http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g6yZX1Zjrr7k_qgkYBRbqTFybzqAD9HUMLUG0

Don't believe what you hear. 49,700 US soldiers are still in Iraq. There is no end in sight.

Facts related to the Iraq war and the nation's economy as the U.S. combat role ends:
U.S. TROOP LEVELS:
_ March 31, 2003: 90,000 (beginning of war)
_ October 2007: 170,000 (peak of troop buildup)
_ Aug. 31, 2010: Approximately 49,700
COALITION TROOP LEVELS:
_ Number of countries that participated in "Coalition for the Immediate Disarmament of Iraq" at the start of the war: 31, including the United States
_ As of August 2009, all non-U.S. coalition members had withdrawn from Iraq.
CASUALTIES:
_ Confirmed U.S. military deaths as of Aug. 31, 2010: At least 4,416
_ Confirmed U.S. military wounded (hostile) as of Aug. 31, 2010: 31,929
_ Confirmed U.S. military wounded (non-hostile, using medical air transport) as of July 31, 2010: 40,166
_ Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion: More than 97,461, according to the Iraq Body Count database.
COST:
_ More than $744 billion, according to the National Priorities Project. To date, $747.3 billion has been allocated to the war since 2003. In January 2010, the Congressional Budget Office projected that additional war costs for the next 10 years could range from $274 billion to $588 billion.
UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:
_ 2003: Estimated 28 percent
_ January 2004: 30-45 percent
_ January 2010: Estimated 15.5-30 percent
COST OF A BARREL OF OIL:
_ Aug. 24, 2001: $23.29
_ Aug. 23, 2002: $26.19
_ Aug. 22, 2003: $27.85
_ Aug. 20, 2010: $74.08
OIL PRODUCTION
_ Estimated prewar level: 2.5 million barrels a day
_ May 2003: 0.3 million barrels a day
_ August 2010: 2.32 million barrels a day
ELECTRICITY:
_ May 2003: 500 megawatts generated nationwide
_ August 2010: 5,880 megawatts generated nationwide
TELEPHONES:
_ September 2003: 600,000 land lines and an estimated 80,000 cellular
_ January 2010: 1.3 million land lines and 19.5 million cellular
WATER:
_ 2003: 12.9 million people had potable water
_ 2010: More than 21.9 million people have potable water
SEWERAGE:
_ 2003: 6.2 million people served
_ 2010: 11.5 million people served
INTERNET SUBSCRIBERS:
_ September 2003: 4,900
_ January 2010: 1.6 million
INTERNAL REFUGEES:
_ 2003: 1.02 million
_ 2010: An estimated 1.55 million people are currently displaced inside Iraq.
EMIGRANTS:
_ 2003: 500,000 Iraqis living abroad
_ 2010: Approximately 2 million Iraqis, mainly in Syria and Jordan
_ June 2010: At least 275,350 refugees and internally displaced persons have returned to Iraq.
NOTE: All figures are the most recent available.

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Let's face it: we're all bad parents. If we could have children when we're, say, 60, we'd all be better adjusted. But biology dictates that stupid and young are the only requirements for fertility.

About 3 years ago, an old-school CEO started coming down on me for working outside the office. I work an average of 12 hours a day and lately it's been at around 15. I was lucky to get away with working at home 1 day a week, but even that was too much. I couldn't get out of the office before 5.

As an ironic twist of fate, the desire to bring home a steady paycheck for my family interfered with my child's development and, perhaps, her ultimate education and career choices. Between ages 3 and 5, I took Kate regularly to theater preparation classes, knowing that the deck in America is stacked against women who can not act or sing. By the time Kate was 5, she was memorizing lines. But then the CEO storm blew in and fear obscured my judgement. Years went by without Kate receiving any instruction.

Last night Kate was in a play. Her role involves walking on and off stage. Just being in the theater and seeing the process is tremendously more insight than I ever received. But I can't help thinking that if it were not for my backing down to corporate oppression, that Kate would have had a least a few spoken lines. I failed and I knew better.

