Desperately Balanced

Rule #016: Accidents happen on the stage that carelessness set.

I had a doctor who told me, repeatedly, that there's no such thing as an accident. He was pretty old-school, not big on excuses and the like. I never truly agreed with him because, you know, there's always some outside factor that plays into an accident. "I didn't know when I left the bike there that you'd be backing the car out of the garage today!"

After a recent accident involving a cup of tea (not mine) and an iPhone (also not mine) I understood the middle ground which would work: Accidents happen on the stage that carelessness set.

Rule #015: The measure of a man is the way he reconciles the difference between the way the world works, and the way he wishes the world worked.

Before I realize that keeping my OS distribution up-to-date causes more problems than it fixes?

Usually it's just a problem that the database upgrade is drastically abrupt and doesn't carry forward useful things like, you know, data. Or configuration. But this time it turned out that the upgraded OS (OpenSuSE 12) was incompatible with the Linode kernels, so all hell broke loose. Which caused me to do a reinstall of the older version, etc. etc.

Anyways, I'm sure no one noticed the site being down, so I'm not really sorry. Just cranky.

EOM

From the local laundromat:

EOM

Not only is the practice of popping ads up over site content annoying, sometimes I think it does a disservice to the advertiser. This pic/ad combo from GumGum makes me want to avoid looking for that handyman service.

EOM

Found empty, crumpled, wet and dirty on the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail.

EOM

I got mail from National Grid... hurricane related, they're either my electric or gas provider, I can't even remember anymore. The weird thing is, the "plain text" email is different than the "html" email. One apologizes for past bad information, the other doesn't mention that at all. And it's all the same email, just two different MIME parts. See:

There's a show (which I haven't seen, natch) called Breaking Bad. The ad spots that I have seen show a grim, forbidding looking man, very similar to Gordon Freeman but a little more dangerous. Dangerous in the "Breaking Bad" way, the "I've turned to the dark side way."

When I found this ad juxtaposed with a picture for an article on Gawker, however, I was struck how the picture that wasn't meant to be scary, ended up being scarier.

There's a good article over at Alternet titled "Why do the police have tanks?" which is very much in line with things I've written here and here. The article is able to pull together facts and numbers, two things that my blog entries tend to be thin on, so I highly recommend it. Granted, Alternet can reasonably be assumed to have a bias, but the article makes reasonably cogent points either way.

I recommend it as a good read, definitely pulls together information on the topic (as opposed to opinion, such as I usually peddle).

(end of topic)

Postgres makes me want to stop upgrading OpenSuSE.