
FLATEOTM: August 2003
No, I didn’t forget.
QOTM: It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. -Arthur Conan Doyle, physician and writer (1859-1930)

Israel and Iran are not exactly best friends
Remember Osirak? No, I didn’t think so. That’s because the Israelis maded it nothing more than a memory in 1981. It was the Iraqi nuclear power plant just south of Baghdad. Israel flew a bunch of F-16s and F-15s around Jordan, across Saudi Arabia and Iraq, bombed the reactor, and flew home on one tank of gas. Now, according to the Washington Times, they’re planning to do the same to an Iranian plant called Bushehr.
My only question is “what were the reporters thinking when they listened to their ‘insider’?”
Read more…

Castro dies and goes to heaven [bear with me]…
When he gets there, St. Peter tells him that he is not on the list and that, no way, no how, does he belong in heaven. Castro must go to hell. So Castro goes to hell, where Satan gives him a hearty welcome and tells him to make himself at home.
Then Castro notices that he left his luggage in heaven and tells Satan, who says, ‘No hay problema, I’ll send a couple of little devils to get your stuff.’
When the little devils get to heaven they find the gates are locked – St. Peter is having lunch – and they start debating what to do. Finally, one comes up with the idea that they should climb over the wall and get the luggage.
As they are climbing, two little angels see them, and one angel says to the other, ‘Would you look at that? Fidel has been in hell no more than ten minutes and we’re already getting refugees!’

De plane, boss, de plane!
It looks like the Air Force is developing a new plane. Why? According to this report, classified weapons spending by the USAF is up by $4 billion over the past 3 years. Makes you wonder what the Bird of Prey Demonstrator demonstrated, exactly. In other USAF news, we are done with the mission in Saudi Arabia. And in a related story, Lt. Smash is home, so go buy him a beer.

New PC At Work
One of my coworkers at work is getting a new PC and its my job to fix it up so he can use it. That means taking the old hard drive our of his PC and putting it in the new one, as well as installing an OS and several other things. The good news is that the old PC is going to become a file/print server, so people won’t be invading my office to retrieve their print jobs. The bad news is it’s getting reloaded with Win2000 Server. The other bad news is that the new PC refuses to recognize the DNS servers on the network, so it can’t connect to the outside world. Aarrgh.
I hate Windows, if you couldn’t tell.

Mars and Hurricanes
Mars was at it’s closest last night, and will continue to be extremely bright the next few nights. But what is an aspiring astronomer supposed to do, since the skies are filled with the remnants of a hurricane? Just sit around and wait, I guess. Oh well.

It’s Official. I’m A Geezer.
And this proves it. One of my cousins is one of “those yung’uns” mentioned in the article, starting at the U of AZ.
Great.

Word Study: Provoke
Ever wonder what the word vex means? I did, so I did a word study on it. It is one of those red-flag words, meaning if someone is saying “you’re vexing me”, or “you’re provoking me”, stop it! There are some pretty bad consequences. You may need the fonts found in this archive in order to read it correctly. FYI, Mozilla 1.4 seems to think this Bible study needs to be displayed only in italics, for some strange reason. IE renders it correctly.

Howard Dean is in the Wall Street Journal
Yeah, that Howard Dean. It seems the WSJ has given him a forum to vent his views on the vastness that is the national economy. What results is a voluminous kvetching against George and all that Big Dub’s economic policies promote (like economic growth).
Read more…

Sorting out Windows XP
Which comes first – 2 or 10? 2, if you’re sorting numerically. But if you’re sorting alphabetically, 10 comes first, because of the way Windows sorts things (like filenames).
Or more specifically, how Windows used to sort things.
Read more…