We all experience epiphanies, especially when we're parents and so much - THE FUTURE - is riding on our decisions. What I can't believe is that I've been free of this CEO for over a year and I completely forgot to put Kate back into theater classes. Prisoners become with comfortable with their prisons. Now that I've realized my huge mistake, I will correct it.

It's never too late. Except if you're a woman and want to have your own biological child. Even then, you can either adopt, become a teacher, or wait for grandchildren.

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God - if there was one - doesn't need to lift a finger, because America spews bad karma no matter who the President happens to be.

• US out of Afghanistan. We can't afford to educate all the religious cave dwellers across the planet. Not until every American is smart enough to not vote for Republicans, Democrats, or Libertarians. Blackwater doesn't want that and GE's shareholders are happily profiting from selling bombs.

• Stop drilling in the US for oil that goes to China and elsewhere. It's our oil, we need it, it cost us dearly, and corporations don't pay their fair share. If the Democrats were serious about changing things, there would be solar panels on my roof right now, made possible with a federal grant available to all homeowners at a substantially lower cost - and orders of magnitude more effective - than the last stimulus. Or BP's writeoffs for last year. But let's face it: PG&E doesn't want that.

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Kate leaves her elementary school today and will be starting at another school in July that is dedicated to grades 4-5.

I stumbled this morning upon a "to do" list written by Kate a few years ago. The list includes:

1. Frisbee
2. Soccer
3. Chinese checkers
4. Football

As my child continues to develop into an evil teenager, I can feel some comfort that I was there most of the time.

But I wish my play-time friend would stay the same forever because I forgot that I enjoy soccer, football, and water balloon fights. She's not gone yet but I can see the end, which makes every minute when she's not hurling psychological abuse at me all the more cherished.

All things considered, I would have avoided the folly of the experience entirely, and I would not do it again. What's done is done. Who wants to play?

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The addiction to unhappiness lies in the truth that when you're unhappy, you don't fear losing anything. This is why you should pursue the men/women who you think will turn you down.

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http://networkedblogs.com/4U2Vp

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No time for myself.

Overpacked schedule.

Deadlines.

I'm grateful for the people who've helped me.

But.

What's the point to living if I can't live?

I hate it here.

I wish I was dead.

I wish I was never dropped here in the first place.

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Let's assess motive for the last Anthrax letters...

http://www.newsgarden.org/columns/anthrax/anthraxtargets.shtml

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Storage: Cassandra and SSDs

Processing: Scala

Deployment: Nimble (see also OSGi and Infiniflow)

Display: GXT (GWT + extJS)

Tools: Bamboo, Crucible, Confluence, Fisheye, JIRA, Greenhopper, Mercurial, Eclipse (of course)

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Debt is a concept created by the ruling class. In the past, debts were paid through indentured servitude. Today, we earn salaries that, by design, will not repay the prices on our heads even after 40 years of labor. We can thank the post-WWII Mortgage Miracle and the Promise of a College Education for that one.

As long as rich white men who think the world owes them everything control the Federal Reserve System, we will continue to drown in gallons of imaginary red ink in return for HBO, American Idol, living with our middle-aged children, and a chance to win the lottery.

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Humans decide whether a particular outcome is either good or bad.

Take, for example, the BP Gulf Oil Disaster. The creatures in the Gulf will either die or deal with the challenges presented to them. They do not attribute "good" or "bad" to their situation. They can't build a house and hide on Facebook, so there's no point to them dwelling on their plight.

But we humans have the burden of our large brains.

A fisherman supports a politician who chants "drill baby drill." The politician, John McCain, is too corrupt and shrewd to force corporations to spend the money required to avert inevitable disasters. The fisherman loses his livelihood when fisheries are devastated, becoming a permanent number on a long list of welfare recipients.

That's karma.

Perhaps it's a bad turn for the fisherman and the fish, but the story continues. Without a doubt there will be a few scraps of positive outcomes even from an underground oil volcano. Perhaps the fisherman will leave his family and live honestly and happily as a gay man.

