As much as I like to poke fun at other contractors’ stupidity, I know that we have plenty of our own.

I witnessed some of that this morning. I was even the minor cause of a blow-up, since I was the messenger. Thankfully, my manager’s manager looked me dead in the eye and realized that my boss and I were shooting straight.

I often say that for-profit private enterprise is less prone to spending money frivolously than the government is, but then there are days like today when I really begin to question that claim.

As the boss noted, “I stopped having fun today pretty early on.” Amen.

Oh well, tomorrow is another day, and while I’ll be up here for a while, I don’t have to be here.

Francis Crick, one of two researchers credited for discovering the structure and makeup of DNA, has died.

I don’t think you can overstate Watson and Crick’s contributions science.

Rafe Colburn posits a thought experiment:

So for the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about the range of possibilities for Republicans who are dissatisfied with President Bush by trying to put myself in their shoes. …

The odds are very low that I’d vote for a Republican for President, especially if the nominee were an orthodox Republican. No matter how bad a job a Democrat does, I’d be very unlikely to vote to hand the country over to someone who I had fundamental philosophical disagreements with. …

So, I have to say that I can understand where many Republicans are on Bush, because I’d probably be in the same place if the President were an incompetent Democrat.

I think this is the situation where many Bush 2000 voters find themselves. I know that it’s true for me; I’ve liked how Bush has done some things, but I have some huge problems with the others—mainly stemming from keeping Rumsfeld and Ashcroft around while they rape and pillage civil rights and the military. [I understand each snake's reasoning, but I largely reject their conclusions.]

That said, I haven’t been able to bring myself to consider voting for Kerry for very long. I’m not a Republican—I leave the party politics to my father and brother—but I did vote for our President in 2000, and I’m certainly not 100% in love with the idea of supporting him this time around. If you’re going to function with Bush’s leadership style—largely laissez faire with respect to your subordinates—it’s up to you to hold them accountable. Were I POTUS, I’d have canned Ashcroft and Rumsfeld a while back.

From time to time, I have reason to burn many copies of one CD. [It's all legal. Really.]

I sure could use one of these: I/OMagic I5252DE.

Spifftacular.

[Hat tip to Will from the .net forum.]

Roger keeps getting funnier and funnier with this whole series. The latest is a parody of the Cave Scene. I lost control very early on in reading this because Roger invoked John Wesley, the founder of my denomination. The person he had invoking it was Kirk, who is probably one of the most staunch Calvinists I know. Methodists and Calvinists, well, we disagree on lots of things, so having Kirk read Wesley’s “words” sent me into a crying, laughing fit.

[At least Rick is finding this funny.]

Looks like two contestants will be making runs at the X-Prize early in the fourth quarter of 2004. This is good stuff: this kind of program should help to lower the costs of launching to Low-Earth Orbit, and LEO access is very important. At some point or another, everything going deep space has to get to LEO; if you can do LEO cheaply, you can then start trying to assemble things in LEO or at a LaGrange point, creating structures that you just can’t make on the ground.

Should be fun to watch this.

Rick noticed something yesterday that I had noticed as well: our installs of Feed on Feeds don’t grab all comments in WordPress’s comments feeds.

I looked at the feeds, and I think I know what the issue may be: the feeds are done in chronological order, rather than reverse-chronological—that is, the comments are presented oldest-to-newest, rather than newest-to-oldest.

For an example: check the comments feed for “Yay for Todd and Sarah”. There are, at present, 16 comments to that entry; the feed only lists the first 10 comments.

The 10 is significant because that’s how many items I have set WP to publish at any one time in its feeds.

Even if chronological order makes sense for the publishing of comment feeds—and I’m not sure that it is!—doing so breaks functionality anytime you have more comments than the value in posts_per_rss in the wp_options table.

Another in a series of a series of … yeah.

[I really can't rip of Keillor mercilessly here, can I?]

Roger has posted the .net Rabbit Scene published. What always amuses me about this one is that Michaela is dating a guy named … Tim. That’s why she got the role of enchanter.

