jsbowden | Thingses.

I passed my test on Sunday. So did Evan. We are both Novice Black now. Whee; welcome to Purgatory, as one of my instructors once referred to it. Now it's a several month challenge to get prepared for our Black belt test coming in February.

I'm going to have to build a usenet server here at work it seems. If I want reliable access, I'm going to have to do it myself. This is annoying. I have had only spotty Usenet access for the last month, and I'm over it. X-privat can't decide whether they want to give access or not it seems. Most days it's all connection refused on 119, other days it works okay. Their comp.* hierarchy is spotty as well, which is my main area of concern along with the Monastery and rasfwr-j. I don't know who x-privat peer with, but their only redeeming feature is being free, and even that's more pain than it's worth at this point (or I could pay to access their other server, but really, why would I do that? I can simply build a local server here, have complete control and just have to deal with getting peering between us and our provider set up). Hey look, I just happen to have this spare Dell PE650 in the rack running FreeBSD 5-STABLE with a spare 80GB SATA drive doing absolutely nothing right now. How ultra convenient.

This morning, I was officially in the 150s when I woke up and weighed myself. Ideally, I can get down to between 150 and 155 and maintain that. So between 5 and 10 more pounds, and I'm done with loss and just watching for gain. It also makes Tae Kwon Do a lot easier to not be carting around all that extra weight. My wife digs it too.

New Orleans. Nothing to say really. The ripple effect from this is going to suck. Hey, maybe the .gov could even step in and stop the gas and oil companies from price gouging the shit out of everyone and driving the price of, well, everything, up even further in the process. Oh wait, that wouldn't fit in with the Bush puppetmaster's overwhelming greed and their plans for grabbing even more for themselves at everyone else's expense. Someday, they'll live in the nicest crackhouses on the block, and blame other people for the deplorable state of things around them.

no subject

Congratulations to both you and Evan. And extracongratulations to you on getting closer to the ideal weight.

Since you're talking about building a usenet server at work, it probably is useless to make you puppy eyes or mumble loudly about single malts to get access, right?

Date: 2005-09-01 08:08 am (UTC)

jsbowden.livejournal.com

Yeah, since it'll be sitting behind a firewall with strict ACLs on the firewall itself, I can't do much there. I'd think UMD would have a fairly nice feed and server though, I know we did when I was at ODU.

Date: 2005-09-01 10:19 am (UTC)

vesuvias.livejournal.com

Great job on the Black Belt progress and the wieght. Stuff like that is the type of stuff that turns out to be very rewarding in the long run as that type of success tends to bleed over into other areas.

Ack!! free usenet good luck with that. newshosting is well worth the money I pay them, they now even have a 14.95/month unlimited plan that I am strongly considering. As I don't have a working tivo this would help me keep up with whatever show seems popular these days.

As for New Orleans, I'm really kind of surprised brother pat hasn't come out with some amazing stupid comment about how "God sank New Orleans because of its Sodom and Gomorrah like decadence and imorality". The last thing the world needed was us getting more uptight about oil.

I wonder how many people after being displaced for "months" will just simply give up and start over whereever they ended up. Find a new job and simply move on with thier lives. Bet it wouldn't be out of the question for New Orleans to lose 1/4 to a 1/2 of its population over this after everything is said and done. That states economy is well and truely frakked.

Still no word from Louisianna on life loss which is scary. It won't be in the 200k realm (like the tsunami) but the mayor mentioned "1000's" which is scary. She may be grandstanding but looking at the pictures it not out of the question that quite a lot of people lost thier lives drowning in thier attic. Remind me to keep life vests for the kids somewhere in the house.

Date: 2005-09-01 10:49 am (UTC)

turnberryknkn.livejournal.com

Whoo! Rock on! Congratulations to you both!

I agree with the feeling behind your last sentiment, re: price gouging; the only problem is, from a practical perspective, I'm not sure how one would actually accomplish that. if you have price controlls, you'll get hoarding, which will wipe the supply, and to control hoarding by definition requires control over purchasing -- in other words, rationing. I mean, it seems the only thing one could do is to come down like the Wrath of God on anyone caught *colluding*, and hope that somebody out there decides to try to lower his prices to undercut his competitors and by that way keep the prices down. Or the government could work hard to try to reduce demand, encourage conservation, which by itself would do a hell of a lot more to reduce net oil shortage than any Strategic Oil Reserve release or new drilling.

Wait, this government? Encourage conservation? Next thing you know, I'll be expecting the government to do sufficent planning and send sufficent troops to maintain civil order in ~~Iraq~~New Orleans! ;-)