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Where has the time gone...?
Mar. 12th, 2002 09:44 pmToday was one of those days that announced itself with the kind of humor once associated with Greek deities.
Ming, you see, began to whine about something around 4 am. When I got up to let him out, Sasha (in the next room) started to jump up and scratch the door. This, in turn, woke Galina, and in short order the house resembled a Keystone-Kops-on-drugs fire drill.
The kids took off for Durango around 6:00 am or so, which would allow them time to find the place where Drew was to have his oral surgery done. (Everything went well and the kids were home around 2 pm.)
I went to the store early, to try to figure out why Alice, the Linux box, won't talk to Borg, the Windows box, or to the rest of the world, for that matter. Unfortunately, I made no progress toward solving that riddle.
I did, on the other hand, stay at the store until about 5 pm, at which time I went home and took a nap until 6 pm. I didn't exactly wake up refreshed, but I was less tired than I was coming up the driveway.
Dinner was a bowl of Galina's soup, a few slices or ham, an apple, some dried fruit, and a Coke. That repast complete, a report came in from downstairs that the shower and toilet had backed up.
And so it went...
I am now trying to do a little translation work, as I my plate is now piled high with about 55 pages of work. Thirty-five of them are due ASAP, while the rest are due Friday at 9 am. This means I need to do about 27 pages a day tomorrow and Thursday, which - having looked at the content - isn't something I feel supremely confident about. So, anything I do tonight will make the next two days a little less hectic.
* * * I took the ThinkPad upstairs and played with it a little last night. In the course of 20 minutes, I managed to end up with a machine that doesn't need a floppy disk to boot SmallLinux. Although last night's efforts were helpful from the point of view of refreshing my understanding of some Linux basics, I'm not exactly sure my time was well spent that way... there are simply too many higher-level things I need to pay attention to. OTOH, if I consider the time spent as "serious fun" (which needs no justification, per se), then I should basically stop squawking.
The download of the second ISO image for Redhat 7.2 completed sometime early this morning (probably an hour or two before Ming started whining... or maybe he was trying to tell me the download had finished?). Anyway, I've finished copying the first image to CD, and the second image is being burnt to CD as I write this.
* * * In current affairs, the Wall Street Journal had an eye-catching article on page one, column one this morning. It touched on how some companies are seeking to do extensive background checks (criminal, credit, and motor vehicle) on people in response to the September 11 attacks. The actions of Lilly, which apparently "requested" all its subcontractors to allow the pharmaceutical company to do the checks, were highlighted in the article.
The piece was kind of predictable. There was the case of a woman who had inadvertently bounced a $60 check some years ago, which blossomed into a court case and a fine of less than $200. She was let go. Then there was the young man who, years ago, broke into his high school with some friends to pilfer a VCR. He was let go. Another man was let go because his name matched that of a convicted felon, although he was not that felon. And so on...
(To be fair, I should note that there was resistance to Lilly's wanting to get credit and motor vehicle information on subcontractor employees, and the company backed down on those fronts. Also, the man mistakenly identified as a known felon eventually was reinstated.)
One thing that was markedly absent from the piece was any indication that the effort had, actually, turned up some really dangerous person and kept them away from Lilly.
The whole thing is a little frightening, because while you might expect that such screenings would only single out the bad and the dangerous (e.g., career criminals, armed robbers, chronically violent people, etc.), companies are avoiding the task of using judgment - which can be challenged in court - to implement a no-holds-barred, zero-tolerance program, so that people who long ago paid their "debt to society" for stupid actions best attributed to immaturity are placed on the same level as, say, sociopathic criminal predators. In my view, a zero tolerance rule generally reflects the IQ of the person who devised it.
About a weekago, by the way, the WSJ has a paragraph on its front page to the effect that Enron apparently had been spreading its money around pretty thickly for the past few years, lobbying politicians to amend the tax laws in such a way as to be beneficial to Enron, among others. It didn't work, which is another data point to support the idea that so-called "campaign finance reform" is nothing other than "incumbent protection reform."
Enough musing; gotta get back to work.
Cheers...
Ming, you see, began to whine about something around 4 am. When I got up to let him out, Sasha (in the next room) started to jump up and scratch the door. This, in turn, woke Galina, and in short order the house resembled a Keystone-Kops-on-drugs fire drill.
The kids took off for Durango around 6:00 am or so, which would allow them time to find the place where Drew was to have his oral surgery done. (Everything went well and the kids were home around 2 pm.)
I went to the store early, to try to figure out why Alice, the Linux box, won't talk to Borg, the Windows box, or to the rest of the world, for that matter. Unfortunately, I made no progress toward solving that riddle.
I did, on the other hand, stay at the store until about 5 pm, at which time I went home and took a nap until 6 pm. I didn't exactly wake up refreshed, but I was less tired than I was coming up the driveway.
Dinner was a bowl of Galina's soup, a few slices or ham, an apple, some dried fruit, and a Coke. That repast complete, a report came in from downstairs that the shower and toilet had backed up.
And so it went...
I am now trying to do a little translation work, as I my plate is now piled high with about 55 pages of work. Thirty-five of them are due ASAP, while the rest are due Friday at 9 am. This means I need to do about 27 pages a day tomorrow and Thursday, which - having looked at the content - isn't something I feel supremely confident about. So, anything I do tonight will make the next two days a little less hectic.
The download of the second ISO image for Redhat 7.2 completed sometime early this morning (probably an hour or two before Ming started whining... or maybe he was trying to tell me the download had finished?). Anyway, I've finished copying the first image to CD, and the second image is being burnt to CD as I write this.
The piece was kind of predictable. There was the case of a woman who had inadvertently bounced a $60 check some years ago, which blossomed into a court case and a fine of less than $200. She was let go. Then there was the young man who, years ago, broke into his high school with some friends to pilfer a VCR. He was let go. Another man was let go because his name matched that of a convicted felon, although he was not that felon. And so on...
(To be fair, I should note that there was resistance to Lilly's wanting to get credit and motor vehicle information on subcontractor employees, and the company backed down on those fronts. Also, the man mistakenly identified as a known felon eventually was reinstated.)
One thing that was markedly absent from the piece was any indication that the effort had, actually, turned up some really dangerous person and kept them away from Lilly.
The whole thing is a little frightening, because while you might expect that such screenings would only single out the bad and the dangerous (e.g., career criminals, armed robbers, chronically violent people, etc.), companies are avoiding the task of using judgment - which can be challenged in court - to implement a no-holds-barred, zero-tolerance program, so that people who long ago paid their "debt to society" for stupid actions best attributed to immaturity are placed on the same level as, say, sociopathic criminal predators. In my view, a zero tolerance rule generally reflects the IQ of the person who devised it.
About a weekago, by the way, the WSJ has a paragraph on its front page to the effect that Enron apparently had been spreading its money around pretty thickly for the past few years, lobbying politicians to amend the tax laws in such a way as to be beneficial to Enron, among others. It didn't work, which is another data point to support the idea that so-called "campaign finance reform" is nothing other than "incumbent protection reform."
Enough musing; gotta get back to work.
Cheers...
