Last night I spent seven hours on transferring data from one computer to another the hard way, aka through physical medium transfer.

Eww.

I had to reboot his 2000 box twice to get it to copy files, and it even missed his bookmarks in Mozilla.

Eww eww eww.

The hard part, though, was moving a laptop hard drive in there. For those of you who don't know, laptop hard drives typically have a mini IDE connection which needs a small dongle to connect to a standard bus. Problem with it is, it doesn't stay there. No plastic housing. So I had to reseat the drive three, four times.

I hate Windows. I hate moving data to and from it more.

Now I'm getting complaints about his old software not working. I try to explain the Registry, but the idea is so alien to me, a hardcore *nixer, that I can't swallow it.

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A little about me: I've a knack for languages. And I don't mean Perl, Python, or C++, which I have a handle on. I mean human ones.

I'm studying Arabic, and I would recommend the language be studied by anyone who wants a grip of what the hell is going on in the Middle East. That, and Hebrew, which honestly is damn near the same language.

At least the Standard Arabic is. Arabic is so fragmented it's obscene. It makes the diff between British and American look like the result of a lisp. An Iraqi and a Libyan have zero chance of understanding each other using local dialects.

And this makes the language more fun: there are no written vowels. The beautiful scripts you see are all consonants, since someone bright thought that the only people intelligent enough to read would know how to pronounce the word. Then again, Hebrew was like that too. (OT Hebrew is all consonents.)

Once I get the hang of this, I'll try an easier tongue, like Japanese or maybe Mayan.

salaam

It's been a while since I've written here.

I am about to go in my now-annual rant about 11 Sep.

Even on the day it happened, I took Bear's advice, and didn't call it Islamists. (For reference, Bear caled Oklahoma City (20 Apr, iirc) an act of a discgruntled postal worker. In fact, I spent the day the way I had originally planned, at a casino. Experiencing one of the best runs I ever had in my life. The roads were clear, there were no commercials on my radio or TV set, and everyone else was panicking. I went to the Aldi (they are a very cut-rate market specializing in self-labelled, ultra-low-price staples and junk food) and got some canned soups, some pastas, various carbonated and caffeinated beverages, tea bags, instant coffee, and some other detrius at my mom's request. (Besides, I needed to go shopping.)

I hate all the commemoration, the mourning, the horsecrap. This country seems to be based on fear and loathing, which explains Microsoft so well.

Consider Vietnam: 'They are little Asian commie sunabitches who want to take over the goddamned world.' Truth? We're little controlling sunabitches that want to take over the world.

Do you realize that for our 55,000+ dead soldiers, there were over 5,000,000 Vietnamese died, and most were civilians?

How about WW II? "Them Japs ain't human, so let's just make 'em sumabitches burn." Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

I don't doubt the philosophers and sci-fi wrters who say that man will be the salvation or destruction of man. God may be watching, but doesn't get too involved.

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On a lighter note, any ideas on how to convince spiders to weave more?

And does anyone know anything about large wasps? I saw one, about three inches long with orange stripes, and it killed a cricket. They duked it out for three minutes, the wasp kept stinging, and the cricket let off a death rattle. Scared the hell out of me, something that big.