September 2006 Archives

Redefining justice

I was blown away by what happens in some of the justice courts in upstate NY (and likely elsewhere), listed here in the NY Times. The article is pretty long, but you can get a lot from just the first page.So what's the big deal?

"Some of the courtrooms are not even courtrooms: tiny offices or basement rooms without a judge's bench or jury box. Sometimes the public is not admitted, witnesses are not sworn to tell the truth, and there is no word-for-word record of the proceedings. Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many -- truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers -- have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school."

Here are some more tidbits:
One woman tried to get a restraining order against her abusive scumbag husband who even threatened to kill her. It was denied. Why? "Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then," according to the justice. That's just sickening. Another justice who ordered a neighbor's dog killed because it had been running loose. His opinion of the law: "I just follow my own common sense, and the hell with the law."Having fun yet? Well, another justice took home a 17-yr-old female defendent with him.There's also a follow-on article that talks about attempts over the years to reform the justice courts.

A hint of light?

There's not a lot of good news coming from Iraq. There have been many milestones of progress, but the insugency has done very well in suffocating the liberty and life from Baghdad and beyond. One of the most violent and lethal "beyond" places is Anbar province, home to Fallujah and Ramadi. In a hint of light, 25 of the 31 tribes signed and submitted to the government a proposal to fight the insurgency, specifically the foriegn Al-Qaeda fighters. That could be huge, but there are reasons for concern. I've been wrong before in heeding optimistic news. Plus, they are requesting more sophisticated weapons from the government (beyond their AK47s). That makes me a little nervous, but I have to admit I'd love to see the people finally be able to stand up to the terrorists and help bring desperately needed peace to the area.

Kernel fights

You could call this sibling rivalry, but it's not about popcorn. This is about Linux kernel problems - basically two closely related kernels that are giving me fits. In short I'm having bizarre connectivity problems between 2.6.17 and 2.6.5-7 (Novell SLES 9). I'm running a 2.6.17 FC5 kernel. The servers I'm trying to access are running SLES 9 SP3, which is a 2.6.5-7 kernel. I can ssh in and then it either hangs displaying the MOTD or will hang as soon as I type a command whose output takes up more than about 1 line of the screen. At that point I have to force disconnect. This has been gnawing at me for months now and hurting my productivity (especially with scp). I'm getting around it by logging into another box first (running an older kernel), but it's driving me crazy. I realize I could set up an ssh tunnel, but I want things to just work normally.With some experimentation, we found it's not just the FC5 version of the 2.6.17 kernel either; a friend is running a Debian install with 2.6.17 and has the same problem. He was able to back-rev to 2.6.16 and the problem went away. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to back-rev my FC5 kernel, though I'm sure there's a way.

Order of things

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So I've had reason recently to think about the order of progression in a relationship. I'm curious to see what you (especially the females) think about the proper order of things when starting out. Oh, and this is meant to be "PG" :).You go out on a first date, you have fun, you go out on a second date, etc. Here are my questions:

  • When do you think the guy should make the first move?
  • When should the guy go for the hand and should the girl be making the hand readily available?
  • When should he go for the arm around the shoulders in the theatre?
  • When should he go for the cuddle?
  • The kiss?

We'll stop there. I have my thoughts but want to hear others'.

Incredible bike show

A guy at work passed around this video of a girl performing bike stunts. I know people have probably seen too many "Ya gotta see this..." emails, but I have to say that I was impressed. I wonder if you just need lots and lots and lots of practice to do something like this, or if there is some supernormal ability (like anti-gravity) needed to do this.

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This page is an archive of entries from September 2006 listed from newest to oldest.

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