Ran across another “Climategate” (silly name) article on the net.  This one written by someone who believes in the consensus that global warming is man-made.  However, there are some really good points that the author (Megan McArdle) makes in her post.

Basically, these emails point out flaws not necessarily in the conclusion, but that the road to that conclusion was flawed in a way that makes the conclusion untrustworthy.

To convince someone that you are right, you don’t go around beating up anyone who says you’re wrong.  You convince them you are right by showing your conclusion, the base facts, and how you used those facts to create your conclusion.  Even an idiot like me can see that.  Deleting your source data (or losing it), and obscuring how you reached your conclusions would have gotten at most a “C” grade in my high school geometry class.  My geometry teacher was all about “show me how you got your answer, not just the answer”.  If a high school math teacher doesn’t accept the method, why should we?

As a U.S. taxpayer watching our national debt skyrocket (and my pocketbook shrink), I’m appalled that we’re using these seemingly unsupported answers to force possibly economically devastating laws such as cap-and-trade through congress.  Even worse, it seems that we’ve spent millions or billions (I never seem to see the same answer twice) of dollars funding those very same conclusions, and maybe spending billions more in the future.

I don’t know.  All I know is that these scientists don’t seem to have a clue, and I’m not sure we can trust any of them anymore.

Oh my, did I get a laugh out of this.  I’ve been quietly steaming over the whole “Man-Causing-Global-Warming” thing for a while now anyway, and the released emails and documents from East Anglia have just added fuel to the fire.  But this…it takes the cake, eats all of it in front of you, and burps in your face.

I hope I can find some more articles written by this Andrew Thomas.  Very funny read…unless you’re French.

…naturally they did.  http://normaluncertainty.blogspot.com/2009/03/sy-why.html.  Oh well, guess what, it’s STILL a good title!  Claire pretty much makes every point I have about the switch from “SciFi”, to “SyFy”.  Still, it bears repeating.  Here, let me do it right…

YOU ARE THE SCI-FI CHANNEL!  SYFY MAKES NO DANG SENSE!  AND YOUR PROGRAM DIRECTOR SHOULD BE SHOT WITH BB’S UNTIL HE/SHE FIGURES OUT WHAT THE WORDS “GOOD PROGRAMMING” MEANS!

I mean, geez, let’s look at what’s been on in the past couple of months.  Mostly hack-and-slash horror flicks.  I mean, I like a good horror movie as much as the next guy, but “Saw” isn’t even Science Fiction, just Fiction!  At least get the genre right!  I guess they want to get away from all that SciFi crap.  It’s cramping their style.  They want to grow as artists, I suppose.  Maybe do poetry at the local coffee house.  Get a cappuccino and do some beatnik, bohemian crap.

Get this through your thick heads…SciFi MADE you the powerhouse you are today!  You don’t go alienating your core demographic and turn your back on what has made you strong in the business, just because you want to play “The Sound of Music” on Friday nights!  You start a spin-off company for that!

There have been some dim spots of goodness.  SG-U is a surprisingly good show, and the movie Wolvesbayne didn’t suck.  But most of those original shows and movies aren’t even “B” movies.  Maybe “D” movies…if you’re lucky.  I’m not sure SyFy execs would recognize a good script if it rolled itself up and played “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on a banjo.  The few glimmers of near-brilliance are immediately replaced with mediocre, or downright horrible programs.

And why am I seeing so many of these horror movies on there, anyway?  What happened to the “Science” in Sci-Fi?  “Saw” was just one of many.  Now, I know they’re doing this “31 days of Halloween” (a blatant ripoff of Fox Family’s old 13 days of Halloween–ABC should sue), but I’ve been seeing nearly nothing but horror on there for several months.  Seems “SyFy” execs think that “SyFy” means “horror blood/guts fest”.  Nearly 50 years of classic SciFi to air, and they give us “Children of the Corn 23:  They’re Back Again and Again”.  Do they give us “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, or campy  cult classics like “Battle Beyond the Stars”?  No, they give us drivel such as “Basilisk”, and “DinoCroc”.   Ugh.  Do I even see “Lord of the Rings”?  Nope, not here.  Gotta watch that on TNT.  You get to see “Manticore”.

“Why do you keep watching?”, you may ask.  Well, it’s kinda like watching an auto accident.  It’s horrible, but you can’t quite look away.  It’s fascinating in some sick fashion.

