Well, I'm working this weekend. So much for firing cannons, singing shanties and hanging out with the guys.

On the bright side, I'll make some extra money for — no, wait, I don't get overtime any more. Aren't I lucky?

Cool, found another Webcomic to read: Evil, Inc. Lisa, you might enjoy this particular storyline, which visits their graphic design department.

Today I tried upgrading my Linux desktop environment, as I noticed that a brand-new version was out. Long story short, I have the stable version of Debian Linux, and KDE 3.5 apparently depends on some libraries only available in the unstable version¹, so things didn't work out too well². It took me about an hour to rip KDE out by the roots and replace the original version.

But on the positive side, I did the entire thing — upgrade, removal and reinstallation — without rebooting,³ and once I got the original version of KDE reinstalled, my desktop was exactly the way I'd left it. The more I use Linux, the more I like it.⁴ If only my three favorite Windows apps had Linux versions...

1. Which would have been nice to know before I tried it.

2. Which is to say, it entirely uninstalled KDE and all applications associated with it, installed a few of its new libraries and then barfed because some of them had files already contained in other packages, and once I'd forced it to overwrite the duplicate files (nothing important, just icons and images), then it finally realized it didn't have the right library versions and refused to install any further. And it wouldn't install the original version back again, because the bits which had been installed had higher version numbers. So I had to go find those bits and remove them before I could go back to what I had.

3. Which is fortunate, because I've been too lazy to put my network drive mappings into /etc/fstab, so it would have been a pain to try to remember what they all were. I'll probably get around to doing that now. Probably.

4. Despite problems like this, which, to be fair, would have been avoided had I just waited for the new version of KDE to show up when I did an update in apt-get or kpackage.

Years ago, I used to see bumper stickers praising the drivers' children's academic excellence.

But I guess that was too exclusionary; perhaps the parents of children not quite as academically inclined complained too much, because then these started appearing:

But then there came the push to make grades meaningless — for apparently a child's self-esteem is far more important than actually learning anything in school which will help them get a good job in the real world — so those made way for:

But apparently that's no good anymore, as the other day I saw:

Well, I'm sure that will satisfy most parents — I've seen vast numbers of children behaving monstrously in stores and restaurants, whose parents react as though they're just doing the most adorable things ever — but somewhere there'll be a parent who can't deny that his or her little brat isn't really "terrific", and will sue to get a sticker he or she can display too. So let's go with one that includes all children: good students, bad students, good citizens, troublemakers, athletes, stoners, A/V geeks and so forth.

Whoops, we can't use that one — it sounds too scientific, which of course means evolution! Why, this nation's 80% minority of Christians might feel oppressed by it. Better go with something safer, like:

Except that's bad for two reasons: first, it advertises to those people who prey on children where potential victims can be found, and it excludes home-schooling parents, and the parents of dropouts. So let's just go with:

Perfect! It excludes nobody except for childfree couples — but they benefit from them too: they can count the bumper stickers as they drive through a restaurant parking lot and mentally prepare themselves for the dining experience awaiting them inside.

Everybody wins!

Well, I'm spending the week in a hotel in Crestview, a development I was informed of yesterday when I got in to work. While I was on vacation, two technicians quit and a third had to go into the hospital. I'm covering the latter's territory while he recovers from surgery.

Well, at least I've got plenty of books, and my laptop plays DVDs.

Thank goodness that ridiculous "War on Christmas" nonsense is over for another year. Italians, Spaniards, Frenchmen and Germans are so lucky they don't have to suffer through the "Keep Christ in Christmas" crap, what with their Buon Natale, Feliz Navidad, Joyeux Noël and Fröhliche Weihnachten.

It struck me yesterday that the whole hullaballoo seems like something Screwtape or Anthony Crowley would have dreamed up: get Christians so trapped in the bunker mentality, concentrating so hard on defending themselves against "secularists", that they forget all about that whole "peace on Earth, good will towards Men" message which used to be the focus of Christmas. I didn't see a single church signboard with that scriptural quote this year, though I saw plenty of "Keep Christ in Christmas" and "Christ is still welcome here" signs.

And I look at those self-appointed generals who lead this "war" — such as Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson, whose doorsteps have seemingly never been darkened by such purportedly "Christian" virtues as humility, forgiveness and charity — and wonder how they've managed to pass themselves off as champions of a religion whose tenets they so blatantly and consistently ignore.

Ah, well. At least it's over for another ten months or so.

Certain entries in this blog of mine attract the spam like crazy. Last night, I shut off comments on the most recent target; since then, twenty-six twenty-seven separate attempts have been made to add comments to it. Every instance involves two hits, from two very different IP addresses, with no repeats; the second one attempts to post the comment.

It looks like there's something out there — a trojan or something similar — that places a victim's computer under the control of the spammers. It looks like the first hit is an attempt to ascertain that the page actually exists, and the second one is the actual comment posting. It's fiendishly clever — since they come from a wide variety of addresses, you can't simply block an IP address (or range of addresses); and since many of them come from big ISPs (comcast, adelphia, ameritech, roadrunner, etc.), blocking their address ranges would block many potential readers.

Looks like I'm going to have to rework the comment code to prevent this.