Another Acronym

In Jawja, in April, any man's fancy turns to... boats.

My friends Charley and Ken acquired a 19-foot Boston Whaler a while back, which they now want to sell.

There's only one little problem - when the motor is run at full tilt, after about fifteen seconds, the outboard motor just... stops. BlaaaahhhhhThud.

Awww...crap.

Much discussion about probable causes ensues, with a collective opinion that there's a fuel-feed problem.

Ken sighs, and mutters to himself.

"What's that, Ken?" Says Charley.

"B.O.A.T. spells 'Bring Over Another Thousand' " says Ken.

So there you have it....

Not-happy Tax Day

I've already paid my damned taxes.

Actually, we're getting a "refund" of the interest-free loan that we've been compelled to make to the gummint, blast their miserable hides.

My wife and I make enough that Los Federales take a large chunk, the Staties take another, smaller chunk, and then they oh-so-graciously deign to "refund" some to us.

What "they" keep would pay ALL of our bills (plus two nice dinners for four at Outback) for three months. ALL of our bills include food, electric, gasoline & insurance, but NOT clothing, telephone & cellular or satellite TV.

Once again, I am severely pissed off.

Grrrr.....

Taxes and Friends

Now that my travails with the truck appear to over, it's time to comment on Taxes and Friends.

Taxes first, on the theory of getting the unpleasant stuff out of the way.

Presuming that you actually pay attention when you are doing your taxes, work out the percentage that the Feds, State (and maybe city) keep of your money. Then, factor in sales, excise, and property taxes. Assuming that you are actually in the taxpaying class, you'll be dismayed. If you're like me, you'll then be totally cranky. THEN, if you're as annoyed as I am, do a quick-and-dirty analysis of what your money gets spent on.

Grrr.....

On to more pleasant subjects.

What's a friend? Who are they? How can you tell?

OWW's definition runs like this:

My friend will come over to my house and open my fridge (He/She either has a key, or knows where the key is, and uses it whenever they please. I trust He/She - and He/She doesn't abuse that trust), see that I'm out of beer, and call me on my cell to let me know. Ten minutes later, he calls back to say that he's on his way to the store anyway, so don't worry about the beer, and what do I want for dinner?

My friend will listen to me babble on about something about which I know next to nothing, and will call bullshit on me right to my face.

My friend, when I call yelling for assistance, drops whatever he's doing and comes a-running. I'll also get a very hard time later for being semi-stupid in public. If it's really bad, I get a great silence about my stupidity.

When I'm feeling down and melancholy, my friend tries to move me along.

When I get too full of myself, my friend brings me back to reality.

When things go really well, my friend celebrates with me - without envy.

When things go sour, my friend commiserates with me - and not even one "I told you so". (Unless it involves a car's mechanical workings - which generates a few "Dummy" and "Idiot" comments. The favor is generally returned at a later date. What goes around, comes around!)

I have many nice, pleasant acquaintences.

I have a few dear and close friends.

Bob, Charley and Sharon, Tom and Kathy, Mikey, Bud, Brad and Susan.

So, today, when I was sniveling and moaning about our tax bill, Charley says "Hey! You should be happy! You're making enough money to complain about your taxes!"

Yah.

I think I said pretty much the same thing to him last week...

Car Stuff

Actually, it's that double-de-damned truck.

My Dodge Dakota decided that it no longer liked it's radiator.

Sigh.

Replace the radiator, plus the coolant. $248.57 and four hours later, I'm good to go, right? Plus however much it's gonna cost 'cause the A/C radiator/condenser had to be removed, making necessary an airconditiner service. (Trust me, if you live in Jawja, and summer-time is coming up, you NEED an air-conditioner in your car.)

Nope.

Then I find that in addition to the radiator, the thermostat's gasket was el-sucko.

Awww....CRAP!

$5.94 plus $0.36 tax plus two more hours got me a truck that doesn't puke coolant all over the place.

Ah, well.