So I guess I’ll keep watching the death of a good channel.  Unable to look away.

Bahahahahahahahahaaa!!!

Whooo, that felt good.  You know, everyone’s been so busy with global scre…I mean, Global Warming, that they haven’t taken the time to actually LOOK outside at the temperatures.  It doesn’t help that there’s conflicting reports from biased sources citing that the arctic ice is low, it’s high, it’s about the same.  Not to mention that it’s the hottest/coolest year on record.

I just think it’s complete hubris to think we do enough to actually affect weather.  No one has given me undeniable facts to support that man is causing a global meltdown.  And in fact, how can we know, when we only started gathering weather data about a hundred years ago?

In school, they told me that most climate changes occur over hundreds, or even thousands of years.  Were they wrong?  Who knows, we haven’t been keeping records long enough to tell!

Now, I was never a Novell engineer or anything, but we had several clients that had Novell servers, so I got to mess with them on a regular basis.  For those who don’t know or remember Novell, it was an awesome file and print server back when Microsoft was still struggling with the whole “network” thing.  There were a few file and print sharing systems at the time, including Novell, Banyan Vines, and Windows NT.  The difference between them was that NT was a bootable OS, while Novell and Banyan ran on top of DOS.  This had the advantage that if something happened to the network server’s partition, you could still boot into DOS and run recovery tools.

Of the three systems, I liked Novell the best.  Granted, I came into it late (’98), but I still was working on Novell 3.12, 4.11, NT 3.51, and NT 4 systems.  We did have one customer that had a Banyan system, but I only worked on it a couple of times…and that was more than enough for me!  NT systems usually couldn’t stay up for more than a week or two before it needed to be rebooted.  In fact, at the time, Microsoft recommended a reboot at least once a week.  Not to mention it would freeze a lot.  Granted, quite a bit of that instability was from the poor quality windows software, but a lot of it was still due to the OS.

On the other hand, it was nothing for me to go to a Novell server, and see an uptime of months.  I believe the longest uptime I saw on a Novell server was 1.5 years.  Compare THAT to a Windows system!  Now, you can get IBM mini systems like the System36, or AS400 systems with uptime in the years easily, but Novell was a system that was being deployed on commodity hardware, was relatively inexpensive, and in some not-necessarily prime locations (like a hot garage).  For the price, you couldn’t beat the stability, and security of a Novell system.  And not once did I hear of a Novell virus.  Not once.  You could drop a virus onto a Novell volume from another station, but it wouldn’t affect the Novell system itself.

Unfortunately, Novell fell to the M$ juggernaut.  It didn’t seem that way at first.  In the early-to-mid 90′s, it was a tie between Novell and Unix systems on servers.  NT came a distant third.  Novell did everything NT did…but better.  File and printer sharing and file security was much more robust on a Novell system.  Novell even had a comprehensive network directory system (called Netware Directory Services) when Active Directory was flailing.  But as Windows 2000 started gaining ground, it was obvious that Novell wasn’t innovating fast enough.  Small businesses were quickly moving beyond needing just file and print sharing.  They needed internet connection sharing, email services, and firewalls.  At the same time, software designers were moving away from the client running all software, and only data on the server, to the server running some kind of service that the client connects to.   Novell either couldn’t or wouldn’t keep pace.  Novell attempted to add these services, but couldn’t do it for the same price as competing Windows products could do it.

After the release of Windows 2000, Novell’s fall went fairly quickly.  Novell tried to rally by buying Suse Linux back in 2003, but it was too little, too late.  By that time, Windows had pretty much trounced them.  Despite a clear (and by all accounts smooth) upgrade path from Netware to Suse Linux, customers continued to migrate to Windows.  Now, very few installations of Novell remain.  It’s a little sad, but the current market simply outgrew what Novell could provide.

I still have a copy of Novell Netware 5, though.  You never know when you’ll need it.

Twitter…not much happening there.  I have a few followers, most of them spammers.  I only have two legit followers.  Facebook, however, has exploded.  No more than an hour passed before I had friends on FB…family I haven’t seen in years.  Now, most of my high school classmates, and many friends, co-workers, and acquaintances are now on my FB friend list.  It’s amazing.

