Two entries in one day. Wow. I'm almost blogging.

Words have different meanings to different types of people. Mention "dossier" to a 60's-era activist, and they probably have images of a dusty manila folder being studied by The Man. Mention "dossier" to me, on the other hand, and I immediately think of baby girls.

That's part and parcel of having adopted children. My two girls - who are, by the way, the two most absolutely beautiful and wonderful girls in the whole world (of course) - were born in China, and each was adopted at the age of about 9 months.

Why mention this now? Well... yesterday, our dossier was shipped out to the PRC by our adoption agency. This is the packet of paperwork that goes to China in order to start their end of the adoption process. Putting it together this third time around was a bit easier, but it's still an amazingly annoying, slow, and frustrating process to assemble all the paperwork.

Making sure all the i's are dotted, all the t's are crossed, getting everything notarized thrice over, getting it translated. You end up putting three copies of everything in your dossier in three seperate physcial locations (including a safe-deposit box!) because of the way the timing works out. See, by the time you've got your dossier assembled and ready to send to the adoption agency for translation, your daughter-to-be is probably about to be born, or has just been born... and by the grace of God and all that is holy and good, you will not miss going to get your daughter because someone managed to loose or misplace even a single scrap of paper.

That's what we've done already. Get this notarized; check that for spelling errors; call the agency about the home study update. With all that completed... now the waiting starts. We've been praying for our new daughter every night for the last 6 months, but at least there was always something we had to do, something we could do. Now it's entirely out of our hands. It's frustrating, nerve wrackingly so at times. When the waiting gets bad, all I can do is look at my two daughters and remember how hard it was to wait for them; how perfect everything was when I first held them in my arms; and how every delay and hiccup that occured while we were waiting for them was instrumental in making sure that the children God intended for us ended up in our care.

All we can do now is wait, and pray. God bless you, mei-mei. May He keep you from being cold, or hungry, or lonely. May He keep you safe, and warm, and give you someone to care for you and cuddle you, until your forever Mama and Dada can come to China to make you part of our family.

Just got off the phone with the customer support at Speakeasy. I didn't call them about a technical problem - I've only had two trouble tickets with them in almost three years of service. No, I just called to check on their current options and see if they had anything a little more cost-effective than my current plan.

You would not believe how polite and helpful these folks were. Five minutes time, and they knocked $30/month off my bill.

I've always recommended Speakeasy because I've been impressed with their technical service and support. (I'm sure that there are some folks who aren't, but my personal experience with them has been outstanding.) Now, on top of that, they were willing to help me figure out how to pay them less money for the same service I've been getting over the past couple of years.

Wow. My only regret is that I didn't call them about this sooner.

The Laws of Slashdot #15 - first sighting of Blakey Rat's Law:

Anybody who brings up Microsoft Bob in a Linux vs. Windows discussion not only instantly ends the discussion, but loses whatever their point of view is.

The Laws of Slashdot #14 - first sighting of ConceptJunkie's Law of Political Procurement:

The government will never choose a simple, cheap and effective solution when it is in competition with a complex, expensive and flawed solution.

[This is part of a comment posted earlier today... I have been thinking about this for a bit, and finally took the time to pull some of my thoughts together to explain exactly why I just don't care what Kerry has to say.]

I was once a registered Democrat; I'm now a registered Republican, and I doubt that I'll ever go back to the Democratic ticket. Why? While I was a Democrat, I never had a Republican call me stupid. I never saw conservative think tanks come out with a study showing that my political affiliation implied that I was disconnected from reality. I never had a member of the "other party" refer to me as if I were less than human because my opinions differed from theirs.

As a known conservative, particularly in this election season, I have been on the receiving end of enough hatred, bigotry, and invective directed at me to last a lifetime. Most of it has come from strangers who know nothing about me other than that I'm a registered Republican, which makes me an instant candidate for their own personal two-minute hate. The only "fact" that matters to them is my party affiliation, which they apparently believes gives them the right to be abusive, insulting, and treat me as if I were some sort of sub-human.

So... even if I were convinced that Kerry was a better candidate than Bush, I would be voting against him, purely becuase of his association with such an arrogant, hateful, spiteful, and all-around viscious politcal party.

Mind you, not all Democrats subscribe to this philosophy - thank God for that. So long as that's true, there's still some hope for the party. However, the party in general - and the leadership in particular - has gotten progressively more hateful and viscious over the last 20 years. For me, at least, they have finally reached the point where their actions speak so loudly that I cannot hear what they say. Their "facts", opinions, and interpretations are useless to me, becuase before I can even enter into a debate with them, I have to at least implicitly agree to their negative characterization of me and my opinions - because unless I do, they are unwilling to consider my "ignorant" and "uninformed" point of view.

Until the actions of the Democratic party leadership and the rank and file show me that they've lost their penchant for assuming their own inherent superiority, and their relyiance on hate speech and ad homenin attacks instead of rational argument... well, I'm going to be ignoring them. I just don't care what they have to say, because the only way I can hear it is to put up with an earful of hatred and hostility. No thank you.

The Laws of Slashdot #13 - first sighting of Escher's Rule of Humanity #1:

Most people are horribly, horribly stupid.

The Laws of Slashdot #12 - first sighting of 0x0d0a's Law:

Those who invoke Godwin's Law usually lack a counterargument.

The Laws of Slashdot #11 - first sighting of Glonoinha's Rule #61:

People are more likely to cooperate with you if you ask nicely and have a gun, than if you ask rudely.

A short break from the Laws of Slashdot to reflect on some of the fundamentally different approaches to problem resolution used by open source software projects.

The Laws of Slashdot #10 - first sighting of Gilb's Law:

Anything you need to quanitfy can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.

I'll admit that this really isn't a /. law, per se... as the original poster cited this, it's from Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Still, it's my first encounter with Gilb's Law, and it's one of those 'laws' that makes you stop and think for a minute.

For example... Gilb's law doesn't neccesarily state that any type of measurement is better than none at all. Note that it also doesn't say anything about whether the superior measurement will be cost effective :-/

Good stuff. I've not read Peopleware yet, but this quote has intrigued me enough that now I think I'll have to track down a copy.

The Laws of Slashdot #9 - first sighting of Bruce's Law:

All unaccountable organizations are corrupt.

The Laws of Slashdot #8 - first sighting of Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom:

No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats - approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.

The Laws of Slashdot #7 - first sighting of LLam's LLaw:

If x is the amount of bullshit someone has to wade through to try something new and y represents the likelihood that they will actually do so, then the value of x is inversely proportional to the value of y.

The Laws of Slashdot #6 - first sighting of Schernau's 2nd Law:

Anyone who signs a slashdot post with a real name to provide credibility automatically loses it.

(I've searched, but so far have been unable to locate the elusive "Schernau's 1st Law". Any information about its current whereabouts would be appreciated.)

The Laws of Slashdot #5 - first sighting of NialScorva's Law, the proposed equivilent of Godwin's Law for legal issues in the tech industry:

Given enough time, all legal battles in the tech industry will invoke the DMCA. This generally means that all constructive arguments have ended.