Using Richard and Zac to read the bits out of the Book of Armaments is also great; they have a great capacity for long, profound AYOR posts.

As you can tell, I’m unhealthily amused by all this. Not often I get to be king, though. [That's why I really grew the beard, by the way.]

John Wilson is the name I think of when I think of the term “asshat”—not that John is one, but I’m pretty sure that John is the first person to use the term around me.

In honor of John introducing me to the word, I present the following:

That, folks, is an asshat–not for his support of the Democrats—although YMMV!—but purely for having an ass on his hat.

Roger Brasslett is back with another of his Holy Grail parodies: Taunting the Tyrant. It’s a great parody of the seen at the French castle.

[I need a laugh this morning; the boss and the other engineer leave town today, and, predictably, the great bowels of CMC have finally begun to move. Fun times.]

As I mentioned, I got a Paste Music Sampler [Sampler IV, to be exact] today. The CDs had come in a while back, but I hadn’t gotten them out of the apartment office. [Why that place keeps bankers' hours is beyond me!] I now also have:

• Impossible Dream by Patty Griffin
• Unspoken Requests by Linford Detweiler
• I Don’t Think There’s No Need to Bring Nothin’ (Music For First Kind Sight) by Linford Detewiler
• Grey Ghost Stories by Linford Detweiler

Yes, I had to pick up Linford’s solo piano work. I like the stuff he does for OtR so much that I figured this was a worthy purchase. [Jeff Holland did have some influence, though.] The Patty purchase was .net influenced; I’ll give Carla, Michaela, and Trey the most credit. I’ve seen Patty live, but I’d never heard a thing she’d done before that day. I have a far greater appreciation for her talent now!

And yes, I do seem to keep getting music at the end of each month. What’s odd is that I’d ordered all the above discs sometime in May…

Various Artists CDs—such as the Paste Music Sampler I got today—are always a pain to tag when ripping MP3s. I went searching for a good MP3 ID3 tagger today, and I found one: ID3-TagIT. This is a nice complement to my use of LAME and EAC.

Breadcrumbs now exist on individual entry pages, thanks to Technically Incorrect’s Breadcrumb plugin. Thanks to Mark Shields.

In case you haven’t figured it out, well, they’re engaged.

Todd and Sarah, I’m happy for you two. There were times when I really feared that y’all wouldn’t make it to this point, but you did. I think Kat and I will sleep easier now.

God bless y’all as you move forward in love.

I need more things to read.

As a result, I’m scraping URLs from Matt’s portal and running them through my Feed on Feeds meat-grinder. I’ll probably be nice and update Ye Olde Sidebar today to reflect the deltas. [Who am I kidding? I'll never get them synchronized.]

Maybe Anil is right, and we’ll be reading 10,000 Weblogs in a year or two. I could certainly manage 1,000; as it is, I’ve got 130+ feeds that I read, and since I skim a lot of them, well …

[UPDATE] So I lied; I’m actually documenting this. Oi.

In the same vein as the Photochopped Wheaties Box, I present one of a series of parodies of Monty Python and the Holy Grail that Roger Brasslett has worked up: I’m Being Repressed!

I can’t decide whether it’s funnier to explain the inside .net jokes or just let you guess…

I think I just scared the crap out of one of our stress analysts by being here in my office all chipper when he walked in. Charlie’s very used to being the first person into the office.

After a long delay and a series of emails this week that have left me really frustrated—story to follow when the repairs are done—I have a reference number to send Boudreaux, my Dell Inspiron 8200, back to the manufacturer for a new laptop. I have to strip the unit down—removing even the HD!—so it won’t get done, but I’ll get it done this weekend so I can get DHL to come pick the unit up.

I might have gotten this done this afternoon—after all, I only put in seven hours on my timesheet this morning—but I’ve gotten wrapped around the axle by a couple different customers and have spent the afternoon gathering engineering drawings for my perusal tomorrow. I’m hoping to only have to bill three or four hours tomorrow.

As I posted on the .net forum, I think that Denis Leary’s Rescue Me is going to be a really, really good TV show. FX is airing it 3-4 times a week here in the first few weeks of the show to give non-TiVo users an opportunity to see it—probably betting on cashing in on buzz driving eyeballs—and if you like comedy/drama, it’s good stuff.

