Author Archives: OGHD

Things are good.  Not great, but good.  Certainly good enough to take a moment and reflect without regret.

The job goes well, although it eats up all of my energy.  I’m in a challenging but rewarding spot, with the promise of a position I have wanted for a long time.  I currently work long shifts in a command center so cold that my fingers go numb.  Well, it beats the heat and humidity outside.  It’s a grueling job, between the rapid-fire pace of many things and the need to keep an eye on the slow-moving items that go dormant if you let them.  High expectations and too many bosses, but it’s a stable situation answered to the best of our organizational capacity.  And that is what we are … Continue reading →

Lap times:
1. 8 53.96
2. 7 17.73
3. 7 11.82

Doctor Charles Krauthammer, a paralyzed psychiatrist and irascibly syndicated columnist, writes that he has only weeks to live.  The letter is matter-of-fact, and the fact is that it’s over.

This unwelcome sentence is occasioned by a fast-moving cancer which had looked to be beaten, but which gained the upper hand.  A rapidly invasive, mid-abdominal cancer “everywhere” sounds perhaps like the miserable interconnected pancreas/gall bladder.  I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer about a year ago, and if you know how to do the “pancreas salute”, then you know that this one is meaner than many.

Krauthammer has been a fixture on the TV screens of reasonable and unreasonable people alike, depending upon whether or not you agree with me about politics.  I parted with him in many of … Continue reading →

An amazing remix of a song I already like very much. Very subdued, a very pleasant but relentless tension. Pen Perry (whomever that is) has found a way to rely on the crashing energy of the original and include yet omit it at the same time. Waiting for the blast that never comes — feeling it nonetheless. There is a presence, like something large and invisible standing just behind you. Off to one side. It’s probably friendly. Probably.

Had a brush with some badness named “openh264.org”.

I am sitting in a Starbucks with its own internet access, my very own local shady access point.  When I connect to the access point, there is a popup which requires me to click I ACCEPT THE TERMS etc, and then hit the CONNECT button. This usually goes smoothly, as I have the password stored, and that’s all I have to do. But today I got hit with a pop-up that said such-and-such a site is trying to download(?) a file.  The file was named something like this:

http(s?)://ciscobinary.openh264.org/{LONG-ugly-UID-here}.zip

What do you want to do with this file, open with IE, do something else, [ ] remember this choice, OK/CANCEL.

This popul was the obscured by another that said something … Continue reading →

Here’s where I was — struggling with my emotions, mustering some Generalship for my beleaguered FaceBook group, heavy into politics.  Back when this blog of mine was political (you can still find a bunch of remnants here and there), back when I was a small cheese in a big way in the FB Tea Party scene, back before I had to take a year off of politics from my inability to write or even think about it.  This is where I was a month or two before joining Second Life to find a whole different gang in a whole different context.  Good Lord, what a dump.

But here I was on that miserable day, when I was staggered at the fact that the incumbent President had won re-election.  … Continue reading →

There are many fine arguments for and against a guest worker program, but the whole thing should be a non-starter. Not only is it unconstitutional, it is clearly at odds with every legislative advance made in the rights of Man since… Magna Carta?

It’s bad enough on its face, but consider the implications for the future. Those like me —  who see the dark hand of communism not behind every mishap, but certainly hovering somewhere nearby, ready to capitalize (if you will) on America’s every mistake — will feel a particular threat from a guest worker program.  As Marxism is fueled by dissatisfaction and steered by class struggle, we could hardly invite revolutionary agitation any more efficiently than by creating a dissatisfied underclass in this land of plenty.  … Continue reading →

From time to time I hear a song and I think, “Now *that* is the sound of love.”  Don’t get me wrong — I have serious epistemological issues with the whole damned thing, but there is a sound that seems to fit the bill.

Now I am not talking about the sound of (ahem) making love (see Aerosmith, Back in the Saddle, ahem ahem, if you get my drift), or music which puts one in the mood for love (paging Dr. Barry White).  Just the sound of the emotion itself.

The first song that seemed to capture that sound for me was Sara by Fleetwood Mac.  There’s a story behind the song, layered and poignant, which sort of fits and not fits.  But the sound is wun hunnert … Continue reading →

I have around 8K users on this site. Most of them are nonsense, but I do have several who actually exist. I want to bulk delete a bunch, so I am going in search of a tool which is better than the default ability in WP.

[Gave up on that.]

Here’s where I knew I had a problem. I have become kind of a numbers nut, seeing a power law distribution everywhere. If you can group things, you can get them to show you a power law. Well, typically. In the past I have gone into the WP user management area, searched for users from a given domain, and gone from there. For example, anybody with an email address ending in @mail.ru is gone for sure. Except on … Continue reading →