When you own a vehicle with 99,548 miles on it, you have to expect something is going to break. So far, the rest of the bits and pieces seems to be holding up OK. With a little care, I should be able to get at least another 50K miles out of the engine/trans/rear-end.

I hope...

There is one good thing to come out of this.

My neighbor Charley was kind enough to lend me a car for the last two days.

A Jaguar XJ6, the sedan with that gorgeous 4.2 litre DOHC in-line 6-cylinder beast under the hood. NOT a stop-light Grand Prix vehicle. Not at all. But, at 75 MPH, when you stick your foot into the throttle, you sink back into the seat under a fairish accelleration which continues in a rather ghastly almost-quiet until you look at the speedometer and find that you're moving along in vigorous violation of any speed law in the land (unless you're in Montana).

That Jag has over 150,000 miles on the odometer.

I think I want one....

Geno's Cheesesteaks Rules!

From Fox News, HERE:

PHILADELPHIA — A Philadelphia agency has ruled that English-only signs at a famous cheesesteak shop are not discriminatory. The Commission on Human Relations says in its Wednesday ruling that the sign at Geno's Steaks does not violate the city's Fair Practices Ordinance. Joe Vento posted the signs at his shop in October 2005. They read "This is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING 'PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH."' Critics allege the policy discourages customers of certain backgrounds from eating there. They say the signs discourage non-English speakers from going to the shop. Vento says he has never refused service to anyone because they couldn't speak English.

Commentary: I guess the "Commission on Human Relations" listened to the various comments that the citizenry made, and decided that "English" is indeed the language of the land...

Arthur C. Clarke

Author and visionary Arthur C. Clarke has died.

There were two giants of Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century - Clarke and Heinlein.

Renowned for 2001:A Space Odyssey, a better look at his story-telling would be a collection of short stories: Tales from the White Hart, of which my favorite would be "The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch".

We'll miss you, Mr. Clarke. Perhaps you can continue your conversations with Mr. Heinlein now...

Friday Exhaustion

Since my last post HERE, we have completed the Great Server and Workstation Move, mostly.

There have been little bumps and excursions along the way, but nothing major came to a screeching halt. Except for the external email that didn't work for two days, that is.

On the Tuesday, all the Really Big Stuff worked. Our depositors never noticed a thing. Their money was there when they wanted it, our website was up and running with their account information, it just flaming-well worked.

Our email system runs on Microsoft Exchange, and it worked just fine - as long as you were working within the Small Financial Institution. But from the outside? Nada, zip, zero, bupkis and nothing.

As it turns out, our firewall didn't want to know about a change in IP addresses for email. Everything else was OK, the firewall just had a snit about SMTP from the outside.

Grrrr.....

After much heartburn, and an outside and very expensive consultant who really did earn every dime of his outrageous hourly fee, email came back up on Thursday. And we didn't lose a single email message. Because of Proper Prior Planning, we didn't lose ANYTHING. Not permanently anyway, it was just delayed a bit.

If this all sounds a little vague, that's my intent. I am NOT giving out any further info - and not for CYA, just for basic security.

I've been very busy for the last 3 weeks, and I am one tired puppy.

"So, OWW, why are you up at this late/early hour?"

Glad you asked! It seems that our Voice Response system decided to pick tonight to be a PITA about it's backup routines.

CP&C (Crap Pee and Corruption).

It's fixed - but now I'm REALLY tired.

G'night....

Moving A Data Center

Granted, it's a very small data center - about twenty servers, plus assorted routers, switches and other paraphenalia.

The SFI (Small Financial Institution) that I work for decided about a year ago to plan ahead for the next ten years, and build a brandy-new Administration building to serve our five current branches.

That includes a brand-spanking-new server room (my term) or "data center" (our Marketing Guy's term).

We have raised floors (to keep the cable mess to a minimum), CAT6 wiring (for Very Fast data flow - can you say "gigabit"?), and some new switches (also for gigabit). All this "giga" stuff makes my geek heart just giggle...

