Ok, so what is the deal with IRC nowadays? I mean, have punks taken it over or what? Seems like it's grown into one big flamefest. I hang on a channel on undernet that used to be a neat place to hang. Since it was a local channel to my area, alot of us used to get together(GT) for late night excursions to Denny's or the cheap clubs for dancing/drinking. We would type away for hours before and afterwards on our IRC channel. It was cool meeting the people in person to see who we were chatting with, and it was cool to see that sometimes the person didn't look how you pictured in your mind. Slowly over time it seems the flaming assholes have infiltrated this channel and now it's nearly impossible to hold an intelligent conversation in public. What has happened? Is it just that I'm getting older? I mean, have you ever gone to a party and had someone come up to you who was fluent in english, then have one of the other partygoers tell him to f-off or kick him outside? Is it that people feel safe in the anonymity behind the keyboard, so they can be so extraordinarily rude and downright mean? It is almost more appealing to me to go into a Yahoo or AIM chatroom now instead of the Wild Wild West that is IRC.

Anyhow, if you have stumbled across this journal, let me know what you think...

My wife takes the bus. Why not, I can drop her off at her bus stop on my way to work. I drive the "economy" car so it works out pretty good. So our gas guzzling mini-van gets to stay parked at home only to be used to take our brood to church. Now that it costs close to $40 just to fill it, we've had the same tank of gas in it for 2 weeks now and it's still on 3/4 tank.

Anyhow I just wanted to say, what's up with this war? Is it just me or to you have a sense of desperation? I mean, we desperately need to get in and stop these brainwashers/madmen/terrorists who force men to blow themselves up to take out a few of our troops. Yes, it's the same old, same old, that Isreal has been going through, right? Perhaps you might say, oh, they have no other choice. Who's to say, I mean what would you do if the tables were reversed? Who knows what the Iraqi propoganda machine has been pumping into these people. "Die for Allah!!! oh and as a bonus prize, your family will get 2 billion dinars!!!! (approx retail value $500 U.S.). Or perhaps its more like this "Die for Allah!!! or we will kill your wife and babies!!! One of my coworkers suggested that the poor women and children that were killed at a checkpoint recently were already dead, and were sent out to "crash" the barricades and make it look like we were the barbaric ones. I suspect it's a very sadistic, insane and highly calculated process.

Step 1: Send out some poor(literally) schmuck with a loaded carbomb and have him decieve and kill some of our Soldiers.

Step 2: Send out some more poor women and children in a van driven by some other poor schmuck into the same area, tell him not to stop for anything, because they will kill his family or because Allah will glorify him in heaven or whatever. The poor schmuck does what he's told even though they are wanting him to stop and firing warning shots, even though they shoot his engine and tires...

What can we do? What can we do?

Pulling out is not an option, we are commited to getting rid of this barbarism, and hopefully helping institute free elections. Look at the example of Afganistan. They've had free elections now, and have a government. Is if perfect? No. Is it better than the Taliban government before? Hell yeah.

Now, lets look at Iraq. Is it as poor and fractured as Afganistan was? Iraq is currently starving, due to Saddam, but it is far from a poor country and a freely elected government would only benefit from this wealth, and hopefully pass it on to all it's citizens.

I'm rambling on now.....

More later, stay tuned!!!

off to pick up my wife at the bus stop

I'm lame and did a cut and paste on my long winded comment within the posting:

Games!!!

Oh, and yes, I have managed to coble together a Linux system with either a free Linux version, in the case of Quake II, or a pieced together version of Wine/WineX/Codeweavers Wine. But, it's MUCH easier to install a decent version of windows, i.e. 2000 or even XP, PLUS whatever game in the same amount of time it takes you to download all the latest patches, updates, tarballs and whatnot needed to even get close to a game running on Linux. Now an opengl accelerated game on Linux? grrrrr

Applications!!!

Face it, everyone uses Microsoft Office. This is a fact. I do feel that this can change, but it will not be overnight, like, the change from WordPerfect to MS Word. If anyone remembers that, you can recall that everyone used WordPerfect, it was THE standard in wordprocessing. Now guess what, Word has completely replaced it, and you know why it replaced it so relatively quickly? I'm not sure with the latest version, but I do recall Word 2.0 up to 2000 being able to open those old Wordperfect files no problem. So, what would need to happen in order for Word to be dethroned? Perhaps a multiplatform, wordprocessor that can open all those legacy Word files. StarOffice? it's getting there. I haven't been able to get Openoffice working yet, but I will give it a try soon, and see how it's progressing. Anyhow, that's just my $.02.

Corporate Standards!!!!

I am forced to use MS Windows at work, due to company policy, but could perform my job equally as well with a Linux workstation. I have even asked if I could install it in a dual boot, but was nixed. So I'll contend with using an Exceed desktop through one of our Unix servers.

Your friendly, local Unix System Admin at your service