it's been that kind of day

You know, the kind of day when this search

doesn't turn up the kind of result you were looking for. Like, really. What kind of fucked up day is that? Did a shit-ton of work for Spun today, thank god. That feels good. Didn't get any writing done on Meat, and I'm starting to think that Scrivener is a terrific tool for doing everything but getting the book written. I seriously have character sketches of squirrels, panoramas of asphalt, and no words on my draft. Fuck. I should be writing screenplays, eh?

And money didn't work out the way it was supposed to this month. And the pharmacy fucked things up, so drugs didn't work the right way this month either. In general, March has been Ick. We have rain, not spring. We have sideways rain instead of pollen and flowers. The cherry trees are going to get destroyed.

I am going to go cry in a bowl of The Fourth Kind. Milla always makes me happy in a special way.

I think I'm going to have to start calling this "stross syndrome"

Fuck, they're ahead again. I've bitched numerous times about this, and I'm not going to bother to self-link about it. The problem is when you write about the near future, things come true too quickly. This means I need to go write some more.

That's seriously some cool technology, but I didn't want it to exist until I invented it. Dammit.

Did some planting

Hoping to grow Oranges and Apples. Took seeds I'd been preparing from fruit I liked this year and stuffed em in 3/4" rockwool, feeding them light water and sunlight. I am seriously hoping for my very first hydroponic fruit, save habanero peppers.

I wonder how I'm going to get any appreciable size from them. They don't have much vertical strength without trellises. It doesn't help, I suppose, that so many of my plants are creepers of one sort or another.

To fruit, mass, and girth!

Thank you, Apple.

I am sure it had nothing to do with me, but I noticed this a few minutes ago.

thunder:~ alex$ file `which gcc`
/usr/bin/gcc: Mach-O universal binary with 3 architectures
/usr/bin/gcc (for architecture i386):    Mach-O executable i386
/usr/bin/gcc (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc
/usr/bin/gcc (for architecture x86_64):  Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

Well, hot damn, Apple. Thank you for hitting this one right out of the park. Emphasis mine, of course.

So, um, Snow Leopard

So we have Snow Leopard Server now installed on Thunder, which now believes it is thunder.spunfr.com (I still own semperbellum, but it's not required for day-to-day stuff). It's going to be doing a lot of work for me, and a lot of work for spun, and if I wind up bumping to a 16-proc (hmmm, faster ram, faster procs, but less cache. I'm thinking "no," for now), it'll be a write-off (mmmmm). But right now we're at 8 procs, 6tb internally, and 16gb (I think; maybe we're still at 12gb). So I might just beef up the machine we have—get some esata storage at fifteen kay, get some more ram for it, say thirty-two or sixty-four, and maybe another two monitors. beefCAAAAAKE!

What's really nice is that SLS is way, way faster than Leopard Server was. We took this long to upgrade because of the iTunes Holocaust of 2008 (yeah). We've got about seventeen hundred gigs of DRM'ed music and other media sitting on two volumes that are broken. Finally, I decided we're going to put them on ice until somebody can recover the data, and I had to use the AppleTV Patchstick Rescue Thingy to scp all my purchases I'd made on the AppleTV while the major 2TB drive was down. So now we're at 2.2TB or something and this means we're forced into an array when the money to fix the drives comes ambling along. The equivalent of the S2S, although I want hotswap and one of those "disk plugs" with the vertical orientation for sata/sas with dual "jacks" because of all these fucking disks I now have sitting around. Labeled in Sharpie, sometimes useful to get at if an image of them fails... I guess.

Oh, and that six terabytes of internal storage? Two 1.5tb mirrors. I done learned me a lesson. One is SLS and the other is regular Snow Leopard. Sometimes LS got a stick up its ass and needed some jelly. I am hoping that having two bootable mirrored raids should do the trick.

hoping…

Nobody who wasn't president or a congressman

Cast a single vote for or against this enormous fucking spending bill. I'm not buying any of this business that it will save us money down the road. I'm looking right down the barrels of a ten-gauge side-by-side with the words "twelve trillion dollars in debt" written on the side.

When I lived in California, the people could propose a "proposition" (such as the much lauded and hated CA Prop 215) and, here's the crazy part: the people would vote it into law or into the dustbin. Now I live in Virginia. I've got my gun laws, and my carry permit, and my more permissive emissions controls. But I live in a state where nobody I know had any say in whether this enormous package ever got voted into law.

Instead, fat white men who are driven to work in towncars or who drive a Prius to work to show their constituents how responsible they are (nickel and diesel pollution aside...) voted on mostly partisan lines, but some on either RICO-act-enforceable lines (we're going to break your fucking knees, buddy) or what I like to call the "blowjob lines" (your dick will be sucked so shiny by so many broads if you just vooooote on this).

The Post is exclaiming this morning (dear reader, it is 0400) that "With stroke of pen, Obama signs historic Health Care Bill into history." By god, people, is this what you wanted when you voted this man into office? I wanted an exit strategy for the war. I wanted bin Laden. I'd like to see piracy controlled with the fine operators we have for that sort of thing. I'd like to see Iran and North Korea have some serious sabers rattled in their direction. Parking a CVBG or two off the coast of each would do the trick nicely.

But what did we get? Longer lines at the emergency room, lower pay for physicians, and fuckall about the geopolitical and geospatial state and integrity of the world.

So the offer still stands, Obama. Let's get some kebabs. I keep telling you, they're right by the Pentagon, which you seem to not be getting enough time near. We can have Afghani or Pakistani kebabs, both within two miles. Who knew, right? You don't have to eat pork because they're Halal, and I imagine, since you're POTUS and all, they might just cook you a fucking bowl of chili. But it would be the best bit of foreign fucking policy you've done since you've gotten into office.

And you need to stop raising that index finger when you talk to people. It does not become you, and it signifies nothing. Your words are only now becoming worthy of pithy deeds. Scolding the nation, or Republicans, or Democrats, or whoever it is that sanctimonious finger is for, is not now, nor has it ever worked. So stuff it. Talk about some real fucking issues.

If you can't, say you can't. Nobody said "we can't talk about some of our current operations in Viet Nam" when we were bombing the shit out of Cambodia; they lied and said they weren't. So, you don't need to bomb Cambodia—really. But if you have guys with green eyes and SOPMOD M4's running around in pajamas killing dudes, and MQ-1's and MQ-9's and RQ-4's burning up the damn globe, where necessary, please, tell us, we're doing some spooky deniable shit we can't talk about, but dammit, we're doing it!!

For fucks sake.