So now it's all ready - and we've been moving servers and switches and routers, Oh My! And changing IPs and wrestling with cable and sweating bullets to get all this stuff in place and running.

'Cause Tuesday, if it don't work, the handy-dandy wall out back will be ready for it's first bullet marks, after the hapless IT geeks have been stood, "Up Against The Wall".

So, that's where OWW has been for the last couple of weeks.

It's kinda like marriage - BEING married is great, GETTING married is... not so great.

Sigh. More Politics...

I see that Kim duToit and Emporer Misha, among others, are somewhat... irritated with John McCain.

Hell, I ain't too thrilled with him myself.

To be blunt, Senator, McCain-Feingold irritated me, and McCain-Kennedy flat-out pissed me off at you AND at one G.W. Bush.

But that does not blind me to reality.

Reality: There are alleged humans out there who will blow themselves, children, and retarded women up to terrorize and disgust us, and to make us give up.

There is at least one Islamist state out there which is actively pursuing nuclear weapons, and has indicated very strongly that they will use those nukes against Israel.

So, Kim has already stated that while he may puke all over the ballot box, he'll vote for McCain, probably.

Misha (and all the rest of the True Conservatives) really need to correct your cranial-rectal inversion and THINK about what a Clinton or Obama sitting in the Oval Office might mean for you and me, and for our children.

We, the "Party", need to get up on our hind legs and do two things:

1. Hold our collective noses, and vote McCain in November.

2. Presuming he can whup Clinton or Obama, we can and should hold his toes to the fire until he sees the sweet light of reason.

The Clinton/Obama (or vice-versa) would be a much bigger disaster, wouldn't it?

And, once again, to Mr. Fred Thompson: "Damn your eyes, Sir, for running a suck-ass campaign!"

Life It's Ownself

I've been debating a change in the way that OWW runs things on this mostly restrained place.

Lately (like for the last two freakin' years) I've been more politically oriented than personally oriented.

Something's not right with that.

Of course, my personal life has been pretty quiet, Thank Gawd!

No divorces, no jail time, no lawsuits, no alarums OR excursions.

Hmmm...

I could comment about the whackos that I work with, except that they're not whackos.

I could raise all kinds of hell about my weird-ass neighbors, but except for Charley, they're nice folks. And even Charley's a good guy, until he and his daughter who's visiting from New Yawk get into the red wine and stay awake until 3 AM playing the music too loud and laughing even louder which pisses off their immediate neighbor, but not me 'cause I'm across the street and two houses down so I don't hear that stuff. I just hear about it later....

Of course, there has been the usual minor dramas of Life It's Ownself...

My thirteen-year-old daughter having a melt-down and tear-flood.

Or the nine-year-old daughter getting cross-eyed mad.

Or the idiot doggies being idiot doggies.

Or, on this fifth day of February going out and voting in the primary election, in my shirtsleeves, because it hit 82 F today, and is currently 68 F at midnight, which absolutely breaks my heart!

Primary Day

Tomorrow is Primary Election Day, "Super Tuesday".

Finally, after all the preliminary hoo-haw, I will be able to render my choice for whichever candidate best matches what I like.

I don't like Madame Hillary, or Mr. Obama - they're dyed-in-the-wool moonbats.

I ain't thrilled with McCain - McCain/Feingold and McCain/Kennedy come to mind.

That leaves Romney or Huckabee.

Romney it is.

Blast your eyes, Fred Thompson, for running a crappy LOSER campaign!

Peace-time Military

I don't know why I'm surprised by THIS:

Many people in the military now perceive a "generation gap" that is marked by a specific date; September 11, 2001. Those who joined after that day, were more likely to have done so for patriotic reasons and were in to fight. The pre-911 troops had served in a peacetime military. The 1991 Gulf War lasted only four days. The Balkans peacekeeping operations of the 1990s involved very little combat. In other words, the pre-2001 troops had seen very little action. A lot of the pre-2001 officers and NCOs had a hard time adapting to wartime.

There are people in the military who aren't really comfortable with the military's prime mission, which is to kill people and break things.

