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BAD RELIGION LYRICS - American Jesus

I let Gabriel nine-year-old Gabriel explore my iPod last night while we were on the way to his cub scout meeting at the Wakefield Bowladrome. Ididn’t mind when he stumbled on the B-52’s. I was amused when he put on Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill. And then he started singing along with Bad Religion on American Jesus. The only words he could really pick out were “…we’ve got the American Jesus.”

When we got out of the song he kept singing it and although there’s nothing offensive about those words and I’m not ashamed of the content of the song, I don’t think he understands enough about anything to explain to someone what he’s singing.

Clearly I need to keep my music to myself.

On a slightly related note Chloe wanted to read my high school yearbook the other night. I don’t mind if she sees what me and my friends looked like and where I went to school. The problem is that when we wrote things down in our yearbooks there was a lot of cursing and allusions to drinking and carousing. My daughter would be all over that like flies on shit. She would pepper me with questions that I don’t want to answer.

I have to tell you that when we wrote things down in those yearbooks we may have felt a little rebellious writing things that might get us in to trouble with our parents but I can guarantee you that we never once thought about what it might be like to have our CHILDREN read those entries!

oi.

Chloe never did get a chance to see the yearbooks. Before I put them away I started perusing one. I had to laugh of course at myself from twenty years ago. I didn’t recognize many names. And then there was one from a girl I knew casually. It was just her address and phone number.

“Huh, that’s odd”, I said to myself. “Why would she only write her phone number and address?”

DUH!! TWENTY years later I finally realize she was giving me her phone number so I could call it and take her out!! What a dope! I think I was retarded when I was a teenager.

I hope my kids do better than I did.
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Top Twenty-Five Barbecue and Grilling Recipes

Derrick Riches writes a column about grills, grilling and cooking outdoors. He’s posted his top 25 favorite recipes and I think I have a new list of things-to-do!

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War Room - Salon.com

Discretion is the better part of valor

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, responding to Dick Cheney’s accusation that he’s changed his position several times on funding for the war in Iraq: “I’m not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody who has a 9 percent approval rating.”

*SNAP!*

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http://www.gamespot.com/news/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=25585002

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ABC News: VA Allows Wiccan Symbols on Headstones

MADISON, Wis. Apr 23, 2007 (AP)— The Wiccan pentacle has been added to the list of emblems allowed in national cemeteries and on goverment-issued headstones of fallen soldiers, according to a settlement announced Monday.

I grew up in the bible belt of the US where people honestly believed that 666 was the mark of the devil and that there ARE people working with the devil. And truth-be-told: I don’t know that there aren’t or that 666 isn’t the mark of the beast.

But to put the symbol of Wicca, which is synonymous with witchcraft and therefore satanism on headstones in national cemetaries is kind of shocking. I know enough about Wicca to know that they don’t worship the devil and are mostly benign in intent and practice, but I think for a lot of people this would be very offensive.

Maybe I’m way off base and the secularization of the US is more advanced than I thought or people may have come to accept Wiccans as real people and not agents of Lucifer.

Want to know what other symbols are allowed in national cemetaries? Check it.

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So there’s this guy at work who specifies the security requirements for the system I’m working on. He’s not a bad guy but sometimes doesn’t recognize the impact of the decisions he’s making. For instance, he’s a little paranoid about security and he wants everyone to be able to see ONLY their stuff. This may not sound like a big deal, but SAP – the software I’m working on – isn’t really set up to easily accommodate this.

Well, I take that back. Its easy, but it’s a very manual process. In this case, he didn’t want managers to be able to look at internal orders or cost center groups for anyone but themselves. I told this guy that the only way we could do this was to have a separate security role for each cost center group and for each internal order.

There are a lot of cost center groups but fortunately they don’t change much. So although it’s a lot of work up front, there isn’t a lot of on-going maintenance of it so I didn’t mind it so much. The internal orders, though are a horse of another color. Every time a new project gets started or every time someone wants to track something specially I will now have to create a new role for it. And there are a lot of internal orders to start with.

I tried to explain this to the designer-guy – that it would mean a lot of work to start with an a lot of effort to continue to maintain these things and it didn’t seem to phase him. He clearly saw it as much more of a deficiency with SAP than something he needs to take in to account.

So I’ve been staring at this mountain of security work for the few days, knowing it would take me weeks… WEEKS to plow through this. And I didn’t want to even go near it. I started work on it this morning and after about an hour I decided that there HAD to be a better way than the very painful, tedious repetitious keying.

So I wrote a program to do it. It took about 30 minutes and it works perfectly! I think it saved me about three weeks of work!! HAH!

HA!

Between you and me: sometimes I really kick ass.

