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The Dude Lives!
After being down since Tuesday, I finally have the Dude (my home server) revived, and all it took was a new hard drive, 8 hours of experimentation, three attempts at trying to upgrade everything before doing a clean install, a clean install, a mass name change of database objects, and I didn’t even those any data. A corrupted boot sector is just no fun at all.
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Ideas to elaborate on later
Here are ideas and historical (no emotional connection to me) events that have fundamentally affected my outlook.
In no particular order
- Pareto Optimality
- Coase Theorem
- Hayek and Sowell on the limits and costs of knowledge
- Gresham’s law
- Napoleon’s invasion of Russia
- Dominant Strategies
- Schelling Points (as elaborated on by David Friedman)
- The seatbelts kill theory of Steven Landsburg (though the theory might actually originate with George Stigler)
- The diaries of Eric Hoffer (and his books, they’re fairly similar) as they deal with mass movements
- Network effects
- Robert Nozick’s notion of morality as a time saving device (morality is used very broadly) as explained in the Examined Life
- The defensive boxing style of Pernell Whitaker
I’ll have more detail on what they are and how they are all used later.
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Pesky second wind
Thursday was quite hectic for me, I work 15 and a half hours, then I continue on into Friday morning. I stop drinking caffeine earlier than I usually do with the express intent of being quite sleepy around 2:00 or so at the very latest.
It all goes according to plan; I’m sleepy and about ready to doze off around midnight. And then what happens? I work a bit later than I intend to, and at 2:30 I get a second wind. I’m now quite awake
All that being said, here’s what I was going to blog about today:
I got my server working again, sort of. I think a part of the boot sector got corrupted, I wasn’t able to do the upgrade around it and had to do a clean install on the new drive. I was able to pull off all of the data and databases off of the original drive, which works fine so long as you don’t boot off of it.
However, all of my setting were lost and I can’t log into the database with any of my old username and passwords. Hence my intranet is down. Any ideas any of my many technical readers?
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The NYT Alpharetta article
I probably won’t have time to post on this tonight, but here it is
The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life -
Continental Drift
While at last night’s Boo Hoo Rambler’s show, my friend Beth said something about “The country getting more conservative” which I wonder about. She was grouping the politics and the society but the general thought can be either true or false. More Republican certainly, but by what measure is the country getting more conservative? I thought I’d make a list:
Top moves to the left
- Massive Federal Spending
- Wars for Democracy (this has been adopted by the Republicans, but the idea has been on the left for quite some time)
- Gay marriage on horizon
- Government involvement all aspects of the medical system
- Abortion available for minors without parental consent, paid for by the feds in some cases. This is something that has stayed the same, but it’s a huge red flag for a lot of the right.
- Central planning for education under the guise of No Child Left Behind.
- The income tax actually becoming more progressive under Bush
- Campaign Finance “Reform”
Top moves to the right
- A push for Social Security privatization
- A move to end the death tax
- Assault Weapons ban NOT being renewed
- Higher defense spending (Bush was proposing this before 9-11 so I’ll include it here)
- Over 55 speed limits remain in effect
- 3 rounds of tax cuts
I’m sure I’ve missed a lot but that is something of a gist. Certainly the Republicans have been doing much of the above (on both sides) but where is the country actually drifting? IMHO the Democrats have not been following an Evolutionary Stable Strategy for quite a while which allows the Republicans play both sides of the street.
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From Ben Stein
Actually a Ben Stein article in the American Spectator
Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POW’s, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel’s life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?
Oh, now I remember. He lied. He was a politician who lied. How remarkable. He lied to protect his subordinates who were covering up a ridiculous burglary that no one to this date has any clue about its purpose. He lied so he could stay in office and keep his agenda of peace going. That was his crime. He was a peacemaker and he wanted to make a world where there was a generation of peace. And he succeeded.
That is his legacy. He was a peacemaker. He was a lying, conniving, covering up peacemaker. He was not a lying, conniving drug addict like JFK, a lying, conniving war starter like LBJ, a lying, conniving seducer like Clinton — a lying, conniving peacemaker. That is Nixon’s kharma.
Ben Stein (before he had his own game show, talk show, movie roles et al) was a Nixon speechwriter. Read the whole thing.
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The Boo Hoo Ramblers
I saw the Boo Hoo Ramblers at Blind Willies’ last night and they’re still my favorite new (to me) band. A very tight trio of guitar (periodically banjo) bass and fiddle the Boo Hoo boys perform a well stuctured and very long show. I highly recommend seeing them.
On a side note, the singer/guitarist is Clark Ashton, who also has Commuter Art Gallery, A.K.A. the house with all the large iron statues in the front yard on North Druid Hills road.
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Computer problems
And of course, now that I reboot my server (I had turned it off to disconnect the monitor cable to install the KVM switch) I get problems. The server boots normally, but just as it gets to the login screen it reboots and the Bios then displays “Disk boot failure, Insert System Disk and press enter”. The server had been going for several weeks between reboots.
Ideas anyone? I seem to recall the last time this happened it was a memory problem, which could be the case. That CPU/mobo/ram is pretty ancient. The hard drive is only 10 months old though.
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A new KVM switch
I just saw this D-Link KVM (Keyboard, Video and Mouse) as a Buy.com “Deal of the Day” and I have to say, it works very well. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it came with six foot cables (I think the average is 3 foot cables). I can finally have more room for all of my other stuff on that desk in my office.
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Blogging will be light the next few days
Work is whupping up on me this week.