Got my first cold call from a headhunter in like 2 years today and they must be desperate. It was for a 3 month contract to hire deal at Seimens in Cinci, HPUX and Solaris Admin, except she wasted 15 minutes getting to the whole spiel about it being contract work. I'd have to be crazy to move to Cinci, find a place, and the get cut at the end of the 3 months. Had to decline, but they must have pegged everyone on their unix lists from Cleveland to Lexington and from Indy to Pittsburg for me to show up on their scans, maybe this whole economy thing is getting better.

Oh yeah, if you are unemployed and in Cinci, the headhunter was Trasys, it might be interesting work for someone who is already there.

Holy hell, I just upgraded my PIII 866 rig to a PIII-S 1.4, damn this thing is flying right now, cooler temp too!

The killer is, some poor dude ebayed this compaq "server" upgrade that retailed for $950 2 years ago, I got it for $150+$20 Heatsink/Fan

Fuck Marketing.
Fuck CDMA.
Fuck UK football.
Fuck non technical people making technical decisions and then calling me to fix the mess they made with a 2 week deadline.

I'm still not better, anyone need a Solaris Geek, prefer Southern US, Cinci/Indi maybe

So I've got 5 days of vacation, plus a week of training to take before Jan 1, decided to burn one of those vacation days today.
Slept in and headed up the road to the finest horse track on the planet, had a decent day gambling (-$30, counting drinks) even hit a $70 trifecta on the 8th race. It was opening day, so there were people who looked like they stepped off the set of Seabiscut roaming the stands, including my barmaid. Keeneland (and 48 hour football tailgating) are the only reasons I would consider moving back to Lexington, but damn they are fine reasons.

/. politics gets some sanity

Yep, Install techs got done this morning with setting up the telco's part of the deal
384/256 ADSL (Actually measured at 356/225 this evening w00t)
150 Channel digital cable delivered over phone line
2 video streams
Caller ID pops up as in the lower left corner of the TV screen (can be disbled if using the VCR)

Which meams I spent the past 12 hours configuring 2 Linksys WRT54G routers to act as a wireless bridge between my ethernet network and the Residential Gateway (Cable Box/DSL modem). Used the sveasoft firmware that needs better documentation, but it is working like a champ


Road Trip last thursday to see Hank Williams Jr and Skynard at Riverbend in Cinci. Discovered you can't get a pizza delivered after 12 in downtown Cinci (8th and Elm, Josh any other Cinci/NKY /.'ers). The concert rocked, the 15 hours between late lunch Thursday and Arby's brunch Friday sucked major league. It's been concerts from beyond the grave/breakup for me this summer, Skynard, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath.

Oh yeah, for those of you who have never been to riverbend, you've got to see the "Flood Stage" markers showing the river level during the 97 flood, 8' up on the bathrooms beyond the lawn, its amazing anything was left of cinci after that one.

I'm proud to present the newest memeber of the Jager Music family, Sixth Floor

These are some sick bastards from down home, southern tinged, truck drivin', whisky drinkin', biker metal at its finest. Check them out to see what Ozzy's and Ronnie Van Zant's love child would have been.

You've all seen the rubberized "spray-on" bedliners used on pickup trucks right. It seems like a quarter inch of that stuff in the floorboard/undercarriage (1/2" total coat) might absorb a lot of the shrapnel that the roadside bombs are sending into the passenger cabins of the Humvee's tooling around Iraq these days. Yeah I know they won't do shit against an RPG, but as a (relatively) cheap spall liner, how well would it work? It has got to do better than the steel plate that soldiers are laying in the floorboards that are being shredded into shrapnel.

...all they do is smoke pot and smell bad
--Eric Cartman

I wish I had my camera in the truck driving home this afternoon. I'm trucking down I-65, in between Sonora and Upton KY, I notice a White Jeep Liberty with Ohio plates in front of me, I pass it and as I'm driving by I see the sticker on the door, PETA. I promptly gave them the bird and laid down on the horn to "register my opinion about them".

How many critters died so they could pollute the earth with their SUV. Last time I checked, there were no solar/wind powered Jeeps in your local 4th Reich Motors dealership (GMontag's was a custom conversion on the hacker jeep, no?)

Rant over, no carrier!

I posit that clicking through on any ad banner for John Kerry or liberal inclined groups could be beneficial by slowly siphoning away their war chest(s). Thoughts and comments appreciated. Not advocating massive automated hits, but just open a new tab if you see one out there to help shut these idiots up.

So one of my college roommates calls Tuesday, he had an extra ticket to Kid Rock in Nashville for Friday, so I said Hell Yes I'll go.

Get down to Nashville ~6PM, check in to our room at the Renisance ($100 for double occupancy in a nice downtown hotel), walk over to Rippy's for some BBQ and Beer, eat drink, and check out a good cover band (amazing vocals). Pay the tab and hotfoot it up to Municipal Auditorium.

