I beat a personal best this morning when I heard someone give a 13-word drink order at Starbucks: "Triple-shot grande decaf non-fat with whipped two-pump white chocolate mocha".

I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on them. The Starbucks culture encourages it, in the way they repeat the orders in exactly the right syntax. After all, it takes five words just to get my iced tea ("iced venti unsweetened black tea"). Plus, when you're spending $3.50 for a cup of coffee, you darned well ought to have it exactly the way you want it, even if it takes a whole paragraph to describe it. It just struck me as funny. I can order a complete lunch at Wendys using fewer words ("number one, with cheese, biggie-sized, iced tea, no lemon").

I had a new experience earlier in the week.

One of the "cheap prescriptions here!" web sites spammed by blog. They posted an 80-line advertisement as a comment to one of my messages trying to sell items to enhance portions of my anatomy, along with dozens of links to their web site.

I followed the web links and found the parent site. I sent nasty e-mails to their President, webmaster, sales, and tech support e-mail addresses suggesting that some alternative methods of marketing might produce better results without alienating people so much, but the e-mails all bounced after a few days.

I don't have any automated tools scanning the comments. I hope this doesn't become a habit.

Why do we accept so many of life's little abuses without question?

Why do we accept that prices must always go up?

Why do we accept that mail order companies always have to add "shipping and handling"? Aren't they a cost of doing business?

Why do we accept that Windows will crash?

Why do we accept that radio and television programming must include more and more commercials?

Why do we accent that out media must continue to get more permissive and more explicit?

Why do we accept "destination charges"?

Why do we accept $4 sodas at movie theaters? Why do we accept that theater owners are ethically entitled to prohibit us from bringing our own food and beverages into movies?

Why do we accept "origination fees", "documentation fees" and "service charges"?

Why do we accept automatic gratuities?

The more we accept these little insults, the more they will add up.

Here's a test of English grammar for you. Parse or diagram this sentence:

O beautiful
For spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!

We sing that proudly and clearly, but the syntax has always bothered me. Where are the subject and verb of that sentence? Answer: nowhere. In fact, the only verbs in the entire first verse are "shed" and "crown" As near as I can tell, that first sentence consists of an adjective and four prepositional phrases.

The second verse DOES have the required subject and verb ("feet beat"), as does the third verse ("heroes loved") and the fourth verse ("dream sees"), but I maintain that the first verse of our beloved anthem is a sentence fragment.

Purists will, of course, challenge me for attempting to parse what was clearly intended as imagery-filled poetry. They're right.

While investigating this, I learned a fascinating tidbit: this poem was not immediately associated with the melody we now hold so dear. In fact, in its early life, it was often sung to "Auld Lang Syne", and the combination actually works very well. Try it!

In my last message, I mentioned how funny it was to hear the phrase "Republican front-runner Arnold Schwarzenegger". I have to admit that pales in comparison to "California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger".

I'll have to reread Revelations, but I'm sure this is one of the signs of the apocalypse.

Wasn't this in Nostradamus?

When the gap-toothed weightlifter
Rules over the land of the golden sun
Humanity slides into oblivion

"Republican front-runner Arnold Schwarzenegger": now there's a phrase I never thought I'd hear on NPR.

The virus problem has grown to ridiculous proportions.

In the month of September alone, my procmail filters have stopped 23,000 virus-laden e-mail messages addressed to my personal mailbox. I was trapping 150 megabytes a day until I decided to route them directly to the trash can.

150 megabytes a day! That is at least an order of magnitude above our normal e-mail volume. No wonder the Internet is slowing down.

I am a generally helpful guy. I have a genetic defect that makes me unable to resist answering technical questions. This leads to my spending 15 hours a week on Internet newsgroups when I should be doing things with my family. It has also led to my being designated a "Microsoft Most Valuable Professional" (MVP), which the fabulous prizes that go along with it, so it isn't entirely bad.

I also get a lot of requests for free technical support, mostly because of my involvement with the S3 Savage driver for XFree86. My website is linked from a lot of graphics web sites, and that puts me high on the Google hit list for Savage questions. Many people do not bother to read the part about Linux, so I get a lot of marginally related Windows questions as well.

This month, I had an e-mail exchange go horribly bad. I got a question from a hysterical, hypersensitive, 48-year-old former elementary school teacher who decided to misinterpret my response in the worst possible way. The exchange just got worse with each exchange. It is an excellent example of how e-mail can cause disasters, as well as being a fine case study in the differences in communication styles between men and women.

It makes for an amusing read, as long as you keep saying "thank goodness this didn't happen to me": www.probo.com/timr/Deed.html.

I'm agog that a circuit court has delayed California's recall election because several counties are still using the "outdated" punch card system. (I do think there are many good reasons why this election should be delayed, but I don't think this is one of them.) The court estimates (apparently using the "pull a fact out of your butt" system of estimating) that up to 40,000 people might have their votes disqualified because they'll do it wrong.

Honestly, folks. If you are too dumb to figure out how to punch a hole correctly in a pre-scored piece of cardboard when you are given a template and a stylus to help you puch that hole, then you are too dumb to have your opinion count, and your vote SHOULD be disqualified. Dumb people make uninformed decisions, which leads to things like President George W. Bush and half-trillion dollar deficits.

We just had a mail-in election here in Oregon. My county (Washington County) still uses the "outdated" punch card system, as do one or two others in Oregon. We managed to make our voices heard, with no fuss and no controversy, and we didn't even have the stylus device; I had to use a ball-point pen.

