Tiananmen Square 20 Years Ago Today

Amazing. Sad. Disturbing.

And we couldn’t even be bothered to be that upset about the 2000 election.

Go Frack Yourself

It’s been nearly two weeks since the series finale of Battlestar Galactica. Oh the whole I really love this show. It’s full of great characters and situations and plot and everything. It just works. The actors are great, the stories are (mostly) great. The emotion they invoke is real, and powerful.

Having said that: Ronold D. Moore, sir, you can go frack yourself.

Series fanales, must I think, suck badly. As a fan you are too emotionally wrapped up in the show to accept that it must end. You don’t want it to end, you selfishly want to keep watching it forever. There are a few things which I can/will accept with the ending of the show, however there are also things which I will not accept.

1) Starbuck. Give me a fracking break. After all that, after all the bad ass girl stuff all we get is *poof* Clearly she isn’t the same as Head 6 and Head Baltar (which we are lead to believe are some kind of Angels). After all this time and character development all we get for poor old Kara Thrace is…fracking poof? And, “It’s up to the viewer” from Mr. Moore? What the frack? You and your team of writers are paid FAR more than “it’s up to the viewer.” I, the viewer, thought you guys had your fracking stuff together and were trying to tell a coherient story…not just sort of making it up as you went. Which brings me to my next point…

2) Caprica 6. We learn through some of the flashbacks that Caprica 6 really struggles with her inner humanity right before she wipes out most of the human race…and brutally murders a baby on the street. By helping Baltar deal with his father, who he obviously doesn’t want to have to deal with…ever, she opens him up to the idea that she should give him access to the defense mainframe. Queue the annilation of the human race. I would have found it much more in character if they just left us thinking that she fracked her way to the access. I mean, it’s Giaus fracking Baltar. Stroke his ego and his cock, he’ll do it.

3) Giaus fracking Baltar. This despicable, selfish, self centered worm made it all the way to the end? Frack that! He directly caused the near extinction of the human race, and he makes it to the end? To ‘new’ Earth to help repopulate the human race?!?!?! Somehow this is part of God’s great plan to move the human race from Caprica (and surrounding) to ‘new’ Earth? At the cost of billions of lives? This doesn’t make any fracking sense.

I could go on and on. In retrospect I’m very disappointed with the way it ended. The writers never recovered from the writers strike, and anything they may have had was lost.

They should have just left us looking over nuked Earth and fade to black.

Bulls on Parade

I wish I could understand. It doesn’t make much sense to me. I assume (I know, I know) that my elected officials (and their appointees) are smart, qualified and looking out for the little guy. Jesus I’m stupid.

This whole bailout thing is crap. I mean, from a fundimental level it’s crap. If the free market and deregulation are such good things then how did we end up in this mess? I read lots of semi-conflicting stuff about how bad it is, or how bad it isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, giving away the kind of money they are talking about seems like unprecedented stupidity to me.

What makes it even worse for me is that I can’t really identify with either side on this. I’m not lossing my ass on Wall Street because I bought up portions of bad home loans made to people who were never going to be able to replay them. I’m not a homeowner who bought ‘as much house as I could get’ under the assumption that property values could only go up for the next 15 years.

Sure, gas is expensive. Food prices have gone up some what. My daughter is too young for me to worry about putting her through college at the moment. But these assholes on the news keep saying how without freeing up the credit crunch, people won’t be able to do things like get loans for cars, or credit to charge things they can’t aford at the moment anyway. So I just don’t get it, because I just don’t feel it I guess.

Here is a miserable self indulgent post for the day…

Happy birthday to me!

And I’m totally grumpy because I have a sore throat which didn’t let me sleep pretty much at all last night. So I’m in a totally shitty mood. Bah, humbug, grumble, grumble.

Here is today’s disturbing fact…the US Terrorist Watch List has now crossed over the 1 million name mark.

Obviously you will find more terrorists if you just keep making bigger piles of data to sift through. Your odds of finding statically rare events always increase by increasing the size of your data set. Oh wait, only if you have an amazingly accurate system to detect them. Otherwise you just get a jump in your false positives.

A safer America through the magic of the false positive!

But I guess we are all on the watch list now that the Congress has seen fit to ‘overhaul‘ the FISA laws.

Oh, and boo to Barack Obama for voting for this pile of shit.

Hello, my name is Richard. You can call me Dick. I’m totally out of touch with reality.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday declared the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq a “successful endeavor” in a visit to Iraq that was overshadowed by a suicide bombing that killed at least 25 people.

In what possible context could you believe that this has been successful? Baby killing. Check. Destroy any existing underlying infrastructure, making things like water, electricity and health care worse then they have ever been? Check.

Oh, oh, oh I got it. War profiteering? Check.

¿Por qué no te callas?

Of course, this is was uttered by the King of Spain in November 2007 to Chávez. I think under the current circumstances, it also applies quite nicely. Are you really going to start a war over killings of an internationally recognized terrorist group, which didn’t even happen in your country? Well, maybe if you had sent them $300 Million you might, but I still doubt it. Shut up, stay home.

Yippie! The server is back online after nearly a week outage. Apparently there was a bad cable somewhere. Logically between the firewall and the rest of the network, but I don’t have the official post mortem. Remote site support can be a real bitch. Part of the delay is my fault too, however, I forgot to set the web server to start on system boot. Shame on me! Bad admin, no cookie!

I was in Target today getting a birthday card for my Dad, when this little transaction happened in front of me. Of course, I was buying just the one item, but none of the Express lanes were open. I mean, with like 35 check out lanes, you would think they could staff Express lanes on both ends at the same time, but then I guess you’d be wrong (like me). So in my grump, I noticed that the guy standing in front of me was also buying exactly one item. It also happened to be some form of greeting card. Strange. The clerk rang up the man’s card and then asked him if he’d like a bag. The man paused, thought about it, and then answered ‘Yes’ to my complete astonishment. But the clerk was not to be outdone by this display of ridiculousness, oh no. Instead of putting the greeting card into one of those little bags, he put a standard greeting card in a full sized plastic bag.