Gov't Mule was opening, and halfway through their set, the guitarist for the Black Crowes comes out, finishes the set. I would have been a very happy man at that point but there was more!

Kid Rock comes out, pyro, strippers, rock and roll, we had great seats, 20 rows back, floor level, center stage. Played 2h15m in the first set, but the house lights never come up. 10m later, a white grand piano rises from the middle of the stage and a lone spotlight is on the Kid, he breaks into Fulltime Father (Written by DAC), kick ass, but then the whole band comes out.

He says, Nashville, we've played for 2.5 hours, but there is one more thing we need to do, come on out here man, From Stage Left, Hank Jr. Comes out, and they rip through a 15min version of Cadilac Pussy, holy hell!, more pyro, more strippers, and the amps were cranked up to 11.

Stop by Legends for one more beer, see a good little band, they were doing their George Strait set, perfect, the steel guitar player was top notch. Get back to the hotel ~1:30, sleep till 11 and hit the road.

Oh yeah, Kentucky won this afternoon!

Okay, some of you know I'm a young conservative, but I have a serious question for my elders around this joint.

What problem was LBJ trying to solve with the great society? It seems that after 40 years of his programs, we have seen no improvement to illegitamacy, poverty, crime and high school dropout rates amongst minorities and have see increases in the white population, whay do we keep wasting money on programs that do not work. This is why I'm so pissed at the republican party right now, the democrats are on the ropes and instead of delivering the knockout blow (ie massive revamping and rollback of new-deal and great society programs), Bush and a republican congress is determined to increasing those programs to new astonishing heights. We need to find a way to clone Reagan, imagine what he would have done with a republican congress.

Side note, so who are the republican's going to nominate in '08, Colin Powell is in the same position Joe Lieberman was in, a good man who some people are blindly prejudiced against, Cheney and Rummy are too old, Rice has no shot and Ashcroft is too hated. We can't roll out Jeb and Arnold isn't legal. Most of the senators are non-viable with the exception of Frist, so who do we throw at Hillary?

For those of you who have read my bio know I'm a Sun jockey at my day job, decided to get edumacated on the company dime to leverage for raise or a better job elsewhere.

Bah humbug, took 310-014 yesterday (Sun Certified Systems Administrator Exam, part 1, Solaris 9), got 34/57, 37/57 is passing, does anyone actually use the printing crap in Solaris anymore? Going to retake in Jan. after setting up a test machine and a printer at work. Oh well, Boss and two of my cow-orkers are gone till '04, so it should be reasonably quiet at work the next week and a half, hopefully.

Time for a history lesson:
Kentucky aproves a lottery in 1989 which is supposed to be reserved for funding education
By 1993, the lottery funds were being transfered to the states general fund
1997 I graduate high school, honors, 9 hours of college credit, 3.5 GPA on hard (95-100 = A = 4.0) scale, 1310 SAT/30 ACT/1240 PSAT, national merit special scholarship recipeient[1]
1998, the state announces a new program. A cut of the lotto money is going to fund the KEES scholarships, basically its a 50/50 split merit/need-based, the merit portion is based off high school gpa, which is not standardized or weighted (Some districts have 95-100 = A = 4.0, others have 90-100 = A = 4.0), no bonus for AP/IB/honors credit, oh yeah, its starts with 1999 HS grads
2003 state is broke, so they are cutting half of the KEES funding, but they are suggesting eliminating the merit portion to be "fair"

Damn it, there are too many idiots in college already. If they would cull the dumbest 10-20%, regardless of financial situation, colleges could focus on real students. I busted my ass in high school because I knew I would get screwed when it came to "need" scholarships, both my parents work, they own their home, 2 late model cars, we were white middle class from flyover country. I was rewarded with full tuition+books, which means I racked up a cool 16K in loans in 4 years and 2 summers getting a BS in biology going to my state's flagship university. I didn't live high on the hog, I worked 8 of 10 semesters, I didn't run up any credit card debt, but walked into the landmine of the worst job market in 25 years in 2001.

What happened to rewarding achievement, its not like high school is hard, show up for class, do your work and its a cakewalk, unless you run into a good crew of teachers like I did (Taught world civ by a JD who didn't want to practice law, civics by a cop, good calculus and US history instructors), they pushed me, my gpa suffered, but I also walked out with more college credit than a lot of people get in their first semester, even working 20 hours a week and working as the video man for basketball. Don't give me that BS of the ACT/SAT is biased, 25/1200 is doable if you have a basic command of algebra 2, geometry, and a decent vocabulary.

Ok, I'm done with my rant, fire away.

1. The company dad works for is a large contributor to the NMS program, so they get to have 16 NM "special" scholars picked from the pool of employee's children who did not qualify for full NMS-finalist/semi-finalist or the black/green/female specials.

All I can say is, hell yeah.

I thought that any plane entering/leaving Bagdad Intl was getting lit up like a christmas tree?
Attack of the leftist media or really tight perimeter security?