This shouldn't surprise me.

Ten years after I left the Navy, I ran into a couple of peace-time sailors who were still in the Navy, as a career, who hated going to sea, and resented the Navy for sending them to a ship that by definition, goes to sea!

The peace-time military acts much like a large corporation. You follow the peace-time rules and sing the company song, and you get promoted, especially if all of your paperwork is in order and your subordinates don't pee in the potted palms.

In wartime, all of a sudden the rules change, and the "routine" that you've been following, the simulated "war games" that you've been doing, the immaculate paperwork that you thought were the "real reason" you joined, are supposed to be actually put into real mud and blood practice.

And so, some of the peace-time military gets moved aside, and is "encouraged" to find something else to do.

And the newspapers, who are not staffed by war-time vets, "view with alarm" the number of mid-level officers and NCOs who are leaving the services.

Of course, once the war is over, the guys who do the heavy lifting, and are good combat leaders make the politicians uncomfortable. They are shuffled aside as quickly as can be arranged, because after all, we have to be "politically correct" while we're "preparing our military for the next "humanitarian mission" in Kosovo or wherever...

What Was That Al Sharpton Said?

This irony is just delicious - not to mention mind-boggling!

Yes, my mind is boggled!

The biggest mouth in America telling Bill Clinton to "be quiet", to "stop", to "shut up"?

Gawd, tell me it's true, please!

Al Sharpton: “But I think that it’s time for him to just be quiet. I think it’s time for him to stop. As one of the most outspoken people in America, there is a time to shut up, and I think that time has come.”

It is alleged that the Reverend Al said that on The View.

Got it from Fox News, HERE.

Un-Freakin'-Believable!

Now, you've all heard and seen the reports and informed opinion about the "Clinton Machine" getting all geared up to clobber Sen. Obama. Well, it appears that there's a bit of trouble in the "Machine", some sand in the gears, and perhaps a lack of lubrication.

Now, all we need is little screeching from Senator Clinton about the VRWC to make my day complete....

Monday, PITA Monday

It is generally acknowledged throughout the civilized industrial world that Monday is the "worst bloody day of the bleedin' week."

It is my personal opinion that all of the previous week's sneaky little gremlins have managed to hide all during the previous week, merrily plotting their weekend's activities, so that when the poor, humble, down-trodden IT geek shows up on Monday, it's "Surprise! We've been busy!"

Sheesh.

I shoulda got sick and stayed home, in bed, with a bottle of whiskey.

Good whiskey.

No, NOT the idiot dog that some misbegotten mongoloid named "Whiskey".

Y'all are a bunch of preverts.

And I'm a grouch.

Grrr....

Memories, PC and Fear

'Way back there, when OWW was a kid, the "Walt Disney Show" used to broadcast some of the Disney movies as specials, running for two hours, including commercials.

One of those marvelous movies was "Song of The South" - great music, and a good story line.

When "Song of The South" was released, in 1946, the critics loved it, and movie-goers went to the local theatre to see it.

Now, with every movie under the sun available on tape/DVD, you can't find a legit copy of "Song of The South".

Why?

One theory that has the ring of truth is that the Disney Corporation looks at "Song of the South" as causing great controversy - if they release it to home video, it will be widely condemned as "racist" or "inappropriate".

That's very sad, from my point of view.

Because I just remember "Song of The South" from a kid's perspective. Great songs, good characters, and a decent story line.

What else do you need, eggs in your beer?

Self Defense

First, follow the link HERE.

Second, by all means, do the Happy Dance.

Third, send a contribution to Mr. Taylor so that he NEVER runs out of fresh ammo.

Folks, "right between the eyes" is synonomous with "gun control".

I went out in the front yard and did the Happy Dance.

Twice.

Monday Came on Tuesday This Week - For a Moron

I've been stumped, recently, for things to blog about. Call it "blogger's block".

Politics, although interesting in the abstract, just doesn't have any zing.