I watched the premiere of Rescue Me, and I think this is going to be a great show. There is language—what do you expect, Denis Leary’s involved!—but the storyline seems to be pretty good. The characters feel real, even if they’re quasi-stereotypical.

FX is showing the show 3-4 times a week for the first few weeks; I know they’re showing it tonight at 11e/10c/9m/8p. I’d give it a whirl if you like drama with comedic overtones.

Several huge NHL names met yesterday to discuss possible rules changes to increase scoring in the league. One of the most substantive changes was given the shortest shrift by the AP: a return to tag-up offsides.

NCAA hockey uses tag-up offsides, and that rule allows offenses to hold the puck in the offensive zone far longer than NHL offenses are capable of doing. In the NHL, if an offensive player crosses the blue line into the offensive zone before the puck does, the play is immediately blown dead and the puck dropped at the face-off dot in the neutral zone nearest the infraction.

In the college game, a player who was lagging in the zone—perhaps because he was deep in the corner when the puck was cleared out by the defense—can not get whistled for offsides if he’s not the object of the puck crossing the zone uncontrolled–that is, he’s not the recipient of a pass. If the offsides player skates out to neutral ice and then re-enters the zone before the puck is controlled by the offensive team, the play is not blown down. Skating back out to neutral ice is called “tag-up” offsides, since you “tag up” on the blue line.

Allowing a team to dump the puck in uncontrolled while players clear the zone and tag up keeps the offensive pressure going. Often you’ll see a team dump a puck into the zone uncontrolled in a tag-up position to allow the offensive forwards an opportunity to get a partial or full line change in place.

I think keeping offensive tempo will have far, far more effect on scoring than decreasing the width of goalie pads or not allowing the goaltender to play the puck behind the net. I could be wrong, but I see tempo continually causing fatigue on the defensive team, and tired players make mistakes, and defensive mistakes allow teams to score goals.

Todd and Anthony may feel free to disagree on the pad question, though.

You know you’re feeling the love when you get Photochopped by your peeps …

Simply hilarious. Nice work, Keith.

Rick, Jessica can stop looking at you like you’re crazy now. OtR has put The Poopsmith Song up on the Web.

Now you can play the song for her so that she’ll understand why we were laughing about it weeks later.

For the non-King readers, you really should go listen to this if you find little-kid [like, two-year-old] potty humor to be funny.

Baseball is so goofy.

One can reasonably project a team’s record based upon the team’s runs scored and runs allowed. Bill James ran the numbers decades ago and called it the Pythogorean Theorem: RS^2 / (RS^2 + RA^2) ~= Winning Percentage. The chaps over at Baseball Prospectus have taken it a bit further, using their Equivalent Runs statistics to figure out what you would expect a team to score and give up, given their performance to date, and figured out which teams are outperforming or underachieving: BP Adjusted Standings.

My beloved Reds are, by expectation, the worst team in the NL Central. They reside in 2nd place in the real world standings. That is, to use a term of Heather’s, a flaming metric asston of luck.

I started looking at this earlier when I realized that Rick’s Dodgers—yes, I found out long after becoming good friends with him that he’s a fan of the Damn Bums, and yes, I wept—are in first place. FIRST PLACE DODGERS?! WTF?!

They deserve to be there, too.

Screwy.

[All standings data current as of the time of posting. If you look at this in the future and feel led to comment that the data is incorrect, well, look in the mirror to find the moron.]

If you use WordPress and want to know, “What’s the latitude and longitude for Huntsville?”, I use:

34 degrees, 42 minutes North
86 degrees, 35 minutes West

In WP-ese, that’s 34.7269 and -86.567318.

It’s close enough for this government contractor.

I’d like to announce the ShowInfo development Weblog. ShowInfo is the concert information database application that I’m developing for [rocksmyfaceoff.net].

I need this very badly. I don’t want to go through another tour without it, and Caedmon’s Call goes on tour in the second week of October [!].