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LiveJournal for Speaks With Fingers.
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| Tuesday, February 8th, 2005 |
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Hmph. Don't care if American Greetings are made in my hometown. There's a reason Hallmark has the tagline it does. *secret smile* |
| Saturday, February 5th, 2005 |
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So the two gentlemen we got to see, while part of the program, never flew the '51's... one was too big to fly (about 6'6" in a day when they only built cockpits so big); the other was trained for bombers but the war ended before he made it to Europe)... but while I didn't get to ask the question about attitude, I did take something important away from their talk: Education and attitude go a long way. Despite the treatment they got outside the base, and by some of the brass, the people at Tuskeegee gave the Airmen the best education and training(*) they possibly could... and they were expected by their squadron commanders to be the best. It showed in their later careers; one stayed in and completed a 30-year career in the Air Force; the other got out, and went on to become a very senior official in the FAA. Both men went on to lucrative consulting careers after retiring from the Uncle Sam. When asked why they chose to volunteer to fly for America when they had been treated so badly, one man said he wanted to prove that he was just as good as the white pilots. The other said he just wanted to fly, and didn't care what he had to do to do so. But neither one let prejudice get in the way of getting in the air. "We just dealt with it," one said. Both of them emphasized to the children in the audience that a good education was the necessary grounding to be whatever it was you wanted to be. So I don't know, from the horse's mouth, as it were, what those bomber pilots thought when they learned the red-tailed '51's were flown by black men. I'm not sure it matters, now. I get the feeling that the Airmen didn't let prejudice get in their way much.... and when it did get in the way, they routed around it, and succeeded in life anyway. Sure, they didn't end up where they set out to go. Who of us does? I sure didn't, and I'm a WASP het male from a family well off enough to send me out of state to school. Sure, it matters that the present day doesn't treat all us weirdoes equally. That's a crime, and shouldn't be taken sitting down. But I think the lesson they were trying to teach us today is that the way to deal with such things is not to let the turkeys get you down, but to go be the best you you can be, and if you can't get it done one way, do it another. "Speak your mind. Don't back down." -- Mohammed Ali, IBM's first Linux commercial (*)Education is an exercise in thinking, and includes theory and encourages one to innovate. Training is learning something more or less by rote, the idea being to do it the same way every time. You are educated in navigation. You are trained in emergency procedures. |
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| Friday, February 4th, 2005 |
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From bash.org, a site devoted to random quotes off IRC.... <Soybomb> On the way home yesterday, I saw a car with a vanity plate that read: LINUX OS <Soybomb> I really wished for a truck with a WINDOWS plate to ram it...sadly, no. <Druuna> unfortunately, you'd probably crash before hitting it... Harsh... :) |
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| Thursday, February 3rd, 2005 |
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The Tuskeegee Airmen (99th Fighter Squadron/332nd Fighter Group) were some of the finest fighter pilots in WW II. Originally assigned ground support duties in North Africa, the Airmen worked their way up to bomber escort, and when the first missions were flown from England to Berlin, the bomber pilots requested the gentlemen in the red-tailed Mustangs to shepherd them into Hitler's backyard. They didn't care that the men in those P-51's were all Black. All they knew was that no bomber was ever lost to enemy aircraft while under their care. It was in part due to their standards of excellence and contribution to the war that the Air Force was eventually integrated (so says an Air Force professor). I bring this up because two of their illustrious number will be at the Museum of Flight this Saturday. Thanks to ![[info]](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20050210080928im_/http:/=2fstat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} wenchita for the heads-up...(The subject line is Lawrence Fishburne's exit line in the recent movie about them....) |
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At least not Manitoba. Turns out they can lock you up if they think you're mentally ill and are going to "deteriorate"... even if you're not a danger to yourself or others. And once they lock you up, they can pretty much have their way with you. You can go read laan's journal for proof. As depressing as the situation in DC is, what with Caligula in the Oval Office and Torquemeda as AG (and yes, I'm engaging in hyperbole, but only a little), at least here in the other Washington they can't do that to you... yet. I really haven't listened to the news lately; haven't felt like it. It's just the same old bovine scatology grinding on ad infinitum nauseumque, and sometimes you just wanna invade a Mormon's basement with an internet link and barricade the door... Of course, part of it is that it's the same old bovine scatology eight-plus hours a day, which is a significant part of one's life... *sigh* But, I digress. Point being, for those of you thinking of migrating north.... you might want to give that a real long hard look. And I'm not sure you're going to like what you see. Of course, if you're relatively unattached, or are willing to take folks with, you could always move to New Hampshire... that's probably the absolute best thing you could do to change your political future, if moving is an option (and if you were thinking of moving to Canada, it obviously is...) |
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| Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005 |
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Put your coffee and coke down; you're gonna love this. Microsoft brass are pissed off. Not at the Linux geeks. Not even at Apple. They're torqued at their own employees. For having iPods. The infectious little music players are everywhere; the arty quotes one manager as saying 80% of Softies that have media players atall have iPods. The Bellevue Square Apple Store can't keep them in stock. You'd think they were crack.... And you know how addictions work. The iPod is a *ahem* gateway drug. Then you get a Mac Mini. Next thing you know you're running Firefox... and that's only half a step away from *really* drinking the Kool-Aid... So, beware, Softies. Get yourself some black earphones, and keep your iPod chucked in a drawer or something... it wouldn't do to have a VP walk thru and spot those telltale white cords... Unless, of course, you work in the Macintosh Business Unit. Then you're safe. You're just testing product. :) |
