The Last Ephor

Since April is nearly over and it's autism awareness month, I suppose I should talk a bit about it. I guess the best way to start is to rehash the story of How I Got Here. My oldest was born in 1999. Healthy, happy and so on. One peculiar thing he did as an infant was to avoid eye contact. Our doctor assured us it was because he was so young and his eyesight was undeveloped and he was probably focusing on something in the background that was more interesting. Besides, babies don't recognize faces for a few months after birth. Only later did we find out that our doctor was an idiot. He was 16 mos. old when his little brother was born and he was walking and making wishes known by pulling me or my wife by the hand to whatever he wanted etc. He was fascinated with the wheels on toys. If you gave him a truck he'd turn it over and spin the wheels and smile. Only later would I find out this is a major warning sign. This was our first born and what the hell did I know? ...

Jeremy Clarkson. If you're a car nut automotive enthusiast you probably know him. If not, witness his scathing wit . Personal favorites in bold 1. [On the Enzo Ferrari] “I rang up Jay Kay, who’s got one, and said: “Can we borrow yours?” and he said, “Yeah, if I can borrow your daughter, because it amounts to the same thing.” 2. [On the Mercedes CLS55 AMG] “It sounds like Barry White eating wasps.” 3. “That [Pagani] Zonda, really! It’s like a lion in orange dungarees. Kind of fierce, but ridiculous all at the same time.” 4. “Speed has never killed anyone, suddenly becoming stationary... that’s what gets you.” 5. [On the Porsche Cayman S] “There are many things I’d rather be doing than driving it, including waiting for Bernard Manning to come off stage in a sweaty nightclub, and then licking his back clean.” 6. “Owning a TVR in the past was like owning a bear. I mean it was great, until it pulled your head off, which it would.” 7. [On the Alfa Romeo Brera] “Think of it as Angelin...

h/t: Everyone

Inconvenient Untruth There is new evidence of misleading information in Al Gore's Oscar-winning global warming film "An Inconvenient Truth." ABC News reports one of the most famous shots in the movie — of Antarctic ice shelves — is a fake. The film's visual effects supervisor says the film took the shot from the fictional movie "The Day After Tomorrow," which created it from Styrofoam and scanned it into a computer. "Yeah, that's our shot," she says. "That's a fully computer-generated shot. There's nothing real in there." ABC wanted to ask Gore whether it was wrong for a documentary to use a fabricated shot to make a point, but says he did not return their calls. I can hear it now. "It doesn't matter if the footage is fake! He's trying to make a point you dolt! It speaks to a larger truth even if he's using footage from an alarmist Hollywood thriller."

Los Angeles is becoming a "Third World city" with immigrants making up half its workforce, says a new study. Becoming? Welcome to the party but you're a little late. A third of immigrants have not graduated from high school and 60 per cent do not speak English fluently, the Migration Policy Institute found. Let alone the native born anglos who can't speak English properly. It said this left immigrants ill-equipped to fill California's fastest-growing occupations, such as computer software engineering and nursing. The organisation added that as the so-called baby boomers reach retirement age, a similar pattern will spread across the US. 1. Boomers aren't going to retire any time soon. 2. That pattern will be most pronounced in border states. Ernesto Cortes Jr, of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a think-tank that specialises on social change, claimed Los Angeles was at a crossroads. "The question is are we going to be a 21st century city with shared pr...

Mordred's Lullaby Heather Dale Marsh Child, the darkness will rise from the deep, And carry you down into sleep; Child, the darkness will rise from the deep, And carry you down into sleep. Guile, my son, I'll shape your belief And you'll always know that your father's a thief And you won't understand the cause of your grief But you'll always follow the voices beneath. (Loyalty...) Guile, my son, your spirit will hate her: The flower who married my brother, the traitor; And you will expose his puppet behavior, For you are the proof of how he betrayed her. (Loyalty...) Marsh Child, the darkness will rise from the deep And carry you down into sleep, Child, the darkness will rise from the deep, And carry you down into sleep. (Loyalty...) Guile, my son, each day you'll grow older, Each moment I'm watching my vengeance unfold: The child of my body, the flesh of my soul, Will die and return the birthright he stole. (Loyalty...) Marsh Child, the darkness will ri...

These guys are always raising hue and cry about corporate greed. Somehow they missed this one: Unable to say exactly how it happened, DFL Senate candidate Al Franken acknowledged Friday that his personal corporation wrongly failed to provide employees with workers' compensation insurance in New York for nearly three years. According to campaign manager Andy Barr, the accountant for Alan Franken Inc. (AFI) who investigated the case for five weeks was unable to figure out "the exact circumstances that led to the oversight." However, the accountant "has determined that, in fact, AFI was not in full compliance during the period in question," Barr said in a statement. "Therefore, no further attempt will be made to contest the resolved judgment." New York state officials said Friday that since Franken had paid the $25,000 court judgment entered against AFI last year, they also considered the matter closed. Not so state Republican Party Chairman Ron Carey,...