I've already touched on the GHIP (Great Home Improvement Project), and I'm pretty sure that nobody is all that interested in my dog's "Kennel Cough", which is under treatment and going away.

How about one of my Christmas presents? Y'know, the headphones for my iPod, which have sent those pukey earbuds right into the trash?

Nahhh.

Well, how about "You Can't Make This Stuff Up"?

From Fox News...


Moron Arrested After Driving Truck Into House
Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Note to Mr. Moron: Don't act like one.

Bryan Scott Moron, 20, of Burleson, Texas, was arrested Friday after he lost control of his truck and struck a mailbox, then a house, MyFOXDFW.com reports.

Living up to his surname, Moron failed sobriety tests, the station said. The arrest report showed his blood alcohol level to be more than twice the legal limit.

Moron, a restaurant server, was also driving at an excessive speed, according to the report.

Iowa, Hillary vs. Barck, and the Future

After thinking it over for a little bit, I have my own advice for Hannity, Limbaugh, and Associates: "Be careful what you wish for!"

Just ask any Republican: "Who would you rather run against? Hillary or Barack?"

The Clintons (Hill 'n Bill) have a boat-load of negatives. In the general campaign, any half-decent campaign could load Hillary's record, her and Bill's documented record and political positions into the old political scattergun and have a ball. And beat the stuffing out of her/their candidacy, no innuendo or half-baked accusations required.

TGHIP - The Great Home Improvement Project

'Way back there, OWW got Real Lucky and was offered the opportunity to place a ship of the US Navy into inactive status. This involved shifting Classified Stuff from the ship into the hands of the appropriately cleared Naval Persons, which Persons were accompanied by armed Marines. We had to hump the Classified Stuff down "ladders", which are minimalist staircases, and down to the pier. I kid thee not, bruddah, we had mucho of the Classified Stuff, so there were many trips from Radio I and Radio II down to the pier.

That wasn't the worst.

The worst was paint.

Navy Haze Gray.

On the deck. On the overhead. On the bulkhead. On the mast.

Many, many days of ..... paint.

I hate, despise, and loathe paint.

TGHIP involves flooring. Move the furniture around, rip out the carpet, clean the concrete slab, lay down the plastic sheets as a vapor barrier, lay the planks of Armstrong Heirloom Hickory Laminate - not a problem, just a bit of physical labor.

But, between "rip out the carpet" and "clean the concrete slab" comes the despicable "paint".

Did I mention that I don't like paint?

I managed to skate out of actually painting a wall for thirty-seven freaking years, but now I am painting walls in "Tequila", or "Heron Blue", or "Duet Green", or "Baby Blue Eyes".

I may vomit.

The only reason I don't go into a quiet corner of the back yard and vomit is that Tiny, Bruiser and Ralph (our vicious guard dogs) would probably crowd around, and in Doggie, say "Watcha doin' Dad? Is it fun? Can we do that? You want a lick in the chops, Dad? How's about I wag my tail so hard I fall over? Dad? Dad? Whatcha doin' Dad?"

Gahhh!

I.

Hate.

Paint.

The "Winter Soldier" Arrives Again

I read American Thinker because of the observed bias in the MSM (Main Stream Media). The writers at American Thinker will hammer anyone, Right, Left, or Middle, when they're wrong.

So, I'm reading a sort-of review of To Set The Record Straight (about the Swiftboat Vets campaign against John Kerry) when I found a reference leading to THIS place.

The original Winter Soldier Investigation of 1971 involved John Kerry and Al Hubbard (verified as a liar HERE, which the least incendiary reference I could find) orchestrating a campaign of lies against all American veterans of the Viet Nam era.

As a Viet Nam era vet, I was very perturbed by this "testimony". Later, after the lies and liars were exposed, I was enraged by the liars and the spineless politicians and "newsmen" who oh-so-publicly admired the liars.

So, to the IVAW, a bunch of vets are keeping an eye on you AND the MSM. And now, information flow is not restricted to the MSM. Just remember what happened to Dan Rather when he tried out a little forgery...