I heard another commentator say that, with 6 or 7 pages of nominees, some people would vote for one on each page, instead of exactly one. My comment applies to this case, as well. If a voter can't follow the instructions to "vote for one only", then let Darwin take his due and remove the defective voter from the gene pool.

Paul Schaefer was doing his "Great Carnac" routine on Letterman last week. He put the envelope to his head and said, "recall election day". Then, he opened the envelope and read the question: "What does Al Gore most hate to do?"

Israel has once again fired up their "stir the pot" engine by threatening to eject Yassir Arafat from the country. I have mixed feelings about this.

On one hand, Israel is quite right in stating that Arafat is hurting rather than helping the peace process. I believe tension in the entire Middle East would be greatly relieved if Arafat were to voluntarily leave the country and retire to a sunny beach on the coast of Spain. I don't think he is helping the Palestinean people any longer.

But on the other hand, nothing will turn him into a martyr quicker than a forcible ejection. All that will do is incite Hamas and induce further violence. Plus, with Arafat gone, is there another leader amongst the Palestineans with enough charisma to actually get the nation to follow him, without being a raving loon?

How can this conflict ever come to a rational conclusion? The two sides view things in a completely contradictory way. Israel responds to each act of violence by (A) taking violent action against the suspected attackers, which is a reasonable course of action, and (B) by punishing the entire Palestinean population through shutdowns and curfews and restrictions, which is NOT reasonable. The Palestineans choose to see the Israeli responses as an attack on the nation as a whole, not as revenge against a lunatic terrorist faction within their midst, resulting in more nationwide unrest.

Until we can separate Hamas from Palestine, I don't see that peace is possible. And until Arafat exits stage left, I don't see that it is possible to separate Hamas from Palestine.

Just to prove my point about the KGW 11 o'clock news, I used a stopwatch to time the news-to-commercial ratio. It wasn't as bad as I thought: 22:20 of news to 12:40 of commercials. One third of the newscast is commercial advertisements.

The interesting thing, to me, is the way they have it laid out. The first 15 minutes has only one interruption. That means the last 20 minutes, which has weather, sports, and fluff, is more than 50% ads.

I'm going to start shutting it off at 11:20. I don't need to be pummeled with car ads.

I have a 17 gigabyte Seagate hard drive in my primary computer at work. When I installed it, that number seemed obscenely high; who in their right mind could ever fill 17 GB? Well, I answered that question last week.

I had just over 4 GB of free space left on the disk, when a client came in with a task that required the new Visual Studio .NET. I have avoided installing .NET up to this point, just because I knew I would waste time exploring all the cool stuff in the Common Language Runtime, but when a client knocks, you answer. To my horror, the release notes say that a full installation need 3.5 GB of disk space!

So, I popped off to Fry's this weekend and got an 80 GB Western Digital "Special Edition" for $119. It has a 3-year warranty, it runs ATA-100 (my current disk is ATA-33), and it has an 8 MB buffer, which should make things go much faster. I came in Monday morning dreading the thought of Yet Another Brain Transplant, a task which Microsoft makes unnecessarily hard.

When I opened the drive, I discovered a floppy disk inside containing a set of utilities from Western Digital called "Data Lifeguard" that, among other things, includes a drive copy utility similar to Ghost that understands the NTFS format on my disk. Great, I thought; that's a lot easier than doing it the hard way!

Alas, here is the timeline for my misbegotten transplant adventure.

• 10:30 AM -- Shutdown, install disk, tweak jumpers.
• 11:00 AM -- Start WD tools and explore
• 11:15 AM -- Start disk copy
• 1:00 PM -- Disk copy hung at 96%: 10,444 of 10,855 MB copied
• 1:01 PM -- Swear a lot
• 1:10 PM -- Try it again
• 3:00 PM -- Hung again at 96%: 10,445 of 10,855 MB copied
• 3:01 PM -- Swear a lot more, use WD's name in vain
• 3:05 PM -- Remove old disk, make new disk the IDE "master", reboot
• 3:10 PM -- Install Windows 2000, tell it to format the partition
• 3:40 PM -- Format complete, start installing
• 4:00 PM -- Install complete
• 4:10 PM -- Start SECOND install of Win2K into a directory not called WINNT
• 4:40 PM -- Second install complete
• 4:41 PM -- Connect old hard disk in again, boot up new Win2K
• 4:45 PM -- Start recursive xcopy from old to new
• 6:40 PM -- Recursive xcopy complete
• 6:42 PM -- Use regedit to fix up drive-letter-to-serial-number mapping
• 6:45 PM -- Reboot into original Win2K on new disk -- SUCCESS

Now, it's true that I didn't run into any really difficult problems, and except for one stupidity on my part, I didn't lose any data. But if the WD utilities had worked, I could have been done in 2 hours instead of 9 hours.

And yes, the new drive is significantly faster: big programs, especially, load much quicker than before. Color me happy.

And why did I install TWO copies of Win2K on the empty disk? Well, the copy of Win2K on my old disk was in a directory called "\WINNT". In order to copy that to the new disk, I needed to be running Win2K on the NEW disk from a directory with some other name. Unfortunately, Win2K does not allow to you change the name of the system directory when installing to a fresh disk -- it always uses \WINNT. Thus, I had to install a second one (where you DO get a chance to give a new name), and delete the first.

