26 Sep 2006
The Other Shoe

shoe droppingKnow what that is, over there to the left? That's a shoe. Specifically the other shoe. It dropped yesterday afternoon.

I no longer have any programming contracts - 1/2 of our income will disappear as of Saturday.

It's pretty grim. I'm pretty down. I may allow myself some time to wallow in self-pity, but I will not give up. We'll survive, and eventually thrive.

Coincidence or not, the first item that popped up in my newsreader today was this little gem. Then I went back and read a post of my own from May. And I remembered this bit, from the novel Dune by Frank Herbert:

The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

07:12 /Home | 5 comments | permanent link

25 Sep 2006
Oil tumbles below $60

"Well, there's an election coming up..." seems to be the talk on the streets in Lebanon, Indiana anyway. It's curious how cynical these kinds of wild price fluctuations tend to make folks - they immediately see a conspiracy. They may or may not be right, but I will tell you this: if I had an investment account, I'd be buying oil futures for December or January delivery like mad!

Oil prices fell to a six-month low under $60 a barrel on Monday as BP's move to restore output at Prudhoe Bay earlier than expected added to a sense of healthy, secure supplies, while demand growth questions loomed large.

(link) [CNN]

10:08 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Apple squawks over 'podcast' use

Morons. They get all the buzz for gratis, the iPod rockets to the top of the market, and then they pull something like this. Do they have a suicide complex? I wonder if they're planning on suing this outfit, too?

So you've just started making your own podcasts, and you think you're the next high-tech audio star? Great, but you may want to think about changing the name.

(link) [CNET News.com]

08:20 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Pirate Radio Challenges Feds

From what I've seen lately, commercial radio is slowly dying in the US. Especially the AM variety, which is nowadays filled with ranting right wingers almost to the exclusion of anything else. I can't remember the last time I heard a song on the AM radio. And FM is devolving into a series of taped "formats".

I honestly hope these folks succeed - if they do, we'll have a radio band as interesting as the Internet. If they don't, we'll all Rush to know Jack, but that'll be about it.

Attendees at a secret "free radio" camp learn how to build their own FM transmitters and evade detection by the FCC. The rogue radio broadcasters claim it's their right to be on the air; feds say they interfere with legit radio signals.

(link) [Wired News: Top Stories]

07:25 /Technology | 2 comments | permanent link

Seeds 200 years old breathe again

Maybe there's some hope for this nutty venture after all.

Scientists at London's Kew Gardens persuade seeds from the time of George III into germination.

(link) [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

07:18 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Leaked intelligence report rocks Bush election stance

You know, if this wasn't a serious news item, and if we hadn't lost so many good boys in this insane war, I'd put this in my 'Humor' category as a "Study in Stupidity"...

I was skeptical about this war from the beginning - it seemed like a needless distraction from the hunt for the folks who flew airliners into buildings. My reservations would've vanished in a heartbeat if Saddam had been caught with nuclear/chemical/biological pants around his ankles - but he wasn't. And the planning for this fiasco had been nothing short of abominable.

The US military has effectively proved that it can overrun and conquer at will: the US administration has proved that it can barely run the government in Washington, much less anywhere else. We've gone from "Mission Accomplished" to "Mission Impossible" in a little over three years - and the parallels between our intervention in Vietnam and this war have grown over the same period.

I think everybody in DC is beginning to understand the term "quagmire" right about now: if we announce a firm date for our withdrawal, we insure a violent and bloody civil war with the probable outcome being an Iraq dominated by it's large Shite neighbor, who incidentally really is working furiously on nukes. If we don't, we insure many more American (and Iraqi) causalities, and tie up so many resources that we won't have the moxy to deal with the aforementioned large neighbor with nuclear ambitions.

It's a rock and a hard place, and there's no good way out. Thanks, Dubya!

AFP - US spy agencies have dropped a political bombshell six weeks before national elections, with the leak of a classified report concluding that the war in Iraq has spawned a new wave of Islamic radicalism and increased the global threat of terrorism.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

07:16 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Novelist acquitted of 'insulting Turkishness'

And this country wants admission to the EU ... amazing.

What do you think the reaction would be if Germany started punishing Holocaust survivors for "insulting Germaness"?

One of Turkey's leading authors was acquitted Thursday of "insulting Turkishness" in a novel that touched on the mass killings of Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire.

