Monthly Archive for May, 2007

What happened to the History Channel?

Lately, the History Channel seems to have forgotten about history. Maybe their daytime programming is still history-oriented, but their prime-time programming has become quite skewed away from historical documentaries, and has embraced the Discovery Channel model: interesting shows, but not necessarily about history.

What happened to the historical programming? The History Channel used to show enough Victory at Sea reruns to sink a ship, but now such programs are nowhere to be found. Instead, we have shows like Modern Marvels and Mega Movers. These are both good shows, but I don’t consider them appropriate for a channel named History. Modern Marvels in particular seems to have run out of subjects with historical context (the Brooklyn Bridge, Hoover Dam, etc), and has moved on to other subjects like sewers and mines. Sewers and mines might be interesting from a geeky perspective, but not from a historical perspective.

Last night, the History Channel ran shows on Star Wars’s 30th anniversary. Again, both were interesting shows from a geeky perspective, but neither was particularly related to history. However, my major objection is this: yesterday was Memorial Day! Aren’t shows about Star Wars rather inappropriate on Memorial Day? I would have preferred Victory at Sea.

Who’s Bobby?

I seem to receive a fair amount of referrals from this MySpace profile:

http://www.myspace.com/bobby133

I’ve never met this person. Who is that?

The Netgear WGR614 v6 router is crap

My Netgear WGR614 v6 router had served me faithfully for about 1.5 years, but it has been acting up lately: slowing traffic significantly, dropping connections, etc. This morning, it stopped routing packets to the WAN entirely. Will it work when I get home tonight, after being turned off all day? Perhaps. And if it does, will it keep working? Who knows…

I went with Netgear to get away from the crap that Linksys has put out the past several years (I’ve personally seen several pieces of Linksys hardware fail), and now it seems that Netgear is no better! The damn thing is almost certainly out of warranty, so it appears that I have nothing but a tempting shotgun target.

Why is it that this kind of hardware even fails? It’s not like it contains hot-running CPUs or huge power supply capacitors. This is relatively simple, solid-state stuff that, in my mind, just shouldn’t fail under normal conditions.

Will a D-Link router be any better?

Update: Tonight, it seems to be working fine. Is there a heat issue involved? Will it continue to function?

Update 5-28-2007: So far, it has continued to operate correctly. One change I made (besides updating the firmware) was to place the cable modem next to the router, rather than on top of it. Heat issue?

Update 12-14-2007: The Netgear router has continued to operate without a problem. As I mentioned before, don’t put anything on top of it — make sure it can stay cool.

Update 3-26-2008: The router is acting up again.

Bleh, politics

I’ve gotten quite bored with writing about politics, or even thinking about politics. I used to engage in political debate with gusto, and enjoyed it, but now the whole enterprise just makes me weary. Maybe it’s something to do with turning 30.

Or, maybe it’s because of the stunning incompetence of the Republican Party. With a Republican Congress and Republican Presidency, there was an opportunity for great things (or, at least things that didn’t suck as badly as Democratic things). Instead, we got a bunch of stupidity. They passed on many opportunities to do something constructive, like fix Social Security, build a damned wall against Mexico, or undo some the damage of the Clinton years. They did none of those things. But you could definitely count on them to stick their noses where they didn’t belong, like between a doctor and her patient’s uterus. And they got more excited about some brain-dead woman in Florida than about making sure I’m not throwing my salary away on social services that won’t be there when I retire.

The one truly constructive thing they did was allow the moronic “assault weapons” ban to expire. Of course, that accomplishment simply required them to do nothing.

And what about fiscal discipline? In 1994, the Republicans replaced a thoroughly corrupted Democratic Congress that pissed money away to their cronies while not giving a flying fuck about the rest of us. And in 2006… the Democrats replaced a thoroughly corrupted Republican Congress that pissed money away to their cronies while not giving a flying fuck about the rest of us. And, what do I expect this newfangled Democratic Congress to do? Why, piss money away to their cronies and not give a flying fuck about the rest of us! New boss, same as the old boss. I think it’s time to explore term limits.

When the Republicans weren’t doing stupid things, they allowed the Democrats to paint them as doing stupid things. “Bush lied about Iraqi WMDs!” is the classic example here. “Bush Lied” is itself the big lie. The entire world agreed that Iraq was a WMD threat before the war. Now that the war has gone south (thanks largely to the Iraqis themselves), many people are simply practicing selective memory. The problem here is that the Republicans have not pushed back against this disinformation. They’ve sat on their asses and allowed the Left’s “Bush Lied” meme to become accepted in political discourse. Stupid!

As it turns out, Saddam did have WMDs, just not in the amounts the world had feared. People can be forgiven for missing all the press coverage of chemical munitions, chlorine bombs, and nuclear technical documents, since, um, the press hasn’t been covering it (that goes against the “Bush Lied” meme, after all). Essentially, Saddam was bluffing about the size of his WMD capability, and he didn’t expect the United States to call his bluff. After all, we hadn’t called the bluff in the Clinton years.