The drive-letter-to-serial-number mapping is one that tripped me up before. In the Win2K registry, in \HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MountedDevices, Win2K keeps a list of the serial numbers of the disks mapped to the DOS drive letters. My old registry, of course, had the old disk listed as C:. If I hadn't changed that, when I rebooted on the new disk, C: would STILL map to the old disk, and the new disk would get assigned something bigger (turned out to be G:). The system would still boot from the new disk (now called G:), but any programs that referred to C: would go to the old disk.

OK, folks. Now I'm really filled with righteous indignation!

Blender Magazine, a music rag from the folks at Maxim aimed at your boom-box-toting teenie, has published their list of the "50 Worst Artists Of All Time". You know that any such list is bound to step on some toes, but I think they may actually have committed a crime: the #2 artist on their list is Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Caution: Truth In Advertising requires me to state that I own most of ELP's albums, either in vinyl or on CD. I've been to three live ELP concerts in my life, plus one for Emerson, Lake & Powell. I have piano music for three of their albums.

Having said that, I think I can factually dispute their inclusion on this list. The folks at Blender do not seem to be able to distinguish between "genres of music we just do not like" and "bad artists". Besides ELP, the list also includes Alan Parsons Project, Rick Wakeman & Yes, and Asia, all of which plied the heavily synthesized, classically-based rock music that ELP pioneered.

Playboy Magazine in the 1970s produced monthly lists of the current top 25 artists in terms of abilities in various categories. For many months, Keith Emerson was the #1 keyboardist, Carl Palmer was the #1 percussionist, and Greg Lake was consistently in the top 10 guitarists. They were, technically, among the top in their fields. It is just factually inaccurate to list them among the worst artists of all time.

I would also point out that the list does not include the Starland Vocal Band, the group that gave us the heinous lyrics "gonna find my baby, gonna hold her tight, gonna grab some afternoon delight..."

The Oregon senate, with the assistance and pressure of Governor Ted Kulongowski, pulled an end-run around an end-run this weekend by reversing itself and passing a bill to authorize bond-backed funding guarantees for a professional baseball stadium in Portland. Passage in the house is expected, and the governer has indicated he will sign the bill.

Shame on you. If it weren't for the recall fiasco in California, we would be right up there on the list for ridicule on Jay Leno's monologue. Eight weeks of rancorous debate over the state's budget. The worst school funding problem in the nation. Elderly and handicapped being dumped out in the street because we can't find the money to continue their housing allotments and their prescription drug funding. And yet, in a matter of a few days, we can commit money to help one of the richest sports in the world.

This is an embarrassment. I sincerely hope the Expos move to Washington, DC, instead.

The Oregon state legislature meets once every two years, and is not allowed to adjourn until they pass a two-year state budget. They are now many months past their adjournment deadline, locked in partisan bickering. Today, they announced that negotiations had broken down (again), and that they probably will not have a budget in place before Labor Day, which means that the state's school districts will have to start school without knowing how much money they will have to spend.

On Oregon Public Broadcasting's morning news today, they interviewed State Senator David Nelson (R, Pendleton), who was part of the group that backed out of the budget talks.

Mr. Nelson pissed me off.

He went over the list of tax increases in the latest (rejected) proposal, and was quoted as saying "How can we in good conscience pass a budget" with those increases?

If Mr. Nelson is too stupid to answer that question, then he has no business being a state legislature, and ought to go back to lecturing the cow patties out in the pasture where his lack of insight won't hurt so many people. You pass a budget with tax increases, because you don't have the money to run the state government without them, Dave. Existing tax revenues will not support the services demanded by the citizens of Oregon, as the disasterous budget cuts earlier in the year demonstrated. Even a senator from the sticks of Eastern Oregon should be able to figure that out. How can he, in good conscience, not pass a budget? Does he seriously think that is a better solution?

The Republicans, who control the house, need to get off of their philosophical high horse and do the painful work of passing a budget with tax increases. It has to be done, and no amount of rhetorical speechmaking or partisan muckraking is going to change it. Raise taxes or kill people. Seems like an easy choice, doesn't it?

What ever happened to common sense?

We went to see Pirates of the Caribbean last night. I had been resisting, because I didn't think I'd like it.

I was wrong. It was hugely entertaining. The reviewers were right: Johnny Depp just steals this movie. It is clear from the very beginning that he enjoyed himself immensely while making this movie, throwing himself completely into his role as Captain Jack Sparrow. Although the movie itself is too fluffy to be mentioned, it would be a crime if Depp is not nominated for an Academy Award for this work.

The computer-generated sequences were well done. The cursed pirates become rotting skeletons when exposed to moonlight, and since many of the battle sequences are filmed at night under a full moon (naturally), the filmmakers had the difficult task of merging CG images with live images as the pirates dash in and out of moonlight and shadow. It was seamless.

I was also amused by the number of scene straight from the ride. As one of my office mates said, the jailhouse scene with the dog seemed even seemed to use the same faces.

Caution for parents: my 10-year-old (who has an active imagination and is easily frightened) could not take this movie. Mom had to remove him after the first turn-into-skeleton scenes.

There was one thing that annoyed me (there's always something). One of the previews was for the next Disney adventure: Haunted Mansion, also based on a Disneyland ride. I guess Disney has finally run out of fairy tales. I suppose next year, we'll be treated to Space Mountain: The Movie.

Explain this one to me.