But I started having issues when I went to post links.  A lot of links (especially blog and article posts) have extremely long URLs (web addresses).  Since Twitter can only have 140 characters per post, I started looking at URL shorteners.  The problem was one of stability and longevity.  The shortener services out there are having scaling problems.  Too many people shortening too many URLs.  So I rolled out my own.  I picked up a short domain name, and downloaded a shortener script called Lessn.  The domain “smlnk.us” (short for Small Link Us) was available AND on sale!  So now, I can simply create a short link for some of those ginormous links out there.  An example is http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com/.  I used this as a test.  It’s very large.  Now, the short link:  http://smlnk.us/1.  Not bad, eh?  If you already have a nice webhosting package, it really makes sense to roll out your own URL shortener service.  It removes the problem of a third party site going down unexpectedly, or removing your links.

Oh my God.  What the hell are these news people on, anyway?  This article reads like we’re all about to catch the new Black Plague.  Everywhere I look, people are almost panicked about this swine flu.  If you read that article, you’ll find out that the 331 cases aren’t in Arkansas.  That’s not the number even in the U.S.  That’s WORLD-FRICKIN-WIDE!  That’s right, folks.  Out of 6.77 BILLION people worldwide, 331 of them have confirmed cases of swine flu.  That’s about 0.000005% of the world’s population.

So, tell me this.  WHY is everyone freakin’ out?  The Black Plague killed MILLIONS.  This looks to kill less than the yearly flu that we deal with every single year!

Auto accidents alone kill about 40,000 people every year in just the U.S.  Stop the panic!  Be smart, take care of yourself, wash your hands, and get on with your lives!

Thing is, I don’t stay with one genre.  I’ll go from high fantasy, to horror, to military sci-fi.  Currently, I’m on an Urban Fantasy kick.  Urban Fantasy, if you’re not aware, is a fairly recent genre that puts supernatural, magical, or mythical characters, powers, or situations into modern (not necessarily “urban”) settings.  A good example are the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher.  Wizard in Chicago?

I’ve recently started reading several new (to me) authors.  Among them Kim Harrison, author of the “The Hollows” series.  I’ve also started reading Rachel Caine, author of the “Weather Wardens” and the new “Outcast” series.  Also Patricia Briggs, Devon Monk, and Stephenie Meyer.  Now, all of these authors have something in common that I’m curious about.  No, it’s not that they’re all women.  I have many authors of both the male and female persuasion that I love.  It’s close to that, though.  All of these authors have their main protagonist as women.  Usually strong, kick-ass women.  All of these series are worth reading.  They’re all well written stories, with excellent character development.  Looking on the bookshelves right now is almost like going to a Buffy the Vampire Slayer convention.

I’m just a little curious why the genre seems to be skewing that way.  Just a kind of offhand observation.  I really am into the “Alpha and Omega” series by Patricia Briggs, and I’m going to get her “Mercy Thompson” series as well, since the two are set in the same world.  Also, the new “Outcast” series by Rachel Caine is turning out to be pretty interesting.  I haven’t even finished the first book yet, and I’m already feeling good about the series.  Very emotionally charged so far.

Ok, I suppose I didn’t really have a point to this post, except for this:  Don’t read the Gormenghast trilogy unless you WANT to gouge your eyes out with a grimy spoon.

I swear, there actually IS an Automotive Harassment Task Force, who’s only job is to drive YOU crazy on the highway. I mean, what POSSIBLE reason could someone have to cut right in front of your bumper, slow down to ZERO mph, then turn off into a side street, when you have TWO BLOCKS of empty street behind you? Or sit completely through a green light, only to take off while it’s yellow, leaving you at a red light? The only rational reason I can think of is that they’re out to get me. That’s right, every driver out there…INCLUDING YOU…is out to stop me from getting to my destination.

Well, watch out, world! Cause I found an application to the AHTF. As soon as I’m admitted, it’ll be ME harassing YOU!

Add to the fact that I have three kids all under the age of five, and you start to see my worry.

I got to meet the Network Administrator of the company who will take over our bank’s IT.  Nice guy, knew his stuff.  Though he made me feel old.  He was in his twenties.  He went to the same university I did, but I was out in the world for several years before he got there.  He’s pretty knowledgeable, but he doesn’t have “the bug”.  I work on computers all day, then go home and want to play on them at night, too.  Not so for my new acquaintance.  Still, it’s always much better to work with someone who knows what they’re talking about, despite not knowing how long a Star Destroyer is.

Well, I will meet the CEO of the same company this week.  I think he’s the guy who’ll actually decide my fate.  Or at least be one of the main players.  Here’s hoping he likes me.