I pity anyone that was stupid enough to get suckered into signing up with the Army Reserves just so they could afford college without so many loans. Because they are coming to get you now.
Sure I still have a few college loans lingering. But I'm pretty low on the DoD's list of meat to put through the Iraq grinder, if I'm on it at all. The worst case has arrived for too may of you. My heart goes out to you and your families. I know you probably had no intention of doing anything more than helping out during a natural disaster and paying for college. I wish I'd known you at the time, because I would have warned you about this. You probably would've ignored me, but at least I could be comfortable with it (bc I could say "I told you so"). As it is, it's a tragedy. My knee-jerk reaction to this was heavy on the jerk, but after some consideration (getting this far in writing this) empathy is emotion I'm inclined to.
And in the end, this whole mess is certainly not worth it. In fact, it's likely gonna leave us worse off than we were before. It's certainly not worth any more families being torn apart.
I finally got around to doing something about the comment spam for this here little blog. With a minute of Jeremy's time, MT-Blacklist was installed, and the process of deleting old comment spam was initiated.
The task was daunting. 27,900 comments. 27,700 of which are likely spam. And to make things more difficult, the cgi script would timeout if the number of posts being serached was too big. Through a lot of scanning, I've managed to get rid of over 20,000 comments. But still have a few thousand left to go. The blacklist.txt file will need to be tweaked to get rid of the rest, but at least the problem won't get any worse.
I'm in my second week away from K&T. If I let myself ponder it for any length of time, I'd rather go home. But I'm being the good little buddhist for the most part, and not considering much aside from that which is now.
"Training" is going well. The CIFS classes I took last week turned out to be Stuff I Knew™, but the NFS training I had today was good. I hadn't done much more than mount previously, so it was nice to get a better idea about what's going on there.
The highlights of my time here have been the weather (not too hot, not too cold, just right.), the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the glider ride with Jeremy. The Aquarium is awesome. The sharks were way cool, but the best part was seeing the Tuna. I'd never seen one swim before, and man that is one bad ass fish.
The flight was really cool. The take off was bumpy due to a 15knot headwind. But ater we got above 2,000ft, it was smooth soaring. Went over the Santa Cruz mountains between Hollister and Moss Landing (or Moss Point, I forget). There were clouds over the Monterey pennisula, but the north part of the bay was visible. Shorelines always look cool from above, and this one was no different. There weren't any good thermals, so we couldn't get too close to the bay. But got a lot of great views of the mountains.
Jeremy and I also took a drive down US1 from SF to Half Moon Bay. It's pretty cool, but it's not the OBX. :)
I hope to come back out in a few more years when Trevor is old enough. Most of the time I was in Monterey, I was thinking about how much fun it would be for him to see all that stuff. And I imagine he'd have a great time flying. We just wouldn't let his mom know. ;)
Just to follow up on some of yesterday's posts:
Tooka Tooka: I left out the best part. Making this sound during a meeting when someone is talking for too long.
Bush: Really, that whole post was sarcasm. Except for the parts about him being a boon for terrorists. That part is true. As somone who opposses terrorism, both as a methodology in general and as the PC word for Muslim Extremists, I do not want them to have any advantage when recruiting. That's why i'm voting for John Kerry. Not because I know he'll be lot better. But just because he couldn't be much worse.
Jack-a-thon: In case I haven't mentioned this before, the offical position of this blog is that masturbation is not only good for you, but it feels good too. Unless you are doing it wrong. Or have yet to break the handcuffs of Guilt inflicted on you by your Church. Just make sure you clean up after yourself. If you are taking personal responsibilty for your body's needs, take some responsibility for the mess it makes.
If you got spam from Tivo today, and actually read it, you no doubt chuckled when you heard about the latest addition to the Tivocabulary. "Tooka-Tooka" being the sound that Tivo makes when you FF 2x. And thus tooka-tooka-tooka is the sound it makes when you FF3x.
If you watched the Daily Show episode from last night today (because you Tivo it and watch it the next day) you were also no doubt confused when they were showing screen shots from a Tivo during Lewis Black's bit. I did a double-take, at least.
I'm told that Bush's bigest supporters are the people he's sworn to destroy. AlQeada says Bush is good for business, acting as the best recruitment tool imaginable. The Greatest of Great Satans.
Do your part to help facilitate terrorism: Vote Bush/Cheney in 2004!
You might not want to check this out while you are at work.
http://www.masturbate-a-thon.com/
I've been fairly good Snood player for quite some time. I think I was the first person on my campus in college to discover it, and soon infected hundreds of others. That was back when it was a Mac only game. And I registered it way back then.
In the subsequent years I started playingit on the PC. And I never bothered to register it. But tonight I just said, WTF, and went ahead and shelled out the 14.95. And I feel a lot better about myself.
This is old news by now. But I was shocked to hear it. I coulda sworn the Justices had personal security manifest in Federal Marshals escorting them. I know they get that for public apearences, and assumed it was a 24/7 thing. It's insane if they don't have protection 24/7. Maybe not the level the President has, but certainly as much as the VP.