Birthday Wishes

Happy 61 to Bobby Cramer AKA Mustang Bobby at BBWW . May he have many more.

Seven Years and Counting

Today is the "blogiversary" of The Fallenmonk. Yep, I published the first post on June 23, 2004. Many thanks to all the folks who have been loyal participants and contributors to this little corner of the "tubes". We have made some great electronic friends over the years and from all over the world. I appreciate each and every one of you.
It is only fitting that I repost the first real post on the Fallenmonk and that is the excerpt from George Fowlers's The Dance of the Fallen Monk that inspired the name and so perfectly reflects a large part of my philosophy. Of course, you also have to mix in a little Pagan, Wiccan, Buddhist and Discordian for a somewhat accurate picture of the philosophy around here.

Now I understood for the first time that all these problems are caused by a race asleep and thrashing about in its panicked nightmares. There will be wars and holocausts and genocides as long as God is portrayed and thought of as a tight-minded legislator, a feudal lord, an offended King, a hypersensitive Artisan – even if church managers condescendingly tack onto that ridiculous list the not-very-convincing footnote that He is also loving. As long as people dream that they are insecure and needy in some sort of eternal jeopardy, there will be atrocities. But as the human race grows up spiritually, and as individuals gain a personal experience of the God they have been worshipping in fear, they will recognize that much of their theology and philosophy is built on nightmares. That will be the day of peace. I suddenly found myself unwilling to sit it out in the mountains of Utah. I wanted to play an active role in the process of the world’s awakening. – George Fowler, "Dance of a Fallen Monk"

As the man says "thanks for all the fish" and Hail Eris!

Edited to fix the date ......June not July....thanks Broken Arrow....

No Blogroll

Techie thing--
I had to turn off the blogroll since it was causing both Firefox and Chrome to alert on "attack page". No word from the the blogrolling folks about a fix or solution so for now the rpc is turned off.

Stupid

I just spent the entire afternoon struggling to get a new comment system running because Steve at YDD said that he had received an email from Haloscan saying that they were to start charging 10 bucks a month starting Jan 2. I can't afford that so I decided to shift over to Disqus because it reportedly could import my old comments.

I just read the actual info on the  Echo site (the new brand for Haloscan) and it is only 12 bucks a year. I can afford that.

Anyhow....system is back to normal so ignore all that crap about Haloscan off and stuff. Everything should be back to the way it was.

Sheesh a wasted afternoon.

Haloscan Comments Off

I have turned off the Haloscan comment system. I think I have enabled the Blogger system but we will see when I post this.

Update: Still trying.

Comment Hell?

According to Steve over at YDD the Haloscan commenting system will be discontinued on Boxing Day.

Haloscan has powered the comments on this blog almost since its inception in 2004.

Although I haven't received one yet, apparently emails are going out announcing the cancellation of the service and the impending loss of all comments unless you either a) download them for posterity; or b) upgrade to Echo, Haloscan's subscription-based successor. I really appreciate the notification in a prompt and timely manner.

Well, that's not happening. I really don't get enough comments to justify what a pay service demands($10/month), which would be something like charging me 50 cents a comment. Even though Haloscan was the only game in town back in 2004, that's not the case anymore: in addition to Blogger's native comment system, there's also Intense Debate, Disqus, and I'm sure plenty of other free services that will work for this tiny little blog. My big concern is losing all the great input from you guys since the beginning....yeah even you David!

So, at some point in the very near future, commenting on this blog will change. I'm looking at Disqus as it appears that they have some method of rescuing the old comments from Haloscan and it seems like a pretty robust system and it is free (for now). Meanwhile, Haloscan lets users export comments in something called CAIF (Common Announcement Interchange Format) and I have done this for all 8,000 comments made on the site since the beginning up until yesterday.

So if you come in here in the next couple of days and it is totally fried and comments don't work or they do and are completely different then you know why. The first step will be to disable Haloscan and revert to the native Blogger I guess but until I get into the conversion I really don't know. I know just enough about HTML to be dangerous so who knows what will happen.

