Feeling "guilty"?

My response to a post by LJ friend volkris (which I am "promoting" to a journal entry), wherein he expresses chagrin with people who say they are made to feel guilty when asked to submit to a drug test. The test, he says, isn't to determine guilt, but truth.

There are good reasons why one might feel "guilty" at having to take a drug test.

While the purpose of a drug test may, as you say, be to "determine the truth," the same could be said of a search of your dorm room, or any demand to produce identification, for whatever reason. Guilt has nothing to do with having your room searched, or being told to pony up your driver license, right?

But the fact is that not everyone has to take a drug test. It's not a universally routine procedure, like showing your license when you write a check (at least, not yet). Cops don't search people who they think are innocent, and despite the legal principle of "innocent until proven guilty," cops are widely thought of as the folks who arrest criminals and who find evidence by searching for it (your mileage may vary in places like Watts or Harlem).

But don't worry. As our population becomes desensitized to such invasions of privacy (not to mention the shredding of the Fourth Amendment), people who are "asked" to repeatedly submit themselves and their possessions to any and all searches and examinations demanded by schools, stores, corporations, employers, and cops will stop feeling "guilty" as these demands become universal.

(By contrast, there is a paragraph in Heinlein's Tramp Royale, which is an autobiographical work describing a trip he took around the world with his wife in the 1950s, where he recalls how incensed he was when a hotel in Colorado insisted that he show a personal identification before they'd rent him a room. He ended up taking his business elsewhere.)

Cheers...

Sans wire, lad!

I spent a few minutes a little while back walking around the house with the eSlate, watching where I was going and also keeping an eye on the machine's display as it was pinging my main Linux box in my office.

We be wireless!

I managed to download and compile the Linux wireless tools by Jean Tourrilhes (an Open Source project sponsored by Hewlett-Packard), which finally helped me over the top. A second download, of a Gnome-based wireless configuration applet (gWireless) died somewhere in the installation phase of the process. You can't have it all, I guess.

* * *One of my Houston clients called with an Excel spreadsheet job. I accepted it, of course.

Oh, when will I ever learn? I tell you, St. Jerome must have been looking out for me today, because I formulated my time estimate for returning the job on the basis of what I saw in the spreadsheet, forgetting that MS Excel allows multiple sheets in a file.

On the basis of what I saw, I promised the job for tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, there were 4 additional "sheets" that I neglected to see (fortunately, they were really small compared to the first page, which I did see). There was also a comfortable level of boilerplate in the job as a whole, which helped me along, though you still have to read each section to make sure there are no subtle differences as you go.

Still, the formatting and the layout of this particular file supports the notion that people who work with computers in "shoehorn" mode, i.e., muck with stuff until it prints out right, really ought to be horsewhipped.

* * *Drew concocted a nice dinner: spaghetti with dried tomatos and shrimp. Mmm-m! Good! I had some as I watched the first few minutes of MI: 2 with Galina before going back down to the office to finish my work for the day.

* * *Huntur is now in active exploration mode, on hands and knees. She managed to climb up half a flight of stairs today while Shannon ran into the bathroom. She also routinely now waves back at people who wave to her. What a (grand) kid!

* * *One project remains on my plate right now, a 50-page edit due Friday. No worries, as the translator is generally good, and was working with the help of edits I made to a previous, related document. Still, it's not something to leave undone until Thursday night...

Time to wind down a little and go to bed.

Cheers...