(link) [CNN.com]

06:44 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

24 Sep 2006
The Week From Hel

I missed more days posting to this blog last week than I have the entire rest of this year (so far). And blogging was literally the least of my worries.

I don't post much personal stuff here, except for Mom and her deteriorating condition, but I'm going to make an exception here. Simply because the events of the past week defy belief without documentation.

My youngest daughter is in the process of getting a divorce. She recently relocated from Minnesota to Indiana with her [soon-to-be-ex] husband's tacit approval. Well, at least he approved until they bought a house. Then he changed his mind and filed for an emergency change of custody for my grandchildren. The hearing was last Tuesday morning - the kids have been in school here for almost a month, and nobody here thought Peter stood an ice cubes chance in Hel of forcing her to move back. We have numerous documents showing his assent to the move, and were convinced it was going to be cut and dried.

Not, apparently, in the People's Republic of Minnesota.

When Hilary arrived she was greeted with over 100 pages of affidavits, filed by Peter, his family, his mothers church lady friends, anybody they could round up. If they could have found the homeless lady that Hilary refused to supply with change last winter I'm sure they would've paid her for an affidavit, too. They filed these five minutes before the hearing started, and when Hilary's attorney objected, as there had been a deadline of last Thursday (9/14) to file additional documents, the judge's comment was only "Well, I always allow late evidence."

These affidavits accused my daughter of being a prostitute, a drug addict, a terrible mother, a rotten housekeeper and a general waste. One deplored her use of "capital punishment" to discipline the children - no shit. They weren't even proofread for obvious errors like that. And for the record, Hilary doesn't even use corporal punishment at all...

Nor does she drink beer, which one accused her of consuming in excess. She drinks, to be sure, but certainly not to excess of anything, and she hates the taste of beer. She's a wine kinda girl.

To give you some idea of what the relationship was like between Hilary and her in-laws before this, let me quote here from an email I received in June of 2005:

Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 09:41:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: J Willams [redacted]
Subject: hello
To: Dave Haxton 

Dave,
I just wanted to let you know how proud Ken and I of
your daughter. She is working so hard, carrying two
jobs. When she is not working she is with the kids.
She has never taken for granted the help Ken and I are
able to give. If she needs/wants some free time she
asks if we are available. We only have the kids
overnight Fri - Sun now, when Hilary is working at her
night job. Now I'm sure you are thinking of course she
does that - but sadly our son doesn't quite get it
yet. So we notice Hilary's accomplishments. He is
getting better about coming here and spending time
with the kids and he is usually here on the weekends
to put them to bed. Damien has started T-ball and
Peter has agreed to be responsible for gettting him
there. Progress not perfection - right. It baffles me
how a son of Ken's can be so irresponsible. Maybe he
should come live with you and you can whip him into
shape?? Just kidding. I hope you and Kris are doing
well, I will send some pictures of Damien and Ana
again soon.
Jacki

Yet I made it into this woman's sworn statements as an ogre who forced my daughter to live in her car and then to move to Minnesota. And Hilary became little more than a party slut who just dropped the kids on their doorstep and left. For the record, she's lived here, with the kids, several times as her husband went through his travails. And what travails he's had!

He got a General Discharge from the Marine Corps in 2005 having spent nearly a year in the brig for snorting cocaine and going AWOL. Yet the affidavits presented him as a "decorated, disabled combat veteran"! And apparently, he's getting nearly $1500/month as a VA disability payment for "post traumatic stress disorder".

There's much, much more, all of it equally ridiculous. My little girl's attorney was given until Thursday to file a response.

And they took the kids away from her at the hearing, and handed them over to Peter's party! This was not a final decision, either - the judge took all the evidence presented thus far, and as mentioned earlier, gave Hilary a little bit of time to respond, and promised a decision by fax (!) this coming Monday or Tuesday. Until then, the kids were to swapped back and forth every 24 hours! And Hilary cannot leave the State until such time as the decision is rendered.

Hilary played by the rules, always tried to do the Right Thing™ and ended up getting screwed. This is bankrupting her, it's draining her emotionally, and the kids - well, I'll describe the effect on them later.

How can a dad not respond when he gets a call from his crying, hysterical daughter saying "Daddy, I need you!"

So I made the decision Tuesday to take a trip. And I made another tough call: I got a hold of my ex-wife, Hilary's mom, Lorraine, and invited her to go with. Hilary needed all the support she could get.

