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A test post of sorts.

After editing and editing the Cee-Lo Green piece, Blogger got all froggy on me and I have been unable to fix it since A) it exceeded my ability and B) I stopped trying.
Well, let’s get back to business shall we? Changes are coming. I may even move into my own domain, which has languished for years. Anyway–short post coming up.

Alan, the protagonist for my novel A Rain of Dust, is modeled on Arkady Renko from Martin Cruz Smith’s awesome Gorky Park books. I was stuck hard on the writing, until I let Alan call Major Pribluda, one of the characters from Gorky Park for a bracing picker-upper. It worked–there’s a sprint in this phone call which eluded me in RL, and I went on to add another thousand words in the hour after I wrote this:

He looked at the progress bar in its agonizing crawl across the screen, and realized that all this database work was just slowing dow the novel. Fuck this too.
On the drive back north he used the hands-free for his cell phone.
“Misha, pick up the phone if you’re in. I … Continue reading →

Americans know what the plebes around the world can only guess at–that the Constitution makes each American sovereign. Deep down, it was ramming bills through without even reading, much less explaining them, and anti-Constitutional shenanigans such as “deeming” passed a bill which had plainly not passed as an end-run against well-designed safeguards, which cost the Democrats this year.

Most Americans cannot explain this, but they know it in their bones. If the Constitution is not the supreme law of the land, then nothing is, and we refuse to devolve into a mob, which is where we were headed under the feckless bungling of the last two years.

Continue reading →

Bill Maher Afraid Mohammeds, Islam Taking Over Western World | Mediaite: “I don’t have to apologize, do I, for not wanting the Western world to be taken over by Islam in 300 years?”

How is it that I agree with Bill Maher on anything? I am not anti-Islam. I am not pro-Islam. I have friends who are Muslim and I wish harm upon no Muslim simply for his religion. I am a big fan of western civilization, which, for all its warts, is pretty damned good. The only problem I have with a live-and-let-live agreement is where basic human rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are infringed. We have made great progress in securing these rights for an ever-increasing percentage of people in … Continue reading →

There’s a fair bit of advice out there about converting the miserable integer8 (ANSI) date format into something you can use, but for some reason, none of it quite works for me.

I have been using MS SQL SERVER 2005, which may or may not be a specific part of the problem.

ANSI dates begin 1/1/1601, while Microsoft dates have, until recently, begun 1/1/1900.  Also, I believe MS dates are/were measured in millisecond, but I’m not sure.  I do know that the ANSI timestamp is represented in units of 100 nanoseconds since 1/1/1601, which is where we start.

If you grab the lastLogonTimestamp from Active Directory (say, by doing a csvde -m -f output.csv and the using the Jet.4.0 connector to represent the directory as a linked server’s … Continue reading →

Doctor Cassell’s notice to customers. [Fair Use Claimed. Original caption and credits: “Sign at the office door of Dr. Jack Cassell, a Mount Dora urologist. (Photo by Deirdre Lewis / April 1, 2010)”]

As reported in the Orlando Sentinel: Mount Dora doctor tells Obama supporters: Go elsewhere

I admit that I’m torn as to whether this is acceptable for a doctor, as opposed to a different sort of business.  After all, I think that we are all fairly opposed to seeing a notice on the door of a medical provider telling you that you will be seen based on your politics.

In the end, however, I find it acceptable.  Here’s … Continue reading →

Keeping your bottom dry since 1871

Following text peeled shamelessly from Wikipedia:

In 1866, the Tokugawa shogunate government established the Yokosuka Seisakusho, a military arsenal and naval base, with the help of foreign engineers, including the French naval architect Léonce Verny. The new facility was intended to produce modern, western-style warships and equipment for the Tokugawa navy. The construction of the arsenal was an important first step for the modernization of Japan’s industry. Modern buildings, an aqueduct, foundry, brick factories, technical schools to train Japanese technicians were established.

After the Boshin War and the Meiji Restoration, the new Meiji government took over control of the facility in 1871, renaming it the Yokosuka Zosenjo (Yokosuka Shipyards). The first dry dock … Continue reading →