[Musings] Time for a change

At around 13:00 today I had to take a walk. I had to step away from work for a while, a morning of problems, missed meetings, and pointless plans. I took a walk by myself and had lunch at 'Jimmy John's' a sub shop that I like better than the other franchise sub shops. While I was sitting, lost in thought, and only marginally listening to two businessmen in the booth next to me talk about taking trips to Miami and where to find the good escorts (the converstaion ended with 'Remember to bring bail money') I was pondering many things.

1) How storage is allocated on AIX OS disks (allocated in to Physical Partitions, PPs, discrete pieces of space of a certain size, volumes are built by allocating PPs from wherever free on the disk) vs how Solaris does it (8 slices, slice 2 which is untouchable and sices 0, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, which are defined via cylinders in to set chunks on which the file systems are built). I was evaluating the pros and cons. I like the AIX way better as it allows for more flexibility, it is a pity that I do not like the AIX OS. If only you could merge the Solaris OS with the AIX LVM.

2) AllThingsSpring is really right, the two dominant parties are just different faces of Janus. They are both racing to the 'middle' which means nothing really. There really isn't much to differeniate them, other than the Republicans have on their half of the spectrum the fanatical evangelical christians, while the left (although not for much longer) have the liberal secular eco-fanatics. But the Democrats haven't realized it yet that they have last the far left side of their party because they try to be too centrist in a vain attempt to win elections against the Republicans. Being a centrist isn't going to win elections anymore, you just end up looking wishy-washy. Democrats, if they want to regain power need to quit going to the center and start making strong stances on issues AND more importantly start challenging their opponents. This also means they have to form a concise message and stick with it, even if the polls go south. I wish I knew a way to trump the GOP's 'fear factor' that they whip out early and flog often. The left needs to understand that no amount of logic or reasoning can counter that, and countering is damn hard. I wish I had the answer to this.

3) The US Patriot Act was renewed, almost unchanged. What happened to the uproar over this? What happened to the promise of investigation and the reworking to protect civil liberties?

4) Instead of investigating the White House on allegations of illegal spying, the GOP controlled Intelligence committee and the Judiciary decided it would be better to not investigate and instead draft legislation to make it legal.

#s 3 and 4 are why we need a shake up in gov't. Unforunately there is usually very little turn over and it is impossible almost to dislodge incumbents, especially after the last round of Gerrimandering, where lines were redrawn to ensure incumbent wins.

I am so glad the mainstream media isn't reporting any of this, we are being screwed but no one knows because our sources of news are corporate owned.

I was happy to hear the independent movie making is on the rise, George Lucas after the Oscar's predicted film is dead. I say about time the old Hollywood dies.