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| Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 |
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| ( Work, work, work... ) | ||||
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| Monday, January 31st, 2005 |
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"Perhaps, when committing your first federal crime, it would be unwise to slap your name and address on it and mail it to 10,000 people." --Dogbert (My ex-boss keeps coming up with these jewels... :) |
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| Sunday, January 30th, 2005 |
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I have just returned from what I think was one of the finer films I've seen in a long time. Minimal special effects, no real T&A;, one scene of semi-graphic violence. Just one of the better *stories* I've heard in a while. I knew Samuel L. Jackson was good. This kicks much keister. A true story, too, about how a coach from the rich part of Oakland goes down into the ghetto of Richmond and turns a group of young punks that were some semblance of a basketball team not into winners... but into young men. It's not whether you win the game... it's whether you succeed in life. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. If you *expect* excellence out of young people, and do so fairly and with respect, most of them will deliver. This is the kind of stuff I want to engender in the next generation. ETA: My bad, half asleep. The movie? Coach Carter |
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For those of you wondering how the heck they got a shot of SpaceShipOne from the front like that, I've taken the liberty of mirroring the wallpaper from which seattlesparks so artfully snipped it... look carefully off SS1's left wing (i.e. just to its right in the pic), and also in the bottom left of the picture.... now do you know? Clicky (1024x768 jpeg, dialup users click with care) ( Answer... ) So I suppose the icon represents the future, more so than I had thought... :) |
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My two favorite teams are the Mariners, and anybody who's beating the DamnYankees. May that list be long and glorious this year. Just hadda be said. (Hmmm, need a new Baseball icon, too. Edgar's retired.) |
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| Saturday, January 29th, 2005 |
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I'd seen a lot of shots of SS1, but not one airborne from the front. seattlesparks dug this out of somewhere, and spruced it up with, one presumes, her Macintosh... I'll use this one when talking about SS1, SS2, Virgin Galactic, and other ideas for getting the heck off this rock. I'll use Apollo when I'm talking Old Skool stuff. Thanks, seattlesparks. Verra nice.
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OK, folks, I need a new "Space" icon. (I've needed one for a while, now, but...) This one is decidedly Old Skool. Damn near as old as I am. I poked around for a while at the Virgin Galactic site, and on Scaled, and I can't seem to find one that hasn't either already been done or lacks proper resolution to be discernible at 100x100. (There was a good one on Virgin's site that shows SS1 with GIMP'ed Virgin logos on the tails headed down over Mojave Spaceport, but it won't look right shrunk down to be an icon. Besides, I'm not a shill for Virgin, I'm a shill for Civillian Manned Space... :) So Go. Search. Find. No stone unturned, no hell, no fury... Uhh, waitaminit, who turned on the disco light? :) /me is in an "Oooh! Shiny!" mood this morning.... |
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| Friday, January 28th, 2005 |
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Today - what little is left of it, is the 19th anniversary of Mission 51-Lima, the passing of Challenger, and Dick Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ron McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik, and Christa McAuliffe. ( Lyrics, not G-rated, and commentary ) Here's to SpaceShipTwo, and sending people back to orbit safely and cheaply. And on to Mars. |
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Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii don't wanna work, I jus' wanna bang on the drum all daaaaay... This totally gratuitous post brought to you by the letter "F", the number "5", and Mail Boat Records. |
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Cringely is all breathless this week, or at least his readership is... they seem to think that the Mac mini, far from being something the likes of Dell can pooh-pooh, is going to be a killer consumer appliance... Love'em or hate'em, I've not seen the computing community this stirred up since And Cringely has a reputation for being a pretty fair prognosticator. I don't think Steve Jobs is gonna take over the world... just yet.... but I think this itty bitty Apple is going to take a bigger bite out of the pie than anyone had thought... except maybe Steve Jobs. I could be wrong. Hell, Cringely is only right two out of three. But one generally doesn't sign a marketing agreement with Target unless Target thinks you're going to sell about a bazillion of them.... |
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| Thursday, January 27th, 2005 |
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You know it's bad when your own hometown paper suggests the competition is better... Zing! Or you could abandon Windows altogether - at the risk of breaking out in a cold sweat, not knowing what to do with the money you would have spent on anti-virus and anti-spyware software. "And the giant say OOOH!.... 'Cause it hurt him, dear hearts!" -- Brother Dave Gardener, "Little David" |
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| Go read what Wil Wheaton has to say. It's something we can do right now in the effort to keep the Republic from becoming Empire. | ||||||
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Today is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Never Again should we let a government get so empowered that it can invade other countries, and impose its way of life on others without their consent, persecuting those who are perceived to be a hindrance to the betterment of society. Yes, I'm talking to you. |
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Atlanta cartoonist Mike Luckovich has a habit of doing fitting eulogies for notable folks upon their passing. Here's one for Johnny. |
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LiveJournal for Speaks With Fingers.
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determined.
amused.
pleased.