It was an interesting drive up, to say the least. Lots of 25 year old issues were opened and discussed, and, I'd like to think, a new understanding was reached. We were friends before we married, and enemies after our divorce, and I'm pleased to report that I believe we're back to our original state - our daughter needed us, and we responded.

There was a moment of levity - how does one check into a hotel with one's ex-wife for perfectly platonic reasons? Especially since the register demanded the names and addresses of both parties? So we traveled as brother and sister.

Which was fine until we arrived in Minnesota. We met Hilary at the lawyers office, finished our responses to the ridiculous allegations, and checked into a new hotel before Hilary and her boyfriend. We used the same ruse we'd been using. We told Hilary what room we were in, of course.

When Hilary knocked on the door about an hour later, she told how the clerk had just stared at her when she signed in. She'd mentioned she wanted a room near #120, because her mom and dad were staying in that room! I nearly peed myself I was laughing so hard - Lorraine and I became "Uncle Dad and Aunt Mom" for the remainder of our stay... which, as it turned out, was not to be lengthy.

No sooner had we all gotten settled in than I received a call from Kris - my mom had had another heart attack, and was in the emergency room of the Indiana Heart Center again.

I couldn't drive Wednesday night: we had just gotten there that morning, and I was exhausted. I was terrified that my mother would die before her 83rd birthday, and I wouldn't be there with her. But I had to sleep, so sleep I did. And I returned to Indiana on Thursday, arriving Friday morning about 1 am EST.

By that time, mom had undergone an emergency heart catheterization. They had found new blockages, and also found them inoperable. So they put mom on stronger meds, and discharged her, telling her that if it happens again to take nitro and aspirin and hope it stops.

Kris had been unable to pack eggs for our Friday delivery to Sunflower, so I did that Friday morning, and then spent most of the rest of the day with mom, and we've been tending her closely ever since.

I left Lorraine in Minnesota - she'll get home with the kids somehow. Damien (my six year old grandson) has developed a severe case of shingles - imagine that, with all the stress he's under. Anastasia broke down in Legoland in the Mall of America yesterday, crying aloud that she wants to go to her "Indiana house", and her own room and her own bed.

It's nothing short of horrifying.

So here I sit on a Sunday morning - burnt out and feeling utterly out of control of events. I really didn't have the money to make that trip - Lorraine helped, but she ain't exactly rich either. So now we're short of cash to buy hay for the winter - which may seem like a trivial worry, but unless the animals eat this January, I won't eat this January either. There's a hard discipline to the land, that's for sure.

Hopefully this explains my absence - to those commenters to whom I've not responded as is my wont in the past few days, please forgive: I'll get around to it as soon as I'm able. But now, well, off to see how mom's doing.

Because day after day, the show must go on.

22:42 /Home | 4 comments | permanent link

'Egg on your face' may be more dangerous than you think

A classic "Study in Stupidity"! How much "research" does it take to figure out that an egg tossed into somebody's eyeball can hurt them?

As the party conference season gets under way in the UK, research in Emergency Medicine Journal shows that lobbing raw eggs at people as a harmless form of protest or prank can actually result in serious eye injury. Between November 2004 and December 2005 researchers at one specialist department monitored more than 18,000 patients requiring eye treatment.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

14:19 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Smokers may be at greater risk of HIV infection

Well, here's a doozy of a nominee for this weeks Study in Stupidity - I'm equally sure that you could make the statistical case (with enough number crunching) that smoking causes male pattern baldness, impotence, the heartbreak of psoriasis, chicken pox and was probably responsible for the election of Bill Clinton or George Bush depending on the political proclivities of the researcher ...

This is a really transparent ploy on the part of AIDS researchers to get some of that "anti-tobacco" money floating around - too transparent to be taken seriously.

Smokers may be at greater risk of HIV infection than nonsmokers, reveals an analysis of published research issued ahead of print in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections.Cigarette smoking has already been linked to a higher than normal chance of contracting other infections generally, including those that have been sexually transmitted.

