second LAN cable into the PC (new motherboard has 2 NICs).

Got to work early enough, have one test to run which is a yawner: play a movie for 5 minutes, pause for 65 minutes. Some machines are supposed to be able to do that but I think the one I am testing is supposed to exit the movie at 60 minutes of pausing, and return to the movie chooser screen. I'll see in half an hour.

 

Arizona

While everyone is whining about how Arizona's new anti-illegals law will cause "profiling", I'm more concerned that the opposite will happen. The law basically give the Arizona police gestapo-like authority to ID anyone at all, for no reason at all. Ironically, this makes the law (IMHO) Constitutional because it treats everyone equally.

There is nothing in the law to say which country the illegals have to be from, and I'll bet there are probably some folks in Sun City who have overstayed their visas and look about as Hispanic as Pamela Anderson. Speaking of which, has anyone checked her visa lately? How many Canadians are here illegally? Oh wait, she has dual citizenship. Tommy Lee, OTOH, was born in Greece of Greek parents, and I don't see anything online about his citizenship status having changed. Hmmmmm.  I know some people from India and China who were caught in the dot.com bust, lost their H1 status, and can't afford to go home, but somehow have not been deported yet. Them and their entire extended families. Not that I want them to be: After all, they did come here legally and had a reasonable expectation of continued employment while they applied for citizenship.

And can we please stop whining about the Arizona law requiring all legal alien residents to carry their papers with them at all times? It's just a little wallet card, folks, and/or a passport. When I'm in a foreign country I carry my passport with me all the time, it's just common sense. And I carry my passport card in my wallet just in case the bug bites me to drive to Vancouver B.C. or fly to San Diego and walk across the border to Tijuana. Or take a cruise. :-)

Having said all that, I'm all in favor of the INS being beefed up, to help identify and process illegal aliens from whatever country they may have come. Add to that a vastly expanded dedicated immigration court system to handle the number of cases which this will result in. I'm for deporting anyone here illegally, with due process. I'm also all for making smuggling illegals into the country a subset of kidnapping, with the appropriate major federal jail time and fines.

But more importantly, we need to make it easier to come to the US of A legally, and add some appeals process to that - I currently have acquaintances in Fiji, Thailand and the UK who have been refused visas (after paying a $100 non-refundable application fee) just because the consulate interviewer said no. There is no appeal to this arbitrary decision.