The way we're going, in a few hundred years, there won't be any more modern people left to decide. Humans will recover, but they won't resemble today's "rich old white men" culture that has killed and is killing so many. For children who will be born 1,000 years from now, that's a good thing.

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1. Go to Settings
2. Go to display
3. Enable the Remote Display Server
4. Set the Remote Display Server's port to 5000 (defaults to 3389)
5. Change your firewall settings and unblock port 5000 (probably want to set scope to local subnet)
6. Run Remote Desktop client on another computer
7. Connect the server that is running Virtual Box (this has nothing to do with the network interface for your VM) on port 5000 e.g., mylaptop:5000

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Last week I tried - and failed - to reuse raw Virtual Box files residing on an external USB disk with two Windows laptops. This is trivial using VMWare. It's fairly straightforward with Virtual Box as long as you don't create snapshots.

Word of warning to Virtual Box users: DO NOT CREATE SNAPSHOTS unless you really go back and forth (e.g., you test antivirus software). If you want a save point, shut down and copy the .vmdk file. You will be glad you did.

If you want to transport Virtual Box VMs across your various computers, it is, by far, easiest to create new VMs and point them to existing .VMDK files than to attempt to understand Virtual Box's .xml file intracies. You will end up with corrupt files. It is also a hell of a lot faster compared to creating a virtual appliance (18 hours??).

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In the Gulf of Mexico, we are all watching - aghast - a movie of what should be 10 years of devastation, sped up to unfold in just three weeks.

The oil from the depths of the Gulf was intended to be burned in refineries, tailpipes, smokestacks, and aircraft carriers, its toxins released to the garbage can in the sky, to eventually settle in lungs, on buildings, and, ultimately, to rest in a dead sea grave from whence it came.

In other words, the petrol beneath the Gulf is spewing into its ultimate destination, this time without the middleman.

Even ignoring the effects of climate change, petroleum is deadly. If we don't demand that the transnational "energy" conglomerates shift to solar, hydro, and wind (which they won't), we're all dead, just the same.

Sorry Louisina. Sorry Texas. Sorry Mexico. Sorry world.

Perhaps someday we'll do something about it. The "Indians" in Ecuador aren't the only victims any longer. The stock market is the least of our worries.

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I've been on the hook for entertaining a young human for the past 9 years. She is close to outgrowing me. Once you get used to playing a role for so long, it's nearly impossible to figure out who you are when the show's over.

We never truly outgrow our parents, but the world beckons. Its inhabitants, problems, and playthings invite us to explore ourselves, to discover whether we have the guts to become who we truly want to be. And that inevitably means leaving behind those we love and who love us unconditionally. For those left at home, nothing is ever the same again - or as good.

Most of us get caught in spiderwebs along the journey, mortally captured and bound. But whether we decide to become food, or to feed on an endless supply of naïveté, the chances are overwhelming that eventually no one will know that we lived.

No matter how futile, those of us who made the unfixable mistake of offspring can encourage future generations to stop the cycle. What we call life is a helix that repeats itself through joy, work, sorrow, and boredom, which has neither an end nor a message besides the same tiresome static: "We are one so don't get greedy. Then again, maybe not."

Our DNA is the needle on the phonograph that plays the tune that we call reality. Stopping the spinning disc won't be easy, but inevitably, the song will end and nobody will be around to miss it.

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IA is the cool way to say Information Architecture which is a fancy way to say Domain of Interest. IA is concerned with the data, tools, and processes that are specific to a focused area of concern.

Folks who work in IA inevitably draw wireframes, which are usually mockups of a user interface.

Balsamiq is an awesome mockup builder for the Mac:

http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups

And finally, there's a blog called Wireframes:

http://wireframes.linowski.ca

In which there's a post about a team of folks using Google Docs to build wireframes collaboratively:

http://www.google.com/reader/play/#item/new/43


Hours of fun!

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Give me a break, conservative pundits, with your "largest government expansion since the 1950s."