Too Complicated

I would post something about the latest plan to save the world of finance but I don't understand it and so I will pretend to be a Republican and complain about Obama chuckling too much on 60 Minutes.
Then again I could pretend to be the GOP Idiot from Minnesota Michele Bachmann and just threaten armed rebellion, which by the way is kind of dicey for someone in her position. I know she probably hasn't read it but there is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which, I think, might apply:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Just Saying...

Anyhow...it is kind of quiet around the blog. It's Spring and the garden is demanding lots of attention and is in direct conflict with my multi-pronged campaign to find gainful employment. I am doing the traditional reactive thing of scanning the thousands of posted jobs on many, many job sites and getting daily emails based on stored search criteria. Most of this are for jobs in my area of expertise. I launch resumes and coverletters to the ones that match my impressive skills and wait, and wait for a response other than "Thanks for the resume...we'll get back to you."
The other prong is proactive and is taking even more time. This is an effort to transition into natural and organic food industry. This means building a network, finding and talking to people in the industry and figuring out how my skills and experience might benefit them. Not easy and I am really starting from scratch. Anyhow, lots of research, lots of letter writing, lots of phone calls looking for contacts and information about the industry.

More than you needed to know, but that is why you are not seeing much activity around here. I am thinking of working nights on the job hunt stuff and days in the garden but I just haven't figured out where I can fit in sleep.

Lots to Do

I hope everyone had a great weekend. Happy President's Day or is that Presidents Day. Whatever, it is nice to actually have a President worth feeling good about isn't it?

Looks to be a busy week for me. My career consultant has given me a load of "homework". I need to spend quite a bit of time defining my personal network, identifying all my "soft skills" and completely re-doing my resume along their guidelines. I also have to begin writing my script for my brief online video. In light of all the work I have to do, it may be a little light around here for a few days. I'll try and post when something moves me but the priority is trying to counteract Shrub's and the GOP negative impact on my career.

Play nice and take a look at the blogroll as there are plenty of good things to read there.

Bizzy...Back Soon

Bizzy day today. I will be back later. Turned really cold here in Atlanta and it is 15F right now. BTW the title is from the "Tao of Pooh" which is an excellent little book.

It's B.A.D.

In honor of Blogroll Amnesty Day I would like to bring your attention to a few places in Blogtopia (yes Skippy coined the phrase). All of these are worthy of a lot more attention.

Jim DeRosa over at DeRosaWorld always astute and topical and he's Italian

Steve Bates at Yellow Doggerel Democrat is always interesting and some witty doggerel and its from Texas

Bryan Dumka at WhyNow? for an always interesting look at the world and the go to place when there is bad weather coming.

Grace Nearing at Scriptoids is a good place to stop by for a different take on the world

Bobby Cramer at Bark Bark Woof Woof for some good writing and the goings on in South Florida

Jill Richardson at La Vida Locavore where you will always find some information about what you are eating and shouldn't be.

Donna Woodka at Changing Places for insights on dealing with change, a little eastern thought and other good stuff.

Barbara O'Brien at Mahablog for a veteran blogger with insights into the politics of the moment and Buddhism too!

Enigma4ever at Watergate Summer - a lovely lady with always something good to say

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast- a prolific and gifted writer with something to say

Cookie Jill at Cookies in Heaven - food, life, California at all that stuff (you can also find her at Skippy's place.

Haloscan is Fried

Haloscan seems to be having trouble. I am getting emails reporting comments but they are not showing up on the blog for some reason. Just so you know I am not deleting anyone. Maybe they will appear eventually.

FM

Tubes Fixed

I haven't mentioned it but I have been having major problems with my DSL. For weeks it has been intermittent. It will be fine for a while then just go away and not come back which requires a reset of the modem. I've swapped modems 3 or 4 times.

Finally, with some help from AT&T, I ran some modem diagnostics and we pinpointed the problem. The signal to noise ratio on the line was down around 6-8 and six is the minimum acceptable. This was causing all kinds of CRC errors (thousands per hour). AT&T came this morning and broke out the DSL at the termination and routed it to the modem over a spare phone line and viola! it works like a champ. No CRC errors and the S/N ration is back to 16-18 where it should be. I'm happy. I was reseting the modem 20 or 30 times a day when it was at its worst and I haven't had to reset it once yet today.