I got a notice from BankOne today telling me they are changing the terms of my agreement. The basic change is the interest rate, which is now going to prime plus 15.7%, which makes it 19.95%. If you should dare to be late, the rate goes to 22.95%.

Who the hell do these guys think they are? Interest rates are at their lowest levels since the Hoover administration. The cost of money to BankOne is less than it has been in decades, and yet they are raising my rate to one that would have made the temple moneychangers gasp in disbelief. I could get a better deal from the Mafia.

The only satisfaction I can take from this is that I don't revolve balances, so I don't pay those usurious rates, but there's another principle involved here.

When a fee is based on dollars, you can justify a periodic increase as just part of the cost of living. But when a fee is based on percentage, that is not the case: the take rises as the underlying cost rises. Raising a percentage fee is nothing but pure profit-taking greed, and that's what BankOne is exhibiting here.

The 11 o'clock news on the local NBC affiliate, KGW channel 8, has started an annoying new tradition that really ticks me off.

They've always had a very high commercial-to-news ratio, but now they've taken it a step further. At 11:26 PM, they break for a 2-minute commercial break. When they come back, they do a single tidbit of fluffy feel-good news -- your basic public interest story -- for a full 50 seconds, and then they break for commercial again! This time, they take a full 3-minute commercial break, after which they do their 15-second goodbyes, and flow into another 3 minutes of commercials before rolling into Jay Leno.

Did you count that up? In the last 9 minutes of the newscast, there is exactly 65 seconds of content, and all of THAT lightweight.

I changed to the channel 8 news when the local CBS station (KOIN) hired on a bozo-and-bozo team (Jeff Gianola and Kelly Day) to do their evening news. I might have to consider switching again.

What a nation of sheep we have become, myself included.

I went to a movie last weekend. Besides having the unmitigated gall to charge me $7.50 to force me to watch 15 minutes of bad television advertising, they actually have the nerve to try to sell soda for $3.50, $3.75, and $4.00 for a 24 oz., 32 oz., and 44 oz. cup, respectively.

Holy carbonation, Batman! Why aren't we outraged at that? They're charging $3.75 for a paper cup with colored sugar water, when I could buy the EXACT SAME cup of colored sugar water at Seven-11 for $1.19, or at McDonald's for $1.50 with unlimited refills. Plus, neither Seven-11 nor McDonald's forces me to watch paid advertisements from Coke while I'm drinking it!

The time has come to end the "no outside food or drink" regime at our nation's theaters. You can't tell me that movie theater owners would go bankrupt if they cut all the concession prices by 50% tomorrow. I say we enact some civil disobedience and start smuggling in our own treats. Theater owners do not have a constitutionally-guaranteed monopoly on snacks.

I took the family to see "Spy Kids 3D: Game Over" this weekend. I came away disgusted and disappointed.

We all really liked the first two "Spy Kids" movies. The first one was fabulous, the second one was a bit silly, but still entertaining. When I heard that the third one was going to be inside a video game, my first thought was that it was a cop-out: skip the expensive scenery and stunts and do everything computer-generated. When I heard it was 3D, my expectations went down even more; I have a genetic defect that keeps my eyes from fusing a 3D image, so the effect is wasted on me.

Here's what I found. I thought the movie started well. To my surprise, I found the video game part to be well done; they did a good job of mixing live action with computer generation, and for the first hour, it was semi-believable. Sylvester Stallone surprised me by doing a nice job as the bad guy -- the comic-relief lunatic "Toy Maker", doomed to be locked in a V-R world for some unknown crimes. It was the kind of over-the-top camp that made the first Spy Kids so much fun.

However, two things completely destroy this movie. First, this is a movie about the boy, Juni Cortez, and his grandpa Valentin, played by Ricardo Montalban (who gets a great inside joke about Corinthian leather). Where was Carmen? Alexa Vega MADE the first movie as Carmen Cortez, and she doesn't even appear in this one until well past the half-way point. When she does appear, it is not as part of a kids-against-the-world spy team with Juni, it is as a sullen and dismissive teenager, moony-eyed for Gary Giggles.

Second, and most important, is the idiotic way the movie ends. After working through the video game and reaching "game over", I was ready for the big moral wrap-up and the closing credits. Instead, they chose to have a completely insipid ten minute sequence of "humans battling huge robots", that seems to have been designed for the express purpose of giving cameo roles to Dad, Mom, Grandma, Uncle Felix, and Machete, NONE of whom appear at all in the rest of the movie. These people are supposed to be spies with cool toys, not superheroes, as they are portrayed here. It was just painfully stupid.

Even worse were the ending credits, which mention (in this order) Antonio Banderas (Dad), who has about 60 seconds of screen time, then Carla Gugino (Mom), who has about 30 seconds of screen time, then Alexa Vega (Carmen), who has about 20 minutes of screen time, and only then Daryl Sabara (Juni), who is on screen for the entire movie. Sabara should get himself a different agent. Banderas and Gugino should have been in the fine print as cameos, because that's really what they were.

The movie made me angry, partly because it was an outrageous attempt to exploit the franchise with stupid gimmicks instead of an actual plot line, and partly because of the manipulative way the "adults" from the first two movies forced themselves into the credits through a boneheaded closing sequence more appropriate for a Japanese Godzilla remake.

I fear this represents the end of the Spy Kids line, and that's a shame, because the concept is a good one.

I upgraded the blog software from Pyblosxom 0.5 to Pyblosxom 0.7 today.

