We watched the new Indiana Jones movie tonight. I very much enjoyed it. We also need to see the new Incredible Hulk movie and the new Batman movie. I’m also told that the Iron Man movie is worth watching, and I expect that the new Hellboy movie might also be worth watching. A super-hero summer indeed. ☺

It was an exercise in organized chaos. Thankfully everyone had assigned seats, or I cannot imagine the mess it would have been. We took Metro in, and the green line was so utterly packed that Lauren and I were not sure that we would fit into the car, and from what I gather from my mom, it only got worse, though she was apparently only a few minutes behind us. The Metro people were nice in a busy way, directing people towards the right platforms, and helping when the special tickets they sold for those going to the Mass had issues. There were a surprising number of issues with what where essentially day passes.

At the ball park, it took people so long to get settled that I do not think all that many (relatively speaking) people took much notice of the procession of bishops into the stadium. There were so many of them. I wonder how many of them are “only” auxiliary bishops. There were a handful of bishops in gold with what looked like (to my eyes, without binoculars, and not seeing it on the TV screen) crowns. Were these cardinals, or eastern rite bishops? I am unsure. Also, there were priests down on the field in full vestments, and others only wearing an alb and stole, what is the difference? The deacons were distinguishable, naturally, because they wear their stole diagonally. Also, some of the non-priest/deacon people (presumably seminarians) were in black cassocks, and others in red/scarlet. Is there a significant difference, or was it just representative of the role they were playing in the day’s events?

During the Mass itself, at Communion, many (but not all) of the Communion stations had yellow umbrellas that volunteers in their red jackets held somewhat but not really over the priest or deacon’s head. What was the thinking?

The Pope spoke very good English, but between my lack of skill at accents, and the degrading effect of the speakers, it was a little bit hard to understand him at times. I am thankful that today I was able to download the full text of his homily.

But really, with all these questions and comments, I am not at all getting across my emotions. I am so very glad that I was able to go, that I did attend.

According to the most recent figures from the Vatican yearbook of statistics, the number of the world’s population that are Muslims is 19.2%, with the number of Catholics trailing behind at 17.4 %. ¹

This is attributed to the failure of Catholics and other Christians to reproduce, a failure that is not shared by Muslim families. This will have huge societal implications as we age.

/tnote[Bypass]/ Rabbit (You scored 15 Ego, 16 Anxiety, and 14 Agency!)

“IT was going to be one of Rabbit’s busy days. As soon as he woke up he felt important, as if everything depended upon him. It was just the day for Organizing Something, or for Writing a Notice Signed Rabbit, or for Seeing What Everybody Else Thought About It. It was a perfect morning for hurrying round to Pooh, and saying, “Very well, then, I’ll tell Piglet,” and then going to Piglet, and saying, “Pooh thinks–but perhaps I’d better see Owl first.” It was a Captainish sort of day, when everybody said, “Yes, Rabbit ” and “No, Rabbit,” and waited until he had told them.

You scored as Rabbit!

ABOUT RABBIT: Rabbit is generally considered Clever by his many friends and relations. He is actually a much better reader and writer than Owl, but he doesn’t consider it worth mentioning. Instead, Rabbit’s real talent lies in Organizing Plans. He organizes rescue parties, makes schemes to reduce Tigger’s bounciness, and goes on missions to find out what Christopher Robin does when he’s not at the Hundred Acre Woods. Sometimes, however, his Plans do not always go as Planned.

WHAT THIS SAYS ABOUT YOU: You are smart, practical and you plan ahead. People sometimes think that you don’t stress or worry, but this is not the case. You are the kind of person who worries in a practical way. You think a) What are my anxieties about and b)what can be done about them? No useless fretting for you. You don’t see the point in sitting around and waiting for things to work out, when you could actually work them out today and save yourself a lot of time and worry. Your friends tend to rely on you, because they know that they can trust you help them work things out. You sometimes tend to be impatient with people who are less practical in their ways. You don’t have much patience for idiots who moan about things but never actually DO anything about them. You have high expectations of everyone, including yourself. When you don’t succeed at something, or when something goes wrong despite your best efforts to prevent it, you can get quite hard on yourself. You need to cut yourself some slack and accept that everyone has their faults, even you, and THAT IS OKAY. Let yourself be faulty, every now and then, for the sake of your own sanity.”

Take it! http://www.okcupid.com/tests/7755608336260521742/Deep-and-Meaningful-Winnie-The-Pooh-Character

View My Profile - : http://www.okcupid.com/profile?u=

An excellent quote by one of the better Focus on the Family authors.

As we are now looking at using qpsmtpd for auth and greylisting, it is entirely feasible to put qmail behind it instead of postfix, and to ditch mailman in favor of ezmlm. I am thinking that this might be the best way to go, particularly now that there is a route forward for qmail. One of the flaws in it has historically been that its development simply does not move, at all.

For this reason I am thinking that I would look at netqmail and not qmail itself, as there are more developers for it.

What is truly bizarre though is that Democrats think they can dismiss his ideas, policies, and even measure his intelligence from this. I am not sure when medical science proved that everyone who mispronounces words and occasionally stutters is mentally deficient, but I have apparently missed the report.

I am further not sure when such a blatant ad hominem attack became an acceptable way to refute someone’s ideas. For the record, if you lower yourself to such an attack, you have, in my eyes, demonstrated that you must have nothing meaningful to say against the ideas he presents, stands for, and works to achieve. You must be so utterly blown away that you cannot even begin to defend your own position. You posit that he is right, and that you are wrong, but you just do not care.