No Good News

Sorry folks, I've been busy doing you know what. Not really much worth blogging about out there anyway. Maybe it's the cold or just pre-revolution doldrums. Osama is challenging Obama. Citigroup is falling apart(about time). Retail sales in December were almost 10% lower than last year or 2.7% lower than expected which, in turn, has sent the stock market further south and it is now courting 8,000 again. Bummer.

It's cold and getting colder in Hotlanta and we are expecting "teens" tonight. I went down to the garden and put some extra mulch on the garlic just in case but it should be fine. This recent warm weather has caused it to put out guite a bit of green which is susceptible to the cold. We'll see.

Meanwhile, all you folks north of me try and stay warm and Madam and I will do the same. Glad I spent the money in November to add the extra 18 inches of fiberglass in the attic. I can tell the difference in how much the furnace runs on these cold days.

Tonight is going to be a soup night I think. I just have to figure out what I have that is "soup fixings". Then again there is always the potential for a comfortable pot of beans and some buttermilk cornbread. I just have to shake the fridge and cupboards and see what falls out.

Friday Wander

I've been busy today with job hunting stuff but thought I would take a break and see what is going on.


Looks like Condi and Shrub have told Israel to go ahead and finish trashing the Gaza strip and clean out all those bothersome Palestinians. Of course, the rationale is completely illogical and full of shit but that's what they do. Only 18 days.

Christy at FDL has revealed another Shrub finger in the eye...

"Look what the Bushies have turned into a cash cow bonanza before leaving office, only eight years after Richard Clarke told them it was desperately needed and they ignored him. Until now. Hmmmm. . . let's see. . . what could the reason be?"

Over at La Vida Locavore

With the arrival of 2009, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) notes nearly a billion people a day go hungry worldwide. While India supplies Switzerland with 80% of its wheat, 350 million Indians are food-insecure. Rice prices have nearly tripled since early 2007 because, according to The International Rice Research Institute, rice-growing land is being lost to industrialization, urbanization and shifts to grain crops for animal feed.

Mustang Bobby went and cleaned up his act and has a new look... though I think he broke his RSS feed in the process.

Economic news:

Manufacturing activity fell more than expected in December, hitting the lowest reading in 28 years as new orders and employment continue to decline.

The Institute for Supply Management, a trade group of purchasing executives, said Friday its manufacturing index fell to 32.4 in December from 36.2 in November. Wall Street economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected the reading to fall to 35.5.

Which is really interesting since the stock market is up almost 300 points today.

Speaking of the economy... Paul Krugman takes a look at the Republican Party of 2008, which is still sixties somewhere while the country has changed pretty dramatically since then.

But America in 1993 was a very different country — not just a country that had yet to see what happens when conservatives control all three branches of government, but also a country in which Democratic control of Congress depended on the votes of Southern conservatives. Today, Republicans have taken away almost all those Southern votes — and lost the rest of the country. It was a grand ride for a while, but in the end the Southern strategy led the G.O.P. into a cul-de-sac.

Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.

Meanwhile, it looks as if someone in South Florida has taken the cue from the Iraqi shoe thrower and gone a little crazy...

MIAMI — State troopers are looking for a charity to take thousands of shoes that were dumped on a Miami expressway, tying up rush hour traffic. Lt. Pat Santangelo says the Florida Highway Patrol received a call about the shoes Friday morning.

Lastly, Huffpo is telling us that Caroline Kennedy is going to step into Hillary's slot in the Senate.

The Dark Side

Here we are on a pretty nice Monday morning after a weekend of rain. Unfortunately, Caribou Barbie is in the neighborhood and therefore much of my energy is being drained in trying to keep the "Dark Side" from overwhelming us. Tomorrow is the big test...to see whether we Georgians can do the right thing and send Saxby Shameless packing. I am afraid of the answer but I will be casting my vote regardless.

Still working on testing another release of software this week so it may be a little quieter than normal around here. At least I can test from home so I don't have to commute. If you are a Georgian please go out and vote tomorrow and if you don't mind make that a vote for Jim Martin.

Later.

