Oh God

I just witnessed my second real death on television. Last year I saw some scientific program that filmed the last moments of an elderly man who was dying, and chose to die peacefully at home. Tonight I saw the Nicholas Berg video on public cable access. The host gave ample warning that he was going to show the video.

I am in shock. First, that the film didn't turn my stomach. I watch action movies and play some violent games (namely Diablo and Diablo 2, where heads do fall off and roll). I am shocked and upset with myself that I didn't puke just watching it.

The next waves of shock came as I changed the channel to start recording Enterprise, which is coming close to the end of a story line that threatens the planet Earth and the entire Trek history that has been written so far. I remember sitting up late one night with my brother and a friend of his watching Christine. We sat quietly through the end of the movie, and finally the tape ran out. We hadn't moved. It stopped to rewind and MTV came on playing a Madonna video (new VCR and MTV showing music videos? It must have been the 80s. But I digress).

I so much want to hate the people who killed Nicholas Berg, but I know that it is wrong to hate them so much. Do I want this Iraqi invasion thing to be over? Yes. Do I think those people should die for what they've done? Yes. But I cannot pass that kind of judgement.

I so desperately wanted Gibson's Passion to shock movie goers so much that they'd demand that there would be no more violence in our movies. I want the torture of Iraqi prisoners to shock us so much that we demand that every human being gets treated with respect. I want Nicholas Berg's execution to shock us so much that we stop executing our own criminals. Is it really possible to humanely take someone's life? Ask Bush. He was nicknamed the Governator long before Arnie was appointed Governor.

I don't believe in the "rapture" that most evangelicals believe in. I don't believe that Christ will come back physically to end history and judge us all. I am at the point of praying for judgement day just so our pain and suffering will come to an end

New Palm

I recieved $500 as a graduation gift and decided to update my old Palm m100, which has given me years of good use, but I was tired of the low memory (which wasn't a problem when I bought it originally) and the poor thing was just getting beat up. I went to Fry's and picked up a new Zire 31. I love having color, 16 MB of memory, and more power.

Unfortunately, the Palm desktop software didn't want to run on my system. It removed my old version, then installed the new, found my data, tried to import it, and then gave me two "Unexpected error #-8796" dialog boxes. I've got years of technical support experience (6 years at Stream, where the average length was 13 months)so I wasn't worried. That was on Teusday.

I searched the web, I searched the Palm Support Site. I tried to search usenet with Google. Nothing. Nada. I saw one post that mentioned this problem and only said "I got past the -8796 error..." with no explanation.

Finally, on Wednesday, I called technical support. This is something I don't like to do. I got through the phone tree and waited 15 minutes before being disconnected. That's an old tech support trick. If a tech needs to get their call average down they answer the phone with their mute button set, so they say "hello? hello?" a couple of times, the user doesn't realize that the line is active, they just think that the hold music is cycling, and then the tech disconnects. It gets them under that elusive 6 to 10 minute call average. It's not really an average. It's a maximum for some technical support fields.

I called again, got a hold of someone whose accent was so thick we both had to repeat everything twice. He claimed that the error was a rare macintosh system error. I searched Apple's support site. Nothing. Nada. Zip. To fix it, I had to reinstall the operating system. This is not easy on Mac running OS 9.

My CD-Rom is acting up and doesn't always read CD's. It takes a couple of times to read it. I had to load the OS 9 system disk on my wife's computer and burn a disk image of the CD, transfer it to my computer, then run it as off of the smi file. The OS 9.2.1 updater requires OS 9.1, not 9.0, so I had to do an overnight download of an 81 MB updater (over a modem that gets 26K to 45K baud). It took a couple of days, then I finally managed to get updated to 9.2.2. I had previously only used os 9.1. 9.2.2 caused interference with some of my programs the last time I tried it, but the Palm people insist that their desktop software won't run on 9.1.

Finally, everthing got updated, I got the machine to read the Palm CD, and the installer gave me one of those "THe application "installer" could not be run because 'installer' could not be found."

Boy, THAT sure pissed me off. I realised that I hadn't rebuilt the desktop and that fixed it.

Now I'm having fun with my Zire. I've got my software loaded, my data is back, and I've got some serious power. Some games run so fast that it's hard to see what the computer is doing, and my metronome broke, but it's a small loss.

Now I've got to make sure that all of my other programs work.

Oh, and I need to get a job.

Why did we wait?

In reaction to the Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib who were stripped, posed, and humiliated, why did we wait until the pictures came out this past week to get upset. There was an article on March 20, 2004, about this ( http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/03/20/iraq.prison.abuse/index.html). I heard the commentators on Air America talk about this several weeks ago. Steph told me that CBS reported that the Pentagon asked them not to air the videos over two weeks ago. The Morning Sedition claimed this morning that Bush was 'blindsided' by this news, when the Pentagon knew about it months ago. Either Bush is lying, or he is being kept out of the loop.

I really have to stop listening to politics...