All sorts of government workers - especially teachers - are getting pink slips. That's the intended result of your master plan: massive unemployment because there are no services.

Your bullshit rhetoric once again fails to match reality.

Perhaps we should stop wasting money on your War on Drugs and your War on Terror. I'm all for the latter as long as we correctly identify the terrorists.

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In the bad old days of computing, development organizations begged for the computing resources that would enable them to (erm, selfishly) build more products and add more features to them.

Yes, it still happens, especially in profitable "First World" corporations. But where ever this is happening, the company will be dead soon.

On the other hand, startups can't afford to acquire hardware. So they don't. They're EC2 customers. They're parasites on the back of the larger Amazon beast. They can't die, even if they have no business model. Their operations costs are ridiculously low because the market - not a CEO or CFO monarch - meets the demand.

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/03/23/UsingAMarketEconomy.aspx

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I must choose between sleep and writing software on a daily basis.

Unless you have a domestic servant (e.g., a traditional wife or grandparents nearby who are retired), I recommend not having children.

Which begs the question: Why bother getting married at all? So you can have someone to wipe your butt when you're 85? Believe me, you can and should pay someone to do that.

I resent my existence. I know it's unhealthy. But that's the way it is. If there was a god - which I doubt - I would hate her. We're told that we should be grateful for having full stomachs and good health (no chemo treatments for me yet) - but I would rather be a rock instead of an aging human who knows what's coming.

It's pointless to fantasize for a better life. One might as well wish for an existenceless existence. Life is cruel. Humans, as a result of their condition, are the meanest particles in the universe.

We have choices to make. We suffer their consequences no matter how we choose our own adventure. The time we spend between yoga and meditation is called life, a highly toxic substance.

Morning

Kate:

1. Piano - 40 minutes. On the weekends this is substantially longer because Kate believes she has an infinite amount of time to procrastinate and we are contantly on her to stop reading and practice. So why bother? First, it dredges brain-body pathways. Secondly, it's a domestication tactic, and trust me, the world will thank me later.
2. Pulmacort - 10 minutes
3. Eye scrub
4. Eye antibiotic
5. Sunscreen
6. Breakfast
7. Brush teeth

Me:

1. Breakfast
2. Make Kate's lunch
3. Yoga 1

Evening

Kate:

1. Bath
2. Pulmacort
3. Eye compress
4. Eye ointment
5. Floss & brush teeth
6. Bedtime story

Me:

1. Buy dinner (optional)
2. Dishes & clean up (preclean house every other week for cleaning service*)
3. Yoga 2
4. Shave
5. Shower

On top of this, there's the other usual chores: house and yard maintenance, Kate's piano lessons, garbage day and the punishment for having money, time, and knowledge: around-the-house IT support. Next year I will take Kate to school in the morning and pick her up (yay).

How busy people find the time to cultivate relationships is another mystery. I suspect that most do not. It should be obvious why spouses cheat and eventually divorce - the endless stress results in impenetrable blame and resentment.

• Billions of people live without a cleaning service. Although I have a Roomba, the twice-a-month service enforces my no-clutter goals and ensures that no matter how tired we are, cleaning happens every 2 weeks. There are ethical and financial consequences for this, but I employ someone directly and pay around $30/hour, which is, admittedly, probably too low for the descendants of "America"'s (call it Mexico, call it whatever you want) original inhabitants. When the brown revolution comes, I hope they kill me first.

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Remember: they're not terrorists because they're white.

4/19/95 - Timothy McVeigh inspires and horrors poor, uneducated, delusional white males across the country who identify with the NRA, the Republican party, US flag lapel pins, and (soon) Fox News, an organization run by a smart, foreign-born freedom hater who stirs up racist fervor whenever a Democrat is President. Not because he himself is a racist but instead because (as it is with most rich white males) it increases his audience and his army of blue collar barely-employed dolts who vote against their own interests.

2/18/10 - Joseph A. Stack flies plane into IRS building

3/4/10 - John Bedell fires two 9-millimeter semi-automatic weapons outside a Pentagon subway entrance

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