Aliza's Journal
Sep. 25th, 2008
10:29 pm - The beginning of the (financial) end?
Is this the beginning of the meltdown? http://www.reuters.com/article/news
-----------
Added 11:27 Pacific time:
This appears to be just a rumor, denied by the Chinese central bank, dealing with a bank run of its own
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/c
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worriedSep. 2nd, 2008
08:16 pm - Dragon Cave viral game
Someone talked me into joining. So help me.
http://dragcave.net/user/Morganza
-- Blue Patterned Dragon Egg -- "This egg has strange markings on it."
-- Darkish Green Egg No. 1 -- "This egg is sitting in a pile of small pebbles." 
-- Pink Egg -- my favorite, of course! -- "It's bright. And pink."
-- Darkish Green Egg No. 2
05:13 pm - Sarah Palin's Gubernatorial Questionnaire
It's been pulled from the original website and from the Google search cache, but the Wayback Machine still has it:
http://web.archive.org/web/200705011923
I have to admit that I'm most offended by this one:
11. Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?
SP: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.
-- July 31, 2006
I guess she was thinking of all those mentions of G-d in the Constitution(*), not the fact that the words "Under God" were not added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954.
I don't trust her to uphold our Constitution.
- Aliza
(*) Zero.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070501192322/http://eagleforumalaska.blogspot.com/2006/07/2006-gubernatorial-candidate.html
I have to admit that I'm most offended by this one:
11. Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?
SP: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.
-- July 31, 2006
I guess she was thinking of all those mentions of G-d in the Constitution(*), not the fact that the words "Under God" were not added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954.
I don't trust her to uphold our Constitution.
- Aliza
(*) Zero.
<hr "align=left" "width=40%">
Added for balance, 5:35 pm:
To be balanced:
"A sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation -- context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase 'under God.' I didn't."
-- Barack Obama , June 29, 2006
As quoted on http://undergod.procon.org/viewresource.asp?resourceID=63
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Afraid. Very afraidAug. 6th, 2008
10:51 am - A list
Cows
Dogs
Oxen
Goats
Sheep
Water Buffalo
Ponies
Donkeys
... and that's only inside the city limits!
Aug. 5th, 2008
07:58 pm - I don't usually eat potato chips, but...
I just had to try the "Mint Mischief" flavor.
Which is actually pretty good...
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chipperJul. 31st, 2008
04:45 am - India Journal, part 1 -- 5 temples, 2 mosques, and a cow
[I've sent bits of this in mail to various people, which may or may not have gone through. Photos to follow as I can.]
8:32 AM 7/29/2008
The obvious big changes are important, but there are little ones, too: What look like crows with gray necks or tails.
I only saw 4 cows on the road on my way to the hotel from the airport...
8:18 AM 7/30/2008
So yesterday I went out for a walk after getting settled, towards M.G. Road [Mahatma Gandhi Road, part of the commercial downtown core]. (Actually I just walked in a striaght line towards the center of the city, to make it trivial to get back.)
The mix of the old and the new is a bit startling -- cracked stone slab sidewalks under shiny modern buildings; the proliferation of private security guards at the gates of modern buildings; etc. However, where I was walking doesn't compare to the shantiness of some of the things I saw from the car coming from the airport.
A few blocks along I saw a very pretty litle girl, maybe 7 or 8, with a bright scarf around her waist. I took a picture of her (OK, my first mistake), at which point she smiles and started doing backflips, which really looked very cute until she stuck out her hand with a few coins in it and pantomimed being hungry. She only followed me for a block (unlike the assertive auto-rickshaw [yellow golf cart] driver who was sure that I was only walking because nobody had invited me into a cab.) The next cute little girl who did backflips for the obvious foreigner didn't seem so innocent... [And yes, I do intend to get some coins that I can give to beggars. I'm a sucker...]
Further on I saw a fragile-looking woman sweeping dirt out of the gutters with two hand-brooms. I took a few pictures from half a block away, but decided not to take any from closer, even though the tradiitonally-dressed woman sweeping dirt against a backdrop of traffic would have made a great shot. *sigh*
I did take a picture of the construction workers who had crawled up a structure and were welding on it, in hard-hats and flip-flops.
This morning I'm contemplating a walk in the other direction -- out of the back of the hotel, where from my roon I can see 5 temples, 2 mosques, and a moderately busy road with a steady stream of autos, buses, motor scooters, and oh yes a cow lying in a presumably cool and comfortable mud puddle in the construction area for Bangalore's new mass-transit line.
It's odd -- the most popular means of personal transit seems to be the motor scooter, and not the bicycle. Maybe that's a function of how spread-out this city is. There were traffic cops at most of the bigger intersections on my rush-hour walk yesterday; still, I felt nervous about crossing a number of the streets. The cynical solution to that, of course, is to find someone else about to cross the same street, and stay downstream of them ;-)
4:22 AM 7/31/2008
Insomnia is not your friend. I'm also told that some of the emails I've sent haven't gone through...
A few snippets:
Globalization means that the safe in my hotel room was made in Israel, and the light bulb in the bedside lamp in Indonesia. Oh, and Tuesday night I was drinking beer from Ireland with the manager of the group I'm working with. :-)
From the morning of the 29th: [blockquote]
As Bilbo said, adventures make one late for dinner. (Did I mention that I'm hungry?)
I have an... interesting view out my hotel room window. It occasionally features a circling raptor with angled tan striped on the backs of its wings; I'll try to get a photo and work on identifying it.