Top 10 Reasons Mitt Romney Dropped out of the race: No. 10: There weren’t as many Osmonds as he thought. No. 9: Got tired of the corkscrew landings of his campaign plane while under fire No. 8: As a lifelong hunter, I didn’t want to miss the start of varmint season. No. 7: There wasn’t room for two Christian leaders in the presidential race No. 6: I’d rather get fat, grow a beard and try for the Nobel prize. No. 5: Got tired of wearing a dark suit and tie, and I wanted to kick back in a light colored suit and tie. No. 4: When his wife realized he couldn’t win the GOP nomination, my fundraising dried up. No. 2: I took a bad fall at a campaign rally and broke my hair. No. 1: His campaign relied on a flawed campaign strategy that as Utah goes, so goes the nation. h/t: Malkin

So.... After losing the Battle of Pencader Manor, Mother Nature continues the fight. Friday I had to vacate the Manor for the Battle Bridge * as a play date was imminent. It was a beautiful day so I had the windows open. Zipping along merrily on my way when a wasp Satan's Own Winged Minion entered the cockpit of the Duffmobile. He began his assault and I began defense. I started defense with the standard yelping and swatting. Somehow it didn't occur to me to slow down. Chalk that up to panic. He got me on the palm of my hand. It started to swell and itch almost immediately. Finally I gave one good swat and out the window he went. The upside of not slowing down was that he was very quickly behind me. Ha! You better bring a better air assault than that baby! Once at the Battle Bridge I logged in and started working. It was cool so I thought I'd sit in the sunroom. I opened the door to the sunroom and was met by volcanic heat that was so voluminous it practic...

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This is round two. Round one was last year a minor skirmish in which I vanquished my opponents thoroughly. I didn't think they had the mettle to return to test my resolve but they did. Last year, starlings decided that my grill was a great place to make a happy home. There's a small vent/hole in the side of the grill that I suppose is there to prevent excessive gas buildup or something. Either that or the designers really liked birds and figured the grills that go unused would be excellent housing for homeless (nestless?) birds. I first noticed the infiltration had begun when I was having my morning beverage and looking out over the scenic view endless housing development. I was lost in thought and standing quite still in front of the sliding glass door. I saw a starling alight on the deck rail and give me the hairy eyeball. He had a long strand of cypress grass in his beak and gave me that "whadday ya gonna do about it chump?" look that only starlings can ...

So last week I was telling you about the changes to the servers here at work. (Riveting reading, I know) The thing is, I'm the admin on a legacy app. This is a nightmare. It means that when it comes to maintenance we're not mission critical. Not until something goes wrong that is. We had to move from one server cluster to another. (These are virtual nodes) Normally, sane operators create the new system in parallel and then redirect from old server to new. They then wait to make sure everything goes well before decommissioning the old one. Nah, let's not do that. Let's just image the old server on the new one and then cut over. The redirect will work fine. No need to wait until after we've had the users try and hit the new server. We'll retire it over the weekend and wipe the old server clean. Folder permission, and all other settings will be lost but really, who cares? Sunday night ~ 11:00 PM, log on and find that I cannot remote into the new serv...

We're moving the filestore today. That means it will be off line. I've decided to keep this information secret by emailing my users, their managers and contractors for the past two weeks. I've also hidden it on a scroll on the main page in 36 point font. Herewith is the message I sent: Hi All, This is to inform you that the file store (K-drive) will be unavailable Friday, April 11 2008 beginning at 2 PM. The outage is scheduled to last (36 hours) through Saturday, April 12. During this outage, users will be able to refresh reports stored locally. However, [redacted] web reports (both [redacted] and [redacted]) will be unavailable. The outage is scheduled to allow us to migrate to a better performing server with more storage than the current K-drive. Should you have any questions related to this outage, please contact me at the numbers below or [redacted] (by Sametime). Thank you for your patience and understanding while we upgrade our hardware. Bold in original. We to...

No, I am not kidding . If this makes any sense to you at all, please explain it to me in the comments

As his son's funeral neared, Jeff Cathey's tears rarely stopped. He often found comfort in the men who shared his son's uniform. "Someone asked me what I learned from my son," he said. "He taught me you need more than one friend."

Things I don't get that everyone else seems to like: 1. Arrested Development (weird people and not a single character I can relate to) 2. Curb Your Enthusiasm (Larry David is annoyed by picayune things. Lather, rinse, repeat.) 3. American Idol (Marx was wrong. TV is the opiate of the masses and this is the Greater East India Company of the whole shebang) Survivor (when they give them weapons and it's winner take all, call me) Season's/Grottos (abominations both) Light Beer (you need to seriously reexamine your life if you're male and drinking this crap) The Rolling Stones (They should have stopped them dead in their tracks after Undercover was released) Rita's Water Ice (C'mon people, it's just frozen sugar water) The latest/greatest cellphone (I use mine for work and the occasional personal call) Ringtones (enough. Put is on vibrate already) Text messaging (it has it's place but sending me Anna Karenina on my cellphone is not going to endear me...

I'm an 80's kid! Hair Bands Score: 100% (10 out of 10)

I've not heard this elsewhere but I'd be hard pressed to think I'm the only one to come up with the idea. If the Government means to bail out Bear Stearns (or whatever lending entities made loans to people who defaulted) why not simply pay off the mortgages and give the titles to the borrowers? Call it "trickle up" economics. The people at the bottom rung keep their houses, Bear gets paid and stays in business. They'd have to spin this carefully to avoid the "rewarding irresponsibility" argument that is sure to follow. YMMV.