Parrot's Kick Ass. I didn't know parrots could live to be this old. I just hope that if I make it to 104,… [IMAO]
This is way too funny! Winston Churchill's parrot is the oldest living bird in England and Winston taught it to cuss at Hitler and the Nazi's. Although the bird is called Charlie she is a female.
We had an interesting conversation at the dinner table tonight. I asked my son what his wrestling partner needed to do to improve. My wife broke in and said he needed to change wrestling partners if he wanted to improve. That surprised me! She saw her first wrestling match a week ago. She then gave us a lecture on why he should pick a heavier partner but not to heavy. She had some interesting points but there is no reason to rush into major changes. This is his first season. Watching my son wrestle and play hockey has been an enlightning experience for me. Naturally I enjoyed wrestling because I was good at it. A less obvious reason was that I was responsible for winning or losing. Recently I have heard several people echo the same comment on responsibility. A loss in a team sport leaves you with fuzzy feelings about responsibility. I think my son has begun to to enjoy wrestling for the same reasons. He enjoys winning. He enjoys being responsible. The success he has had at wrestling has giving him a lot of self confidence in his ability to check the bigger guys in hockey. I think I see the benefits of a team sport much better than when I was growing up. The teamwork required on a sports team is very similar to that required in the business world. The process on humbling yourself to the team's needs develops great character and great teams. I wish I knew this when I was in high school.
At the 5th and 6th grade celebration the small group discussion was about what does WWJD really mean? I was surprised to find that this was a much harder subject for the kids to talk about. They answered the small group questions easily but the discussion between the leaders and the kids quickly lost its focus. Later when I was reviewing the night with a couple of the leaders I mentioned that Jon Kitna wears a WWJD bracelet. Jon Kitna is the quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals. I can imagine that the pressure on a professional quarterback by the media and his teamates to deliver wins is tremendous. Life is probably pretty confusing and lonely for a professional quarterback. Sometimes the difference between being a hero or a goat hinges on one play. In a week most people will have forgotten the play and the game. I believe Jon wears the bracelet to remind himself who he is and what his goals in life are. I cannot help but think that the bracelet helps him get his feet back on the ground and be the man he always has been and always will be. The key to being a great player and person is to humble yourself to the game, your opponents, the coaches, and your teammates. It is not about doing less but about doing more by focusing on the good things in the game and life. Humbleness allows you to see the world clearer and make the right decisions. The key to unlock the humbleness inside us is to imagine what Jesus would do. I think this works for Jon both on the field and off.
I ran a vulnerability scan on my local network using Nessus after reading a nice How-To article I found on SecurityFocus. The scan took a pretty long time but it did not crash anything. The scan did not show any major vulnerabilities but I have a couple of items I need to research. Oh well!
I have been spread thin the last couple of days. I have been trying to finish up the annual and quarterly employer reports and W2s. Its not a hard job but I had to squeeze it in between videoing horses, juggling bank accounts, holding horses for the farrier, and going to my son's wrestling match. The good news is that I was able to file all of the state reports online. The last report to finally make the cut was the school district tax report. That is much easier for me and I am sure it must be much easier for the state. Tommorrow should be a little easier. I plan on finishing up the reports, W2s, and 1099s for Habitat.
Our house is actually a combination house and barn. This can be really convenient if taking care of horses is a high priority in your life. It does have its drawbacks though. Around the evening feeding time my wife came upstairs to take a shower and watch Oprah and the news before dinner. Then she started screaming, “There is no hot water!” I was sent off to investigate. The water heater sounded like it was heating and the washing machine was not running. Then I found the culprit. The girls had used the hot water to fill the water buckets for the horses.
Today I decided to try out knoppix. A couple of day ago my son told me he could not install the Age of Mythology game I got him for Christmas because he did not have enough disk space. He had already installed another Christmas present, Medieval Total War, and it requires 1.7 GB of disk space. A couple of weeks ago I bought the fedora core 1, openoffice, and knoppix cds from www.cheapbytes.com. I bought Knoppix because I heard you can boot from the cd and you can use it as a rescue disk. I booted from the cd and everything came up. Some of the plethora of open source packages that comes with knoppix is a partition magic clone and a Ghost clone. This is really cool! My plan is to buy a new disk drive and use the utilities that come with the drive to move the stuff to the new drive. Plan B is to try and fix the problem with these utilities. Plan C is to re-install.
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism.
I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion.
Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
Michael Crichton
Remarks to the Commonwealth Club
15 September 2003
Developer Toolbars. Wouldn't it be nice to have one-click access to the validators? And surely there's an easier way to snap your… [Web Standards Project BUZZ]
The article leads you to a very nice toolbar for the web developer who is interested in validating web pages.
I reconfigured my Fedora1 box to use a static address and hostname that is different than the one that is used when it boots as a W2K workstation. This should keep my son and my active directory happy. By using a different IP address I can limit when I expose open ports to the internet.
I mounted a shared directory on my SBS server using the instructions in www.sbslinks.com/Linux.htm. I am working through an article by Vitor Feitosa, Authenticating Windows 2000 users on a Linux Workstation. Once I get all of this to work I will have a single signon for my network. I will wait until I get my copy of Microsoft Services for Unix. I picked up a copy last week for the cost of shipping. I could use a copy of schema extension I got off the Internet but I have opted to wait.
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