That is why I have not really mentioned it ever, though I disagree with the man on immigration, education, and a number of other issues. I think that I can hold my own, and that my ideas are worth considering, are in fact better. I do not need to attack the man and hope that doing so causes people to forget his ideas.

Do you really want to see our medical system go the way of Canada or the UK? Keep in mind that 1/4 children in the UK cannot see a dentist because the nationalized health care there is floundering. Or that a far greater percentage of those who have strokes there die than here, because they cannot get the drugs that would save their lives. Or a host of other examples.

I am all for handling social issues. I just do not think that the democratic party’s notions of nationalizing everything will by any stretch of the imagination help. It is a waste of money, and worse, gets in the way of really solving problems.

But it is beyond that. Both Democratic candidates are 100% in favor of killing babies. This is not hyperbole, it is not fiction. Both will work to expand funding for abortion, help ensure that attempts to restrict it are impossible. Both will work to export our insanity to other countries such as poor African nations. Both will make it harder to make people aware of the reality of the choice they are making - to kill their unborn baby.

HOW CAN YOU VOTE FOR THAT‽

I simply cannot understand how you can worry about health care or education and sleep nights knowing that you have, with your vote, helped ensure that 1.37 Million¹ babies will be killed next year.

I am sorry that having that child might impact that mother. It might reduce her standard of living, remind her of things in her past, change her career plans, or whatever else. BUT THAT CHILD DESERVES TO LIVE. Keep that in mind when you proclaim yourself pro-choice, that the child has none.

And yes, he or she is a child. He or she is not a mass of tissue. We can keep him or her alive without the mother for months before natural birth. He or she has a soul and a life of his or her own, one that is just as important, but a whole lot more defenseless, than that of the mother whose “rights” you are so passionately defending.

Worse though, I think, is if you somehow think that something can be more important than this. The idea of claiming to be pro-life, but voting democratic sickens me with the thought of that much hypocrisy.

Seriously, why does it always pick days when it does me absolutely no good?

Vincas suggested OpenAFS, which seems similar to the glusterfs that I have been working with some. These offer a client/server model, more like an nfs replacement than an actual file system. This could work well, though it is not quite as clean, to my mind, as ocfs2. Since we are already using ldap, synchronizing UIDs isn’t a problem, so file permissions should work fine with either, or even with nfs.

OpenAFS has the advantage of having debian packages. One thing to keep in mind is that Dan dislikes it, though I do not know why. He’s certainly come down against some worthy software, while liking some less capable software, but on the other hand, his impressions are often sound.

Glusterfs is newer, and does not yet have real debian packages, though there are packages from a third party that the gluster guys have included in their wiki. On the other hand it has Dan approval. I am not really sure how which would make a more stable platform for us.

A U.S. Department of Education report, in compliance with the 2002 “No Child Left Behind” act, found that up to 10% of public school children across the country have been sexually abused or harassed by school employees and teachers.¹

We, as a culture, are obsessed with abuse in the Church. It is a huge scandal, one that could have and should have been handled better by our bishops. However, to focus so exclusively on that, and to ignore the far greater problems we have in this society, is to do a disservice to our children. More, it is morally negligent and dishonest.

Despite his pro-life stand, Senator John McCain is now the favored candidate of the Republicans for Choice Action Committee following Rudy Giuliani’s exit from the presidential race, Cybercast News Service reports.¹

CNA did not provide a link to the original article.

As results were tallied, McCain led with 345 delegates, to 129 for Romney and 115 for Huckabee. It takes 1,191 to win the nomination at this summer’s convention in St. Paul, Minn.¹

This surprised me. I had not realized that Mr. Huckabee was doing so well. Perhaps he was not, going into “Super Tuesday.” Either way, he is now very nearly in second place for the nomination, and it is no wonder that he has not dropped out yet.

I do not really expect that he might win. I am watching Senator McCain in the news. He has received endorsements from a number of real pro-life advocates, such as Senator Brownback. I wonder if these intelligent men are right to trust him, and I wrong to distrust him, or if I am in the right, and they self-deluded.

I hope we have the opportunity to find out, but I wish even more strongly that I did not need to wonder.

You’re probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people’s grammatical mistakes make you insane.

That is neither here nor there though. While I was converting, I came across a number of small but indicative things that lead me to believe that the administrators employed by the customer whose servers I was converting are in fact incredibly incompetent. Gah, that was a bad overly clauseful sentence.

Anyway, while nothing I found makes things certain, it was, as I said, certainly indicative. Today, I wake up, and they are complaining that files are missing from a vhost that I did not touch. At all. Sure enough, the file system is mounted but the files themselves are not there.

Looking in history, I cannot prove that they ran the rm -rf themselves. The alternative is that they were hacked. Either way, it feels like a sort of bitter “I told you so” moment, because yesterday I spent a few minutes complaining to Dan about the state of the converted machines, and suggesting he contact the customer about it. I do not think the customer realizes how incompetent his administrators are, nor that he has enough technical skills to interview a system administrator adequately. As a good business partner, I personally feel we owe it to this customer to have given him a heads up. And Dan might have done so for all I know.

Still, it is deeply ironic that we have had a catastrophe the very night after I warn Dan that they are asking for one.

bah.