For a small increment in release numbers, there were some pretty substantial changes. He redesigned the plugin scheme to make it easier to add featurettes without modifying the existing code, which is a good thing.

One of the things that I'm not sure about is the comment scheme. The 0.5 code didn't have any built-in comment/response mechanism, so I built one. The 0.7 code DOES have a built-in comment mechanism, but you don't see any of the comments on the main page. When you click the Comments() tag below, you get sent to a page that displays this one message, plus all the comments, plus a form for submitting your own comments.

I suppose there is sense to that for a site that gets a lot of traffic -- and therefore a lot of comments -- but for a low-volume site like mine, I think it's nicer to be able to read the comments inline.

Well, Wari has been very receptive to my suggestions in the past (in fact, some of my code is now part of one of the new plugins!). Maybe I'll bring it up.

I could use your help.

I like ambient music -- the kind of quiet, ethereal, continuous, melody-free stuff that is designed to sit in the background. I know a lot of people can't stand that, but that's why there are so many different kinds of music.

I would like to get a CD or two for my office, but I don't know who to get. I don't know who is good and who makes weird junk with barking dogs and squeaking doors. If you know something about the ambient music scene and could offer me some advice, I would appreciate it. Email me at timr@probo.com.

Weblogs are harder than they look. I honestly thought, when I started this about six months ago, that I would be able to make an entry every day. I managed to keep that up for about three weeks, and to my rather great surprise, I ran out of novel and interesting things to day.

I suppose the point of a weblog is that I should be expressing my opinions even when they are not "novel and interesting". I'm embarrassed at how few postings I've made recently. I must try to do more...

I'm lusting after Dell's new Inspiron 8500 laptop. They have one version with a 1920x1050 15.5" LCD display. Ah, man, how many DOS command shells could I spread across that sucker? Makes me drool. My Pentium-II 266MHz seemed like such a great buy, but four years later it kind of limps along...

We had car trouble this weekend. No particular message or lesson here, just a sad story.

We travelled to Oregon's Summer Square Dance Festival in Pendleton this weekend, a distance of about 220 miles from Portland. Pendleton is in Eastern Oregon's desert, and it was plenty warm -- in the 90s. We had both kids, both dogs, and our 25' trailer in tow.

The weekend started out very badly; when we got in to Pendleton at about 10 PM Friday evening, the RV park I had reserved turned out to be a combination trailer court and RV park. It looked like a junk yard. When I knocked on the door of the office, a grumpy old woman in her robe came to the door -- she was already in bed. I don't know how anyone could expect to operate an RV park and not have folks knocking on their door at 10 PM on a Friday. She pointed me to a grassy area and went to bed. Fortunately, she never asked for my name when I made the reservation, so we left.

The real adventure started Sunday afternoon when we headed home. No sooner did we get on the freeway than I noticed some of the idiot lights were on -- the air bag light was solid, and the battery light came and went. Then, I noticed that the battery voltage meter was pegged off the top of the scale -- a sure sign of a dead voltage regulator. I turned on a bunch of equipment, the voltage went down and the battery light went off, so I continued on. Shortly, both lights went out and the meter went back to normal. I held my breath and crossed my fingers that it had just been a freak occurrance.

About 120 miles later, at The Dalles, it became clear that the voltage was steadily going down: the voltage regulator had taken out the alternator, and we were running on battery only. In another 30 miles, at Hood River, the van was dead. Fortunately, I managed to take an exit and get to a side street. After an hour or so, we had called a local tow company and managed to locate the only RV park in town. The tow truck couldn't tow a van and trailer, and no tow truck could take a family of four plus two dogs, so I was hoping the truck could charge the battery enough so I could drive to the park.

Sure enough, he did that, and left us so we could set up and unhook things. When my wife went in to register, the desk folks informed her that ABSOLUTELY no pets were allowed; we would have to lock the dogs in the trailer and give no hint to the residents that they were there. Plus, we could only have the spot until Tuesday. That was the last straw for her.

After more phone calls and pleading and cajoling, the owner of the tow truck company said he would call the owner of the local body shop, who had some cars for rent. The guy came in at 6 PM on a Sunday evening, unlocked his shop, and rented me a minivan (thank you, D&S Collision Repair in Hood River). The minivan was big enough to take all of us plus our critical junk the last 90 miles to our house.

But wait, it gets better. At 8 AM the next morning, I got a call from the towing yard, which also had a repair garage (River's Edge Towing). They had confirmed that the alternator had expired. They had one in stock and could have it done by 10 AM. I was stunned, given my experience with the repair shops in Portland. The wife and I headed out to Hood River, and when we got in at 10:30, the van was fixed, operational, and washed clean. When the alternator in the SAME VAN expired a year ago, Colvin Ford in McMinnville took four days and charged almost $900 to put in a rebuilt alternator. River's Edge in Hood River put in a brand-new alternator in two hours, and charged $380.

We returned the rental, hooked up the trailer, returned it to the lot, and got home by 2:30 PM. As emergencies go, we got off pretty easily.

And again, a big thanks to River's Edge Towing and D&S Collision and Body in Hood River.

I'm a tea drinker. In fact, if you have followed the very early entries in my weblog, you know that I love iced tea, and I'm a bit of a nut about it.

