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Sent by soldiers who served, or are serving, to Michael Moore; published in today’s Guardian. I’m sure Moore was selective in his choices of letters to publish, but it’s still depressing. I know someone who had two members of the Reserve company he commands airlifted home due to injuries sustained during the first week of their tour, just last week. His company is tasked with psychological operations, “preparing the ground” prior to military incursions into neighbourhoods and towns. His company’s predecessors rotated out after a twelvemonth tour, with hardly a chance to meet any of his men. His team has to build up all of their field knowledge from scratch. A fine way to fight a war.

Spent a while at Kate’s last night, keeping an eye on the wee fella while Shannon worked. Cian chanted. “Tankers! Tankers! Tankers!” “How charming,” I thought to myself. “He must have seen some tanker trucks.” Then the devilish grin spread across his face, and the chant changed. “Wankers! Wankers! Wankers!” My heart sank. It couldn’t have been Shannon he heard saying this, because Americans don’t have any facility with wankers, tosspots, or other fine selections from the onanistic line of verbal abuse. ...

I was talking to my coworker Jane today, who mentioned in passing that her car has over 480,000km on the clock. My first response was, “Hey! Just another 110K before you hit its second light second!” Drop the “light,” because it’s assumed, and you can quote your car’s odometer in seconds. This got me to thinking more deeply, though. Geochronologists use a method called fission-track dating (along with a battery of others) to measure the age of rock samples. When unstable elements (such as U_238) decay spontaneously inside rocks, they leave short tracks of damage in the crystals. Since the decay rate for a given element is constant, counting the number of tracks in a rock sample lets you estimate the age of the sample. ...

Yesterday, when Shannon picked Cian up from preschool, he complained loudly and at length about his ears hurting. As is his wont when not feeling well, he proceeded to scream bloody inchoate murder, while she tried to secure an appointment with his paediatrician. When finally she dragged (I believe this is literally what happened) him to the doctor’s examination room, she had to pin his bad wriggly self down so that the nurse could take his temperature with one of those infrared in-ear thermometer things (not the right scientific designation, I know). Whereupon the cherub held forth with his opinions. ...

Robert came by this evening. “I went to see Ghost in the Shell II last night,” he said. “Definitely two cybernetic, depleted uranium, thumbs up.”

Although the image quality of the built-in phone that my camera sports is generally abysmal, sometimes the poor resolution and washed-out colours add a certain tone to the images that I end up liking rather a lot, much as people seem to be very fond of those old Fisher Price cameras that record to audio cassette. !!

We signed the final paperwork on the new properties last night. I remain impressed by how little my signature at the beginning of a signing session resembles itself forty repetitions later. Shannon and I spent tonight drawing floor plans on graph paper. I thought that I was fairly indifferent to my surroundings, preferring to live inside my head, but it turns out that I ignore the walls around me only when I have no control over them. Give me a pencil and an eraser, and suddenly I’m the Tyrant of the Basement.

On the left, we have the image that was published with the listing for the new property. On the right, a picture of the actual place. While the pen-and-ink drawing makes the property look quite attractive, the photo fails to make the place look as decrepit and sad as it appears when you actually walk around it. For example, you can’t see that the rails on the steps are wire-wrapped onto their posts. The photo also fails to show that most of the left side of the house in the drawing is invisible from the street, as zero lot lines cause the neighbouring property to abut it. ...

I decided to resurrect the blog this evening, after a mere 18 months of inactivity. I thought it would be a simple matter of fiddling with a few Apache configuration directives; as I should have expected, it turned into a heinous nightmare. I originally settled on Rael Dornfest’s blosxom blogging software. It’s conceptually lovely, being both simple and flexible. Unfortunately, my original installation bit-rotted to an unmourned death after a server move, so I had to resurrect it. ...

In a mild frenzy over an apparently bad network card on my file server, I ran to Fry’s the other day, and picked up a Netgear FA-311 network card to replace the presumed dead card. Bad idea. Although the box clearly states that the FA-311 works under Linux, it doesn’t. You can download an elderly natsemi driver from Netgear’s web site, and it won’t work. The PCI ID of the card appears to be totally bogus, too. Sigh. The real lesson, though, is that home-crimped network cables are fragile. The old network card was fine, as it turned out; it just took me forever to get around to suspecting the cable itself.