So now what do I do? Should I impress everyone and tell them that I’m three weeks ahead of schedule because I am JUST that good? Or should I amuse myself for three weeks and let them know that I’m done when my deadline arrives?

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Things have been kind of busy lately and I haven’t had a chance to update the ol’ blog. On Friday I came down with a stomach bug that sidelined me all weekend. I took off the second half of Friday and spent most of the weekend either in bed or in the bathroom.

It was an ugly affair.

However, on Thursday I got the new fiber optic line to the house installed! WooHoo!! 20Mbs going straight to my house! HAH! This isn’t entirely for my own entertainment. Part of it is also because I have voice-over-IP and I am concerned about what happens when a phone call comes in while I’m downloading something – will the call suffer? Also I want a viable alternative to my cable company and I’m hoping Verizon can provide that.

It also just plain ROCKS!

Although I have to admit that since Thursday I haven’t spent much time on the computer so I can’t be sure.

My computer is working again. After I took it to Apex to get repaired it had died again and I was PISSED. I had previously paid $150 for a new 480 watt power supply and a new CPU fan which didn’t need to be replaced and clearly didn’t keep the computer from crashing. It turned out that I had an extraneous fan that had a bad connection. So once that was removed everything started working again. I spent a couple of hours on the computer last night and enjoyed myself.

The weather was stunning. It was 70 degrees and sunny. Incredible. Although I spent all of Saturday in bed, we took a drive on Sunday and wound up at Lowes getting some mulch. As usual I underestimated the amount I would need by about half. So I think I will go during lunch today and get the rest.

I’m still kind of beat and feel a little wrung out from the weekend. I think I ate something bad at the tiny carnival that came to town. I took the kids on Thursday and I ate a lot of junk food.

The kids are back at school and I am back at work and all is right with the world.

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Hotshit.com - Hotshit.com

ok - here’s what happened. Mayou, the tech who worked on my machine confirmed it was the motherboard.

FRIED.

very bad.

etc etc

So he said that for $200 he could replace the motherboard.

But that it would cost $50 more if the CPU had also been zapped.

Or he could take out all my drives and memory and put it in a new case with a motherboard and zippier CPU for the low low price of $599.

Or, finally, he could just sell me a whole new system for $1100.

I told him to replace the motherboard.

He was fine with that and ran off to round up the board.

but he called back a few hours later and reported that nobody had it in stock.

But while he was farting around with the system he dismantled it.

all of it.

yes, all of it.

This concerned me at first. But I knew I was in good hands and was unsure of what the punchline was going to be so I waited.

He told me that there was dust in there.

A lot of dust

A WHOLE lot of dust. And that when he took the fan off the CPU THEN put it back, the whole thing started working again!!

HOLY CRAP!!

Its working again?!!

Happy Days!!

So now its back to normal. now I just have to pay him for his labor. I wonder how much it will be…

oh, and Ben is back from eCamp. I also wonder how he’s doing. All three kids have pieces of art in the city-wide art show at the high school. Their reception is tonight so we have to go see elementary kids’ art this evening.

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Did I tell you I got a new desk? Its a solid oak roll-top computer desk and it looks pretty good. On the left side of where your knees go is a cabinet that holds the main chassis/cpu/case. The solid oak door really looks like three drawers. Its attractive, I swear.

But I’ve been a little concerned about a lack of air in there. Yes, there’s a small hole for cables to leave the cabinet and a small vent but they both looked insufficient to dissipate all the heat that my beast generates. I had decided to drill some holes in the back of the desk for additional air-flow. In the meantime I just made it a habit to leave the cabinet door open while the computer is in use.

Last night I was running a full system-wide virus-scan and a defrag. I left the computer for a couple of hours while I went upstairs to watch TV.

When I returned I saw that the cabinet door had fallen closed.

And the computer was dark and quiet.

DISASTER!

I opened the door and I could feel the heat billow out of the cabinet. I knew instantly, of course, that this was what we in the business call “very very bad”. I pressed the power button and nothing happened.

Nothing.

At all.

This was very very bad indeed.

I pulled it out and let it cool down for ten minutes and tried to power it up.

Nothing. The computer’s LED’s just looked at me as if to say “He’s Dead Jim”

In the morning I tried again. Still nothing.

Since the LED’s are still on I suspect the power supply is still good. However, I have grave concerns about the CPU and motherboard. The hard disk is probably fine. I dropped it off at my favorite local shop to have them look at it and see what they can find.

If the repair is inexpensive it will be a no-brainer - I’ll just have it fixed. But if it gets pricey (>$200) I will have to start considering other … ahem … options.

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Idenix Midstage Studies Fall Short - Forbes.com

Drug developer Idenix Pharmaceuticals Inc. said Thursday two studies of a treatment for Hepatitis C failed to meet their primary goals. …

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