There are a lot of teas available, falling in the basic broad categories of black, green, and white. I've learned through experience that I like basic black teas. In the commercial brands, my favorite is probably Stash (which, coincidentally enough, is made here in Portland, Oregon). I love their English Breakfast and their Irish Breakfast, both of which are basic black tea blends. I also like their "Fusion", which is a green/white blend that doesn't have an awful lot of flavor. Even your basic Lipton tea appeals to my palette.

Because I spend a lot of time at Starbucks, I also discovered some of the Tazo teas. Their Awake black tea is one of my top three as well, but most of the rest of the Tazo leaf teas are just too weird.

For folks who like tea, I would recommend a visit to www.mycupoftea.com. Besides having a great variety of leaf tea, they also have a wonderful introduction to tea varieties and tea growing. I ordered three bags of loose black tea from them ("Trafalgar English Breakfast", "Assam" from India, and "Chinese Keemun"); all three are very, very nice. The quality and clarity of flavor are clearly better than the bagged tea I've been buying, and I find that the hassle of using the infuser isn't that much greater than using a tea bag.

I was pleased to learn that my latest contract is located in a building with a lunchroom stocked with about 15 different kinds of tea, and TWO refrigerators with ice makers. I can make myself REAL iced tea twice a day, and it's much better AND cheaper than hitting the Coke machine.

President Bush has placed this nation on a very dangerous path. He has put his balls (and ours) on the line. Let us hope he is right.

If the Iraqis actually launch chemical or biological weapons against our forces, then the Bush Administration will have been vindicated: it will prove that they were right, and the rest of the United Nations was wrong. If that happens, I'm guessing the rest of the security council will choose to fall in line with us and vanquish Iraq.

But if the war proceeds to something approaching completion without the use of "WMDs" by the Iraqis, this nation will be a paraiah -- a laughingstock -- a demon. It will show that Bush fought this war for no better reason than to avenge his daddy. It will also guarantee that George W. will follow his daddy's footsteps in the One-Term President's Hall Of Shame.

I still don't see any way for this to all come out to the good.

Political commentators tend to annoy me. It seems quite clear that, most of the time, they are inventing trends and cause/effect links where none exist.

One of the prime examples of that is in the coattail effect. We are asked to believe that the Republicans gained so many Congressional seats in the 2002 election primarily because of the unsupportably high approval ratings for President George "Big W" Bush.

I find that reasoning unfathomable. They are suggesting that, when people go to the ballot box, they say "Hmmm, I like President Bush, and President Bush is a Republican, therefore I'm going to vote the Republican ticket." Is that line of thinking anything other than boneheaded? Would ANYONE actually vote a party just because they happen to like another person in that party?

I know I do not do so. I look through the voter's pamphlet carefully. I actually read the candidate's statements, and try to reconcile those statements with what I've read and heard from that candidate. I vote based on positions and qualifications. I care not one whit about their party, although I must admit that someone who claims to be part of the Raving Loony Extreme Opinion Space Aliens Out To Get Us Party will have to be pretty amazing in order to get my vote (and there have been political parties in Oregon whose credos do not fall all that far from my invented title...).

Can't we, once and for all, get rid of the annoying habit of referring to LCD panel sizes by cutesy pseudo-acronyms? VGA and SVGA are clear enough, but as the panels get bigger, we're inundated with "ultra XGA", and "super XGA", and "ultra XGA +". It's just stupid. I can't wait for some one to choose "super ultra XGA", so we can pronounce "SUXGA".

Wouldn't it be much clearer and much less confusing to use the actual pixel sizes? If that's too long, we can use the equally unambiguous decapixels: 6x4, 8x6, 10x7, 12x10, 14x10, 16x12, 19x14, etc. Now, I can tell EXACTLY how fine the pixels will be, instead of having to search for a glossary (which, by the way, the laptop manufacturers conveniently neglect to include in their brochures).

SUXGA just sux. Get rid of it.

Attention Jared Fogle: your fifteen minutes are up.

I've heard a number of people in recent weeks attempting to dismiss the entre Oregon budget crisis by the platitude "the legislature should live within its budget." This statement shows a serious lack of understanding of the budgeting process in Oregon. In fact, the state government would be perfectly happy to live within its budget, and we would not currently be in a crisis if that is what the voters actually wanted. However, the people who say this do not actually mean what they say.

The state's current budget, which was established some 18 months ago at the beginning of the current two-year cycle, would cover the necessary expenses just fine. The issue we currently face is that our actual income from tax revenues is falling way below that 18-month-old budget. If we could spend to the budget, through raising tax revenues or deficit spending, we would not be in a crisis.

Part of the state's current budget crisis can be blamed on all of those kicker refunds we insisted on getting back in the late 1990s. Consider, as a metaphor, the case of Joe Smith, a real estate agent. Realtors make a good metaphor for the state economy, because unlike the typical company employee, realtor income is not constant from month to month, and like the state government, it depends linearly on the condition of the economy in general.

Let's assume that Mr. Smith is more organized than most of us, and sits down in November to decide his budget and spending for the next calendar year. Let's say that he forecasts an average year, and budgets for an income of $60,000. As it turns out, he has an above average year, and he ends up making $100,000. Does he return the excess to his clients? Does he throw it in the garbage? No, of course not. He puts the extra cash into his savings acount.

Next year, if his income drops to $40,000, Mr. Smith has that buffer in savings, so he can maintain his budgeted spending even though his income has dropped.

The issue in the state of Oregon is that we do not allow the state to put anything into its savings account during boom years when income exceeds budget. Because of that, there is nothing available to make up the difference when income falls below the budget, and we are left with crises.