(link) [EurekAlert! - Breaking News]

07:23 /Humor | 1 comment | permanent link

22 Sep 2006
Day After Day (The Show Must Go On)

Gaze at the sky
And picture a memory
Of days in your life
You knew what it meant to be happy and free
With time on your side

Remember your daddy
When no one was wiser
Your ma used to say
That you would go further than he ever could
With time on your side

Think of a boy with the stars in his eye
Longing to reach them but frightened to try
Sadly, you’d say, someday, someday

But day after day
The show must go on
And time slipped away
Before you could build any castles in Spain
The chance had gone by

With nothing to say
And no one to say it to
Nothing has changed
You’ve still got it all to do
Surely you know
The chance has gone by

Think of a boy with the stars in his eye
Longing to reach them but frightened to try
Sadly, you’d say, someday, someday

But, day after day
The show must go on
And you gaze at the sky
And picture a memory of days in your life
With time on your side

With time on your side
(day after day the show must go on)
With time on your side
(day after day the show must go on)

The Alan Parsons Project

23:39 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

19 Sep 2006
On India’s Despairing Farms, a Plague of Suicide

They pushed hard for "free trade", allowing their nascent IT sector to soar. Now the chickens have come home to roost, so to speak, and there's Hel to pay.

I feel terribly sorry for the Indian farmers: I only wish I could say the same for their government. They've made a bargain of Faustian proportions, and the bill's coming due.

You'll soon hear the cry raised that this is our fault (the US and Europeans), because of our agricultural subsidies. And to some extent, it is. But on the other hand, look at this way: the deck may have been stacked against the farmers in India, but it's been equally rigged against the IT workers in North America and Europe. Hel, I moved from IT to farming, even though I don't get any of the vaunted subsidies (yet, anyway). The policies that set the decks up like this are policies that both Indian and Western governments negotiated.

So if Indian farmers have a gripe here, and they do, that discourse should take place in new Delhi, not Washington or Paris. And if the displaced Western IT workers feel ripped off (and they should) they need to take it up with their governments, not the one in new Delhi.

Because the Indian government is going to be facing it's own crisis soon enough. It's not good to have the second largest population on the planet and be unable to feed them.

India’s economy may be soaring, but a struggling agricultural industry remains its Achilles’ heel. In 2003, 17,107 Indian farmers committed suicide.

(link) [New York Times]

08:16 /Agriculture | 3 comments | permanent link

18 Sep 2006
Al Qaeda group warns pope, West, 'doomed'

Ya know, I pretty much raked the Pope over hot coals for hypocrisy when he made these remarks: Christians had done the same thing he was citing Muslims for doing. But I never questioned if he was being accurate in his assessment and excoriation of Islam. He was: conversion by the sword is de rigueur:

The group said Muslims would be victorious and addressed the pope as "the worshipper of the cross" saying "you and the West are doomed as you can see from the defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and elsewhere. ... We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose head tax, then the only thing acceptable is a conversion (to Islam) or (killed by) the sword."

So, to "protest" the papal remarks, these folks are issuing statements proving that what he was saying was absolutely right! They don't want an apology, and it really doesn't matter what he said.

"Religion of Peace" my ass...

And we heathens - where do we fit in the grand scheme of this? Nowhere. Both sides in this latest dustup have spent the last couple of millennia doing their level best to kill us off or convert us. Which is, I suppose, a logical thing to do when you and you alone possess the One True Way to paradise, eh?

A pox on both their houses - there are many roads to paradise, and indeed, many paradises. And unless the "One Real God" crowd learns this, and pretty quick, then we're all doomed. At least in this world ...

An al Qaeda-linked extremist group warned Pope Benedict XVI on Monday that he and the West were "doomed," as protesters raged across the Muslim world to demand more of an apology from the pontiff for his remarks about Islam and violence.

(link) [CNN.com]

17:00 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link

Woman Bites Dog

This is the very definition of news ... well, OK, wrong gender on the human, but it still should count for something!

With a Rottweiler's jaws firmly clamped down her arm, Danielle J. Nelson took a drastic step to break free: She bit back.

(link) [Tampa Bay Online]

16:26 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Hotel Minibar Key Opens Diebold Voting Machines

Morons.

As if Diebold doesn't have enough to worry about! On the Freedom To Tinker blog, Ed Felten, one of the co-authors of the recent report 'Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine', reveals an even more bizarre finding related to the initial report. It turns out that you can gain access to an AccuVote-TS machine using a hotel minibar key. In fact, the key in question is a utilitarian type used to open office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and the like. They might as well hand them out like candy.

(link) [Slashdot]

15:13 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link