All:
We only passed 4 cows on the road getting here from the airport. Toto, I don't think I'm in Kansas any more...
I think my first task here in India will be to buy appropriate clothes to wear to work tomorrow. ;-) [Cue flashback to previous note about adventures.]
[/blockquote]
(that view features 5 temples (one Sikh and 4 Hindu, I think) and 2 mosques, laundry and solar water heaters on the roofs of some flats, a semi-busy road jammed with cars, buses, scooters, a few bikes, and the ubiquitous yellow "auto-rickshaws", which are three-wheeled taxis that sem to be slightly overgrown golf carts. You know the traffic is bad when people stop their engines when the car starts, and the "autos", as they are called, need to be restarted with a pull of a cord.) There's also a construction area for Bangalore's future mass-transit line, which features a cool comfortable patch of dirt that generally hosts one or two cows.
A few more notes:
By the way, one amazing thing is that even fairly grubby autos and trucks often have some decorative touches, whether it's a line of hand-painted flowers where a car would have a racing stripe, a garland on the front of a truck, multi- colored filigree work fringing a truck bed...
Beggars showing off sickly babies whenever the car stops in traffic are a bit disturbing. The people hawking towels, newspapers, toy motorcycles, and rubik's cubes are a lot easier to ignore. (Yes, I've been stopped in traffic and had someone walk around between the cars trying to interest people in Rubik's cubes. It didn't even seem surreal in context.)
We only passed one ox-driven cart, and I saw a few cows and one long-horned ox by the side of the road, as well as what might have been a camel market. Hopefully today it won't be raining and I can take bad photos from the car. ;-)
As we got further out of the city towards my office there were more men in traditional waist-wraps instead of Western trousers, usually topped with a Western button-down shirt. I'm told that the men are from Kerala State, and that their native language is Malayalam (the world's longest language-name palindrome ;-) ) like some of my colleagues. Most of the women I see are wearing traditional clothing, though of course India has a huge diversity of cultures and traditions -- saris, tunics (kurtas) with flowing pants or rarely jeans, a scattering of hijabs. Only one of me female co-workers wears Westernized clothing, though it still slants towards a kurta influense. She's also the only one of the women who speaks up and asks questions during meetings. Hm, perhaps there's a correlation ;-)
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insomniacMay. 18th, 2008
12:34 pm - Not Clear On The Concept -- GMail Bloat
The last few times I've logged into GMail, my script blocker has notified me that there was blocked remote-site content on the GMail front page. Today I finally allowed it to see what it was.
After a several second delay, this showed up:
Latest News from the Gmail Blog
A need for speed: the path to a faster loading sequence
Posted May 13, 2008
Great performance has always been an obsession at Google and it's something that we think about and work on everyday. We...
Way to go, Google, adding several seconds of load time to the GMail entry page to tell me that you're trying to optimize system performance!
And so much for the streamlined clutter-free GMail interface...
Apr. 20th, 2008
01:35 pm - Only at a California Seder...
Sashimi instead of gefilte fish.
Yum!
Mar. 14th, 2008
05:22 pm - Tech Tip of the Day
Trying to click on the links in a screen shot of a web browser doesn't work very well.
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frazzledJan. 16th, 2008
09:15 pm - Housemate needed -- Sunnyvale, CA
I've posted this on Craigslist, but I figured more exposure wouldn't hurt.
This is ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
plymouth's room, as she's moving in with Auros.
( Text of the ad )
(And yes, I know, I haven't posted to LJ in forever and y'all miss me. I miss you too... I just got out of the habit of reading and posting.)
Aug. 17th, 2007
11:52 am - Re-Establishing Windows XP Network Credentials
(This is a "feature" of Windows networking that has aggravated me for years. Anyone who can teach me a workaround will gain my undying gratitude.)
Between docking and undocking my laptop, and using it at home, I've somehow managed to lose my network credentials yet again. I don't want to have to reboot just so I can print a one-page text file.
Is there any way to re-establish my network credentials without rebooting my machine? (Logging out of Windows would be just as disruptive as a reboot, as I would have to close out all of my windows with work in progress.)
Please note that my TCP/IP network connectivity is working perfectly. I have a zillion open SSH sessions, web browser windows, IMAP views, etc. none of which are affected by this bit of Windows stupidity.
Failing that, is there a way to set up this machine so I can log in and out of Windows without interrupting tasks I have in progress?
Windows XP Pro (Version 2002) with SP2
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VERY annoyedAug. 9th, 2007
07:31 pm - A blast from the past...
A blast of hot stale fetid air from the past...
Twiki's formatting oddities remind me a bit of programming in SNOBOL...
Jul. 21st, 2007
12:56 am - I got it!
This better have been worth standing in line for...
Jul. 15th, 2007
06:52 pm - Image Link: Pink Dolphin
http://calcasieucharters.com/index.c
Somehow I suspect someone would have sent me this link if I hadn't found it on my own :-)
Jul. 5th, 2007
10:09 am - Worst spam of the day
An executive resume, complete with spelling errors and formatting issues.
Jun. 11th, 2007
09:56 pm - Duelling Deities
Coyote is just Anubis on drugs.
- chiendarrendor
Jun. 4th, 2007
01:24 pm - When I am an Evil Overlord Sysadmin...
I will not use the root password for my most secure server as my password for an online game.
May. 26th, 2007
May. 25th, 2007
10:37 pm - Party conversation-starter
So, what have you done to get yourself on the Homeland Security watch list?
(and yes, I assume that this LJ post isn't mine...)
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