During boom years, we expect the state to stick precisely to its forecasted budget. During lean years, we expect the state to stick precisely to actual revenues. That represents the worst of both situations. Since Oregon continues to do its budgeting on a two-year cycle, it is no surprise that we have a budget crisis, and as long as we keep having operating this way, we will continue to have financial crises like the one we are currently in.

I see several ways to alleviate these problems in the long term. First, Oregon should leave its rural past behind and go to a one-year budget and legislative cycle. The world is too dynamic to think about budget forecasts two years in advance. Next, I believe we should eliminate the kicker refund, and allow the state to put any surplus revenue into a "rainy day" fund. However, that has about as much chance as Mike Tyson would on Jeopardy. I can already hear all the screams of outrage from where I am sitting.

One alternative would be to have the state budget for next year be based on the actual revenues from this year, instead of using the voodoo art of forecasting to get the final numbers. Although this would cause consternation at budget time during a lean year, at least we would not have to worry about running short at the end of a cycle and having to make drastic cuts just to survive.

(Submitted to the Oregonian on 2/27)

Gas prices here in Portland at "prime" locations (near freeway exits) hit $2.00 for regular unleaded, and $2.20 for premium yesterday. That is basically a 75% increase from six months ago.

I'm searching for the right adjectives to describe this. Predatory, immoral, price gouging, mercenary; all of these are accurate, but they don't express the depth of the vitriol I feel for the slimeballs setting these prices.

Yes, crude oil prices and futures have gone up recently. However, it takes MONTHS for crude oil to be refined into gasoline and appear at the pump. What that means is that gas stations and oil companies are using the tension in Iraq as an excuse to charge usurious rates for gasoline they had sitting in their tanks, purchased and refined long ago at a cheap price.

That's offensive. The government ought to do something about it, and I believe it is within their powers to do so. Will they? Not as long as we have a president who gets is part of that same industry. It is not impossible to believe that Bush anticipated this result from his quest for Iraq, and pushed his agenda along to help his friends in Texas.

The Southwest section of the February 20 Oregonian contained a number of letters weighing in on the issue of fluoridation. Unfortunately, many of these letters reflect a continuation of the disturbing recent trend in this nation toward a reliance on pseudo-science -- a trend being championed by our President.

Several people raised the notion that fluoride is a poison. Sodium fluoride is, indeed, poisonous, in the same way that table salt is poisonous. In fact, sodium fluoride and sodium chloride (salt) are very similar substances, chemically speaking. In large quantities, they represent a danger to the body. Salt does not kill us because we are smart enough not to ingest large quantities, and sodium fluoride in drinking water will not kill us for exactly the same resaon. It is added in very small quantities.

One writer referred to getting his information from a naturopath. As individuals, we are all entitled to get our medical care from whatever provider makes us feel comfortable. However, we should not be relying on naturopathy to set public health policy any more than we should be relying on astrology to set our space exploration policy, or Rush Limbaugh to set our national political agenda.

Too many people get their complete science information from newsletters and web sites written by people with about as much scientific background and credibility as President Bush. These newsletters include lots of ranting and raving designed to stir up anger and outrage, but ranting and raving does not make science. The scientific process is a gradual one, in which hypotheses and experimentation leads us from a general idea to a specific understanding.

People are entitled to righteous indignation and outrage. The right to express outrage is guaranteed in the constitution. But unless that outrage is actually based on facts or evidence with a well-established basis, it should have no effect on public health policy.

Flouridated water has proven benefits for dental health. It reduces tooth decay measurably and provably. Objecting to its use because of hysteria, pseudo-science, and unsubstantiated rumors is neither productive nor good public policy.

(This letter submitted to the Oregonian on 2/20 and printed 2/27)

Letterman had pseudo-psychiatrist Dr. Phil on his show last night, and the world is better for it. It has been a long time since I laughed that hard. Letterman has lampooned Dr. Phil's television show virtually every night for the last six months in his "Words from Dr. Phil" show, giving little snippets taken completely out of context, in which he generally makes Dr. Phil look like an idiotic country bumpkin.

I admire Dr. Phil for having the gumption to appear on the show after all of that abuse, but he proved that he can dish it out as well as he can take it. Letterman tried to get him to admit that most of the people on his show are just bozos who need little more than a swift kick in the pants, but Dr. Phil had a good answer for every barb. I enjoyed it.

Two men who know how to laugh at themselves: it was glorious.

Interestingly, part of Dr. Phil's advice mirrors one of my own little nuggets of philosophy: You only get one trip through life. If you aren't having a good time, you ought to go do something else.

Without any fanfare or public outrage of any kind, as far as I can tell, the FCC is set to enact some rule changes that will significantly alter the configuration of the nation's media outlets.

Today, a newspaper is not allowed to own a radio or television station within the market area it serves. That rule is scheduled to go out the window.

Further, today, a network is not allowed to own radio or television stations that serve more than 35% of the population of the country. That rule is also scheduled to be tossed out.

There are several things about these actions that I do not understand. First, I do not understand why the FCC would even consider making changes like this. Where is the benefit? It seems intuitively obvious to me that it is unconditionally a Bad Thing to have a single company serving news and content to more than a third of the nation. Besides corporate pandering, what is the point?

Second, where is the outrage? I'm guessing these rule changes will slip right by, under the guise of "deregulation is the universal good", but the fact is that most deregulation benefits corporate executive boards much more than it benefits middle America.

