Stranger Things Have Happened

"Republicans are seemingly authoritarian in the natural. They have no desire to govern, but have a compulsive need to rule."
-User "maxdenn" commenting on a CNN article.

Guitarist, Composer and Author Bill Morrisey was found dead of heart failure in his motel room in Dalton, Ga on Saturday July 23, 2011. He had been on tour, and was on his way home. It saddens my heart to know he is gone, a great and gentle soul fallen away from the world. Bills songs were full of longing, and pain, and his own special wry humor. May angels wings carry you to a better world, Bill. You were truly too good for this one.

Here in NH we are a lightning rod for what one might call "I/C" - Idiot Current. It's like AC but instead of going back and forth it flows sideways into the twilight zone. We have Republicans, who elected one governor (Meldrim Thompson) that wanted to give tactical nuclear weapons to the states national guard to combat protesters (!) and another (John Sununu) that shoved a nuclear plant down the states throat on the argument of cheap plentiful electricity, thereby giving us some of the highest electrical rates in the nation before leaving the state with his middle finger (figuratively) out the window of his limo on his way to Washington to become the type of beltway insider he had spent his time in office railing against. He made a pretty effective sleazy lobbyist (for the nuclear industry, I believe!) for a time before becoming George Bush Sr's chief of staff. We have a huge influx of libertarians whom I characterize as republicans that want to smoke pot, own guns and not pay their taxes, but of course can't actually be repugnicans because of the pot issue. How they think the pavement beyond the edge of their driveway is to be paid for is a mystery I have never gotten a good explanation for, but maybe that's why they all seem to drive SUV's. Then we have the teabaggers, who just seem extremely gullible proto-fascists. My fondest wish is that they could be transported to a reality where the world has everything they say they want, so that they could try to survive for a year. It would be interesting to see how many made it back from their little visit to theocracy/plutocracy and how many of those would rather stay here than return. I have noticed they seem to be very fond of Michelle Bachman. This is a woman who has in the past campaigned against Masturbation as if it were a serious and relevant platform issue. That she has made it to Congress should tell all of us pretty much everything we need to know about that august body. I won't go into the Palin thing, I don't want to have an aneurysm before breakfast.

I've heard some people say they "agree with the tea party". I'd actually be curious to hear what anyone agrees with regarding the teabaggers, not as any form of examination but rather because I've heard them say they believe so many conflicting things that I'm not sure what their platform really is, other than raw hatred and fear. One tends to see them up here by the side of the road leaning against a rusty pickup truck, holding up misspelled signs averring Barack Obamas kinship with Satan in some form or other. It's pathetic, not only because the misspelled words are usually two syllables or less but because if this were 1970 Barack would have made a pretty believable Republican. I discount his color in that statement, because frankly the guy is whiter than I am. Who's more likely to be found on a Saturday hanging around in the shade playing the blues on an old guitar, and who's wearing a starched suit, wonking out on policy decisions and cutting deals with sleazy rightist radicals instead of confronting them like he should be? The weirdest thing I've noticed about the teabaggers is they seem blissfully unaware that their "party" is a corporatist media blitz financed largely by some of the richest plutocrats in the country, the Koch Brothers. Here's a nice article on what really pays for all the stuff the TB's are loving: http://bit.ly/9PBf9L The TB-rs themselves don't seem like people who read much, to say the least.

Holy Crap, did I just say all that before 7 am?

"May the bridges I burn light the way." - Marko Rakar, Croatian data activist

"Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for." -Bob Marley

"There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside."

- "The Jungle", Upton Sinclair (via Gutenberg Project)




Wikipedia Page for The_Jungle

"It is a fact, the significance of which cannot be exaggerated, that the measure of the civilization which any nation has attained is the extent to which it has curtailed the power of institutionalized religion."

- "The Profits Of Religion", Upton Sinclair (via Gutenberg Project)

I wish I had read this mans work 40 years ago. It was right there, waiting for me, not that anyone would have pointed me towards it in the school systems I encountered. Kids should be reading this in school instead of their schoolbooks. Congressman should be required to carry it at all times. You should read some of his work, not because it is Great Literature (much of it is not) but because he speaks clearly and directly to the real causes of social injustice and its remedy. If nothing else, Upton is remembered as the single man responsible for the existence of the FDA - without him, no one would have bothered. This certainly wasn't his real reason for writing The Jungle: he later said "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Much is available on the Gutenberg Project site.

His Wikiquote page is also valuable.




Excerpt:

"Will it be the task of your masters, do you think--will they write the
charter of your liberties? Will they forge you the sword of your deliverance,
will they marshal you the army and lead it to the fray? Will their wealth
be spent for the purpose--will they build colleges and churches to teach
you, will they print papers to herald your progress, and organize political
parties to guide and carry on the struggle? Can you not see that the
task is your task--yours to dream, yours to resolve, yours to execute?
That if ever it is carried out, it will be in the face of every obstacle
that wealth and mastership can oppose--in the face of ridicule and
slander, of hatred and persecution, of the bludgeon and the jail?
Continue reading "A Strangely Cold World" »

"Look, I guess it's a disagreement over the idea about where it is that we should try to get us back on the road and off of debt. It's not just non-defense discretionary spending. I don't think our problem is we have too much money going for job training. I don't think our problem is (that) there's too much money going for education, yet those were the things that were cut in the deal.

I think, fundamentally, our problem in this country is the growing sense of inequity that we have. When the top two percent are making more than the bottom 40 percent, then I don't think that it's fair that the only place that these cuts were coming from were some of the most vulnerable people in America."
- NY Congressman Anthony Weiner, April 11, 2011

Note that he was referring to the bottom 40% of wage earners, who presumably still have a job. For now, anyway. It was a short while later that Congressman Weiner got busted sending pictures of his Eponymous Member around the internet, and we all know how that turned out. I'm glad that before that happened, he took this opportunity to show that the "angels of his better nature" were alive within him, and his coming scandal was not all there was to the man.

I see on http://thegearpage.net that these sites are good resources for beginning amp builders. Since I'm starting a number of projects very shortly including a Mission 5E3 build I'm sure these will be worth looking at.

http://www.freewebs.com/valvewizard/index.html

http://www.aikenamps.com/TechInfo.htm

http://www.el34world.com/schematics.htm

http://paulrubyamps.com/info.html

http://www.geofex.com/ampdbug/ampdebug.htm

Support Issue Tracking is a topic at my day job the last few days. Weeks. Years?

I had decided to revisit the options we discussed way back a few years ago and see what direction all these softwares have gone in since the last time we decided to put up with what we had. Back then, I researched the various support tracking suites. At the time most of them were closed source and very expensive. Today, that situation has changed; there are many open source systems and one that is well liked and easily available is called Request Tracker. A look at their web page that lists some of the organizations running RT at http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/who.html makes interesting reading. It's written in Perl and supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite for a back end. The company has a knowledge base/article tracker that links to it called RTFaqM, which I didn't look into.

I also found this comparative matrix of support tracking systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems

The screenshots at http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/screenshots.htm look nice.

http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/ has a wiki at http://requesttracker.wikia.com/wiki/HomePage

I'd appreciate hearing back if anyone reads this and is interested at all, or has -anything- to say about Request Tracker, good or bad.

With a little luck, this entry will also appear on Livejournal.com thanks to a (new?) Serendipity plugin.