Global Raining

Locally, it feels like monsoon season. In the past five days, we have had rain, rain, and more rain. This afternoon a downpour made my backyard into a temporary swamp; the tips of the blades of grass were under water on a good chunk of it. I had to deploy the siphon to speed up the draining process. Even though we are not near a creek or river, the way water flows (or does not flow) away from our house can cause problems. All I have at my disposal is a Wet-Vac, some hoses I can use to siphon, and a borrowed small pump.

A quick read of the local news says that all the local rivers will crest past flood stage again. This will be the third time in the past two years this has happened (Ivan in '04 and spring '05). Some areas may crest 10+ feet above flood stage. Boy, talk about an inconvenient reality.

Schuylkill Driveway

I had the joy today of experiencing a Philadelphia morning rush hour for the first time, if I remember correctly, since 2003. I don't envy anyone who does it daily. How anyone does it is beyond my understanding. The heavy rain was a bonus.

Silence

Recent suicides at Guantanamo have renewed calls from some Americans to demand the prison be closed, claiming conditions are poor and the detainees have no rights. Most of them come from countries where if they were in jail there, they'd have much worse conditions and fewer rights anyway.

According to a recent Dept. of Justice study, there were 314 jail suicides in the U.S. in 2002. Plus, from 2000-2002, Caucasian inmates were six times more likely to commit suicide than Afro-Americans and three times more likely than Hispanics. [Link to study]
I haven't see any demands to close any jails or prisons in the U.S. nor have I seen any charges about how a certain group's higher than normal suicide rate might be a result of discrimination or unfair treatment.

Like I've said numerous times, Americans seem more worried about how we treat others than we are about how we treat ourselves. We read in our local paper that someone picked up by local police killed himself in jail and we say "ho hum" but a foreign national with terrorist ties kills himself, we "say, close it down." It just makes no sense.

Parts and stuff

Since Dubya must have forgotten to have global warming affect where I live, I took advantage of those gloomy, April-like, barely getting to the 60's days last week to go through my spare computer parts.

I threw out a CDROM (said manufactured in 1994 on it), a 120 MHz processor and board, some modems, a NIC that had the word 'sh*tty' written on it, some EDO RAM, some other small stuff like cables that don't attach to anything, and a case. I moved everything out of a crappy old NEC case, a case I had to hack of the back panels to make the board's ports stick out of and into a nice case with 4 bays and a working power button.

I still have a lot of parts, probably enough to put together two more PCS - one Pentium and one Pentium II. All told, excluding my wife's W98 PC, I have a P3 as my main workstation, running FC4; a P2 as an NFS server, running Slackware 10.0; and my laptop, still running (don't laugh) Mandrake 9.2. Since laptops are so fickle I am afraid to try anything new; if it ain't broke I am not going to fix it. I tried to upgrade once and that became a broken system. Anyway, I have two other machines that are idle at the moment. One is a P3 running Arch Linux 0.7.1 and the other is Pentium 200MMX, running FreeBSD 4.11-Release. That BSD box would be running but the HD makes a lot of noise. It boots up and runs but I think it's just a matter of time before it goes kaputt.

The idle P3 is a candidate for something, I just don't know what. I may try the latest FreeBSD on it. In the summer it's hard to spend an afternoon tinkering inside and, besides, next on my to-do list is getting my main desktop PC updated to either FC5 or Arch 0.7.2.

Overlord

I've been listening to the CBS News broadcasts from June 6, 1944 today [Link]. It's interesting to hear the newscasters use words like "we" and "our" when referring to the Allied troops. They don't use the first person anymore.

Another thing to note is the how news reports talk about how well things were going for the Allies ("few casualties" was said often). We know now that while the invasion was a success, it hardly went according to plan and the early stages of the assault were almost a disaster for the Allies; and the news broadcasts did give "eyewitness" reports. The news did not question "our version" like they constantly do now.

That's it for now. I need to look up what "Eastern War Time" means. That term was used several times during the news.

Maybe Next Year

I've all but decided not to go the World War II weekend at the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum in Reading. My friend from Pittsburgh whom I usually meet at the show could not make it and the weather has been rainy and dreary. I can deal with the weather but I feel like the turnout of planes and other WWII-era equipment would be lighter if the weather is iffy.

The pictures I took last year are here. The B-17 is called the Yankee Lady and you can book a 30 minute flight on it for $425. I want to do it but that's steep. Maybe I'll start saving for it now.