Daniel Cody - “Left on the Lake”

What happened to GWB’s promise of reuniting the country by reaching across the aisle?

Refusing to take no for an answer on 20 of his judicial choices, President Bush indicated Thursday that he intends to re-nominate them when the new Congress convenes - CBS news

I guess I’m wondering why Pres. Bush is trying to change the landscape of American law by appointing activist judges to the bench?

It seems everyone from Joe Biden to Trent Lott is pilling the criticism on Donald Rumsfeld these days. It started last week when Rummy was questioned by a Guard member who asked why he and his crew were having to search landfills for scrap metal to armor their vehicles. Rumsfeld’s reply was, “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want.” which is complete bullshit since the US was the side who decided to (preemptively) invade after nearly eight months of buildup.

Now everyone is complaining that he wasn’t signing the death notices of US troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan himself, but having a machine to it to save time.

My biggest question here for people like Lott who are just now starting to criticize Rummy is where the hell have you been for the past 20 months? It’s not like Rumsfeld just started not signing these death notices on Monday or anything, he’s been doing it for the better part of two years. Why are you just complaing now about it? Same thing with the armor on vehicles. It isn’t like these guys had the vehicle armor they needed last Spring and this Winter it was taken away. They’ve never had the armor they needed, and it took a gutsy guardsman to ask the question that everyone, especially our reps in Congress, should have been asking the first time we saw a Humvee blown to bits by an IED on CNN.

So why ratchet up the criticizm now? My bet is a lot of people are starting to look for a fall guy to pin the entire Iraq mess on, and God knows we can’t blame the President for anything to do with the decision to start a preemtive war for which there was no clear reason to begin in the first place and no exit strategy to get us out when it was ‘finished’.

Can we blame him though for continuing to keep Rumsfeld onboard, even praising him as the best Sec. of Defense in our history, and telling us all how much faith he has in him as recently as yesterday?

The fact is Rumsfeld should’ve been the first Cabinet Sec. to be handed his walking papers for the monumental failure in Iraq. Instead, he was asked by the President to stay on for the next four years.

Instead of the Rumsfeld pile on we’re seeing now, perhaps there should be some people asking why he was asked by Bush to stay on in the first place?

In a surprise to no one, National Guard recruitment is short almost 30% of it’s goal in the last two months.

With 12-18 month extended tours, second rate equipment, and the prospect of being shipped off to the front lines in Iraq, it’s no wonder. What’s the DoD plan when they can’t rotate large numbers of new Guard members into Iraq to keep troop levels where they need to be?

Hopefully the planning is better than just about everything else they’ve dealt with in Iraq.

The presentation this weekend I gave for the Milwaukee LUG (linux users group) went pretty well! There were about 27 people who showed up for the presentation on Saturday, one of which was Jenny, who was a trooper for sitting through all the Unix in-jokes and showing her support. It was nice to have her there, so she could see a little bit of what I actually do for a living instead of just hearing about it, and she says she learned a few things about Linux by being at the presentation.

For those interested, a PDF copy of my presentation on recompiling the Linux kernel is here.

One other person of interest in attendance at Saturdays meeting was Rick Miller, one of the original Linux kernel developers. When he said who he was during the beginning introductions, I have to admit I felt a bit nervous about giving a presentation on the Linux kernel to one of the original kernel developers.

It’s a bit like teaching a Greek literature class where on the first day, Aristotle himself shows up and lets you know he’ll be auditing your class. Well, maybe Linus Torvalds showing up for the presentation would be like Aristotle or Plato, but you get the point. I was giving a talk on something this guy had a part in creating, and that’s a bit daunting to say the least.

However, the presentation rolled on and out of the corner of my eye I found him nodding in agreement with me on most of the points I was making, and he jumped in a few times to clarify or provide some back story on certain other points which was interesting and educational.

At the end of the two hour talk, everyone seemed to have enjoyed the presentation, Rick included. He said he learned a few things about the 2.6 series Linux kernel which he wasn’t that familiar with from my presentation. That was a nice compliment to say the least.

Overall it felt pretty nice to get back up in front of a group of people and talk about something I’m familiar with, we’ll have to see if I can find other opportunities to continue doing it…

It’s been a long time since I’ve given any sort of presentation, but the drought ends this weekend when I give a presentation on compiling the Linux Kernel this weekend for the Milwaukee Linux Users Group (MLUG).

The meetings are held at the Waukesha County Technical College (directions here) in room B079 of he Business Occupations building, and I’ll be talking at 1pm. If you’re interested in the in’s and out’s of the Linux Kernel (and who isn’t?!??!) stop by for the presentation and say hi!

Can anyone tell me why the President of the United States feels compelled to play military dress up all the time? I mean the flight suit was bad enough, but now they’re just making costumes up for the guy!

The least they can do is stick with ‘real’ uniforms, although the president having to parade around on the catwalk in military garb isn’t exactly professional or presidential in my opinion.

This Starship Trooper President outfit is only slightly less ridiculous than the movie itself.

If you’re tired of spam clogging your Inbox, or the add on anti-spam programs for Outlook Express that slow your machine to a crawl, or if you’re tired of constantly worrying about who’s sending your viruses through email, the folks from the Mozilla foundation have email client for you: Thunderbird.

In the same way that the Firefox web browser let people get back to surfing the web instead of dealing with pop-ups, crashing, and all the other great things about IE, Thunderbird is an Outlook Express replacement that helps you stop dealing with the crashing, viruses, and spam and get back to reading and enjoying email. Hence their slogan: “Reclaim Your Inbox”.

Today the Mozilla foundation released version 1.0 of Thunderbird after years of testing and development. I’ve been using it for about a year and a half now, and think it’s a great email client, especially for ‘power’ email users. It runs on OS X, Linux, and Windows, is free for download and has feautres like adaptive junk mail controls, rss reader, message grouping, saved search folders, and more.