As for the war itself, “mismanaged” seems to be a good euphemism. General Petraeus seems to be going in the right direction with classic counter-insurgency tactics, if reports from embedded milbloggers are any indication. Too bad we didn’t do that in 2004. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

As for the Muslims — especially the Arab Muslims — all I can say is that’s a pretty fucked up religion. Most religions, especially the Abrahamic ones, are intrinsically messed up anyhow, but Islam takes the cake — hence its elevation to “fucked up”. And I’m not going to qualify or justify that statement; the Muslims do that themselves. There is a significant number of complete whackos in that faith, and the rest of them are simply enablers that do nothing to contain their whacko brethren. Westerners who still buy into the “Religion of peace” baloney after all the bloodshed perpetrated by Muslims all the way back to Muhammad are just willfully ignorant.

Maybe there’s still hope for those people. The kinder side of me still holds out hope. Our efforts to build a democratic Iraq are ultimately based upon that hope. But many days I have my doubts.

So it’s safe to say that I feel let-down. I’ve been let down by a Republican Congress that stank as badly as the Democrats they replaced. I’ve been let down by a bunch of Shiites that are more interested in settling scores than building a country.

And I’ve been thoroughly embarrassed by George W Bush, whom I confidently voted for, twice. It’s not that he’s an idiot. It’s that he’s stubborn and a very poor communicator, which together are essentially fatal bugs. I guess that when the Queen of England (or Helen Mirren, anyhow) declares that she “was a mechanic during the ‘war’”, she was referring to the American Revolutionary War. I wish John McCain had won the 2000 primaries. Or Joe Lieberman, for that matter.

I fully expect the new Democratic Congress to stink, and I also give the Democrats about a 70% chance of winning the White House in 2008. Trying to make things somewhat better by debating politics right now is somewhat akin to standing on the beach and commanding the tide not to come in — I expect to get all wet. And since no one else reads this blog anyhow, I expect it to be all wet on an empty beach.

In any case, all of the bloggers in my blogroll are better political writers than I am. Go read.

Microsoft Word 2007: first impression

In addition to Windows Vista, we also have Microsoft Office 2007. I fired up Word, and my first thought was:

Where’s the damn menu bar?!

Hmmm. Obviously I need to play around with it more.

Windows Vista: first impressions

We just got a new box in the house, with Windows Vista Business installed, and I’ve gotten to play around with it a bit.

First impression: Too Much.

Too much eye candy. Sure, Aero is pretty — very pretty — but there’s so much going on that it’s distracting. Visual Overload. Fortunately, there’s a so-called “Classic” theme, which makes Vista looks like Windows 2000. Ahh, much better. (I do the same thing in Windows XP.)

There seems to be too much code as well, since Vista makes an Intel Core 2 Duo 7200 machine feel no faster than my three-year-old Athlon 64 3200+ running Windows XP. Hmmm.

On the other hand, my lovely wife said, “wow!” when she first saw Flip 3D, so maybe there’s something to that marketing campaign after all…

Bye bye comments

Since re-enabling comments, I’ve received several spam posts. There are tools available that can screen and nuke spam comments, but since basically no one reads or comments on this blog anyways, it’s not really worth my time. So, bye bye comments.

The Three Conjectures

As a reminder, let us not forget The Three Conjectures written by Wretchard back in 2003:

Conjecture 1: Terrorism has lowered the nuclear threshold.

Summary: The nuclear threshold — the point in which we attack (or counter-attack) with nuclear weapons — is crossed when an enemy has both the capability and the intent to use nuclear weapons against us. During the Cold War, the Soviets obviously had the capability to destroy America, but not the intent (in the face of certain retaliation). September 11 has shown that the Islamists have the intent, but they don’t yet have the capability. This has lowered the nuclear threshold, since if the Islamists get their hands on nuclear weapons, they fully intend to use them against us, and we’ll be forced to respond.

Conjecture 2: Obtaining WMDs will destroy Islam

Summary: As long as their capability remained, the Islamists would continue to attack America, even in the face of retaliation. Further, even if we wanted to negotiate a peace or surrender, there is no central Islamic authority we could even talk to. Such a scenario would eventually require us to annihilate the entire Muslim world. Wretchard: “The so-called strengths of Islamic terrorism: fanatical intent; lack of a centralized leadership; absence of a final authority and cellular structure guarantee uncontrollable escalation once the nuclear threshold is crossed.” And even if every non-Muslim were dead, they would then turn on each other with their new-found weaponry.

Conjecture 3: The War on Terror is the ‘Golden Hour’ — the final chance

Summary: The fate of the Muslim world very much depends on destroying the Islamists before they achieve nuclear capability. It is ironic that an American victory in the Global War on Terror is the best hope the Muslim world has.

Then there’s the the Postscript to the Three Conjectures, and the follow-on Fourth Conjecture. And of course there’s Den Beste’s response and disagreement with Conjecture 2. Wretchard then responds to Den Beste.




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