The snake’s been in the cage for a few months, but I’ve held off posting pictures until I finished the last little bit – the frames around the window. But as pointed out in this comment, it would be good to get some pictures with Luke in his cage. So, hopefully I’ll finish up the frames this week, while I’m away from the office, but in the meantime, here are some pictures: ...

K’s parents are in town and staying with us. Okay, that’s not a typical thing to be thankful for :-), but I like her parents and this gives me a great excuse to take most of this week off. I lost 54 minutes of vacation last month, I would like to avoid a repeat. Hopefully, I can get caught up on a few things while I’m out of the office

The Disney illustrated Communist Manifesto… p.s. fwiw, some of this is Warner Bros. and Hannah Barbara (but who’s keeping score)

I took the day off for my birthday. I got to sleep in late and get some things done around the house. I managed, I think, to get rid of whatever was smelling up one of our air ducts, I tarred up part of the roof and repaired the fence where the dog kept getting out. After that, I headed up for the Poindexter small group meeting and then his talk (more on these later). On my way home, I picked up some take out from the local Mexican restaurant. We ate dinner, made a cheesecake and walked the dogs. I opened presents when I got back. K got me a hand full of things I had wanted: the Library of America Writings of Washington and the Writings of Thoreau, Jared Bernstein’s All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy, and the Pinky and the Brain DVD 🙂 Tim Powers’s On Stranger Tides is still being shipped. ...

bah – the past few nights, my website/blog keeps getting screwed up because all of the disk space on the drive is consumed. the first night, i freed up some space, but didn’t pay attention to how much was free. it happened last night and again i freed up space, noting that i had about 700 MB free. Tonight, it happened again and I finally tracked down what happened. I do an rsync backup to an external drive every day. A couple of days ago, I rebooted the machine and the external drive didn’t mount back up. So I wound up doing a backup of my home directory and root partition to the root partition. Of course the partition filled up. Oh well, problem solved now. I just need to be more careful in the future

In case you are looking for something interesting to do next week, go to Love Auditorium at Duke University on November 15th at 5pm. Admiral John Poindexter will be giving a talk: “ A Vision for Countering Terrorism Through Information and Privacy Protection Technologies for the 21st Century. It should be an interesting and thought provoking discussion of where Poindexter draws the line between security and privacy. I’ll be meeting with Poindexter and a small group at 3pm – quite the birthday present. ...

Now that the Democratic Party has won congress, a result I am thrilled to see, there will be increasing cries for them to present “A Plan for Iraq. Leaving aside the constitutional issues, i.e., the executive branch is responsible for military operations, while congress controls the purse strings and provides oversight, asking for a plan at this point is a complete exercise in futility. There were a number of plans presented or endorse by Democrats over the past four years and all of them were ignored. At this point, Republicans are basically saying, “we’ve ignored you for years, but now that it’s completely fubar’d what do you intend to do about it? ...

I just saw and took the American Accent online quiz and got a result that surprised me (sorry, i can’t get the results blob working in wordpress). It claims that my result is “The Inland North: You may think you speak “Standard English straight out of the dictionary but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin? or “Are you from Chicago? Chances are you call carbonated drinks “pop. ...

The votes are cast, the results are coming in. There’s not much more to do on the political front, other than wait for the final results. While I’m waiting for that to happen, a few remarks on a conversation that I recently saw too late to comment on. The question was why is it so hard to get third party candidates on the ballot (e.g., libertarians, greens, etc.)? One person noted that even the Iraqis and Afghanis have more choices than we do in the U.S. where you have to decide between the Democratic and Republican parties. ...

Well, it seems that we finally know what happened with the North Korean nuclear test that fizzled. They apparently mistranslated the Arabic documents the U.S. posted online. Okay, so neither of those is really very funny. On the one hand, the U.S. posted a whole host of Arabic documents from Iraq that had never been examined before in the vague hope that someone would be able to find evidence that Iraq had a WMD program before we invaded. This was idiotic. It’s equivalent to my posting an entire database of personal information in the hopes that someone online could determine if there were social security numbers in it. ...