Still Commuting

Yeah, I am still a part of the 8-5 crowd. Still assisting the implementation team with their user testing process. I think they are regretting asking for my help since I am a very thorough tester and my years of working with users has taught me all the most effective methods of breaking software. I know how to force bad code to bubble up to the surface and am constantly having the developers ask me why I did that since it is not a normal thing a user would do.
The good news is that this is probably the last week as the developers are winning the race. They are now fixing bugs faster than we are creating bug reports. That's a good thing.
I may get a chance to play here today...we'll just have to see.

Still Testing

Sorry for the quiet around here but I am still very busy testing software. Not going well is the best I can say. Long days and lots of frustration. Should be over(one way or the other) this week and things can get back to normal. Not enjoying the commute everyday and definitely not enjoying sitting in a 15th floor conference room all day struggling with a very complicated application that really is not ready for "prime time". As is common in our industry pushing the 'bleeding edge' is fraught with disaster at every turn. The developers are starting to hate me and my ability to break stuff. They have yet to learn what I have in my nearly 40 years of doing this... that users will do things that don't necessarily make sense to a developer and this usually causes unexpected results. Today the system assigned the technician I am pretending to be a service call at a Burger King. Since I am also pretending to be the dispatcher I knew that there were existing trouble tickets for the same location and being the model of efficiency I manually added all the rest of the tickets to the tech's work schedule so that all the tickets could be handled at once. The application is supposed to do this automatically, it didn't, I did and it wasn't happy. I won't go into what happened when I used parts on a call that the system didn't think I had on the truck. Let's just say we are having fun. More tomorrow so it will remain relatively quiet here for another few days.

Quiet Around Here

It's going to be quiet around here for a few weeks while Madam and I go to a wedding in the UK and then take a little holiday in Saint Mars du Desert in France. A friend has a house there and it won't cost anything but food and wine and sharing the petrol cost with some friends. Can't beat the price.

With the DHS now taking laptops without probable cause and searching them who knows what I have decided not to take mine this time. I will just do without for a couple of weeks. I have my BlackBerry(and I am having 2nd thoughts about it) and can post in an emergency or something but otherwise I'm going cold turkey.

You guys place nice while I am gone. We are supposed to be back the 19th so we'll see you then.

Update: BTW help yourself to anything you find in the garden. Some nice bell peppers are almost ready and of course there are plenty of tomatoes. Shame to have them go to waste.

Your Papers Citizen

It's only a matter of time before it's "Your papers citizen?". Steve at YDD has the dope but let's just say the Department of Hopeless Insecurity has just lowered the bar one more time. Here is a snip but you really need to read the whole thing at Steve's.

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

[snip]

The policies state that officers may "detain" laptops "for a reasonable period of time" to "review and analyze information." This may take place "absent individualized suspicion."

The policies apply to any and everything that can store digital or analog information such as flash drives, IPods, cell phones, BlackBerry's you name it. Notice they have just brushed aside "probable cause" and "unreasonable search" with nary a sniffle for our lost rights.

Madam and I are heading across the pond on Tuesday and this little jewel made me decide to leave the laptop at home. The Fallenmonk will go dark for a couple of weeks unless someone wants to volunteer to play in my sandbox while I am away.

I'm Worried

I know it has been pretty quiet around here on the political front. I am trying to pay attention and keep up with what is going on but the demands of my job and the fact that the client has suddenly realized after 14 weeks that tomorrow is my last day is just overwhelming my time.

The thing is, especially after reading Billmon's post linked in the previous post. There seems to be a real possibility that the Dems are going to screw the pooch one more time and lose this thing to Karl Rove's campaign of personal destruction. Read the post and post your view in the comments. Am I just being a 'fraidy cat'? It just seems to me that we are seeing a repeat of 2004 when the Rovian message of personal destruction turned the electorate away from what were the really important issues and the reality of the world we are living in.

Heading back to Atlanta tomorrow and the end of this gig. Only a few days before Madam and I head to the UK for a big wedding and then a week or so in the wilds of France trying to relax. I just wonder what the dynamic will be when I get back? For the first time in years I am going to be out of touch...no internet no American paper and not even CNN International. It will be interesting. Needless to say the Fallenmonk will be very quiet for the first part of August.