The first amendment ensures that the government cannot interfere with a free press, but there are no constitutional protections against corporate interference with a free press. To me, that single statement is a compelling argument for the continuted regulation of the media markets by the FCC.

Are they asking me to believe that corporate America has my best interest at heart? Haven't Enron, Arthur Anderson, WorldCom, and Martha Stewart all provided thorough and complete counter-examples against that claim?

We replaced and upgraded the operating system our main gateway server today. We had made a LOT of customizations to the old Red Hat 5.2 system, so we expected trouble. Fortunately, we had been planning this for months; the machine has been going flaky for quite some time, and it is difficult to keep up with all of the security updates. Thanks to all the planning, the upgrade itself wasn't too bad. We had been running it offline for a couple of weeks, and thanks to all the preparation, it only tooks about 4 hours this afternoon to do the switch and clean up all of the leftovers.

The thing that amazes me about this is the amount of guru mungling that I had to do. Very often, when I have finished with some delicated computer operation, I wonder what "mere mortals" do when they have the same kinds of problems?

I suppose they just throw them out and start over, which, considering the amount of trouble we have, might not be a bad solution overall...

About 25 years ago, I encountered a humorous book entitles "How to Avoid Death and Taxes and Live Forever." In one of my favorite chapters, they outlined a method for avoiding taxes that involved creating your own country.

Basically, you go out and find an uninhabited island that is not currently claimed as the property of any country. Put up a building, design a flag, and give your new country a name. Print up stationery, and send out a couple of press releases announcing the "Protective Republic of Bob", and naming yourself as King and Supreme Ruler.

Next, start writing some threatening letters to the U.S. State department, in which you grumble about unjust treatment at the hands of the United States government. Copy the New York Times, of course. Finally, declare war on the U.S.

When the government sends a battleship to investigate (or garbage scow, as the case may be), make sure you have enough explosives on hand to eradicate your sole building. Fire on the ship, then set off your explosives.

Finally, issue a press release blaming the destruction of your beautiful kingdom on the wanton agression of the United States. Demand reparations. The government will be happy to help you rebuild. And, fortunately, war reparations are not taxable!

I believe North Korea is now playing out this scenario in real life. The parallels are just too eerie. I just cannot fathom what a country with a starving populace and an almost complete lack of material resources thinks it can accomplish by THREATENING the United States, other than as a blatent attempt to get shot at and demand reparations. Is there any other possible explanations for why they would restart their nuclear program? Does anyone on this planet really think the United States has even the slightest bit of interest in invading North Korea?

I don't see a happy ending for Kim Jung Il's little misadventure.

I am saddened by the loss of the space shuttle Columbia yesterday morning. My sympathy and condolences go out to the families of the seven astronauts who lost their lives.

It is my fervent hope that we do not have another 18 month gap in flights while NASA investigates the failure. (Strictly speaking, I don't think they can do so, since we still have human beings up their in the International Space Station that will need refueling and replacement.) The astronauts all know that their job is dangerous, although their families might not see it that way.

I just hope this ends up being an unforseeable accident caused by a series of unlikely events, and not the result of incompetence or bureaucratic insistence. If the root cause was, in fact, stuff falling off of the external fuel tanks and damaging the wing, I suspect there are a number of good ways to solve that, including something as simple as a discardable shield to protect the delicate ablative surfaces during launch.

So, the "fans" in Oakland riot when the win (last week), and they riot when they lose (this week).

I'll tell you what I think. I think they riot because they aren't smart enough to know they aren't supposed to riot. No one is telling urban young people that they aren't supposed to sell drugs; they aren't supposed to shoot each other; they aren't supposed to steal; they aren't supposed to beat up other young people.

I don't know how this is going to end. Usually, children are aghast at their parent's behavior and vow to be different when they grow up. Is that going to happen here? If rioting looks like fun, will the rioters kids grow up to be senators and CEOs, or will they move straight to the anarchist movement?

It scares me.

Here I go again, harping on George W. Bush. Now he tells us that he has EVIDENCE that Iraq still has a weapons-of-mass-destruction program, but he's not going to tell us about it.

How can he expect to have the support of the American people, much less the leaders of the world's major countries, if he won't tell us WHY he insists on this course of action? We are not idiots. We can handle the truth. This "I know a secret and I won't tell, nyah nyah nyah" stuff is just insulting.

I don't particularly doubt that he has evidence, but I also would not be surprised to learn that there isn't any evidence.

If this country goes to war unilaterally, without solid, publicly announced evidence, world opinion will turn against us in a major and unpleasant way. Even if Mr. Bush is willing to suffer that downturn, the rest of the American people are not.

Well, I managed to make it through the first week of the new contract, and although I did experience my usual stress level, I also seem to have been able to accomplish more than I feared.

My nine-year-old is coming up with more and more inventive ways of getting out of doing his homework. His favorite ploy is simply to forget to mention it until bedtime. We started making him stay up until it was done, so that strategy has outlived its usefulness. He has now learned the technique of spending hours in the bathroom. He heads off quietly, and pretty soon we realize it's been 30 minutes with no word from him.

I would never have thought of such a thing when I was growing up. I had such a terrible fear of authority that I just did what I was told. The sad thing is that, like me, school is pretty easy for my son. If he just came in off of his daydream ship and did the work, it would be done in no time and he could relax.

Ah, well, I suppose we all learn these lessons a bit too late to do us any good.