I wouldn’t claim the cats like me, more that they recognize a source of readily available food and a way to get the area on the back of their heads and between their shoulder blades scratched.

Well, I guess we both just need to plug away at our projects. It will all come together, like always, but it will never be as quickly as it did when we were doing it every day without a break.

You are also one of the reasons I enjoy it here, and others. I like sane people, and you love, and are loved by, cats (As is Bryan and others here)! Bonus there. I believe that if a person is liked and cared about by animals (moreso than the other way around), it says a lot about that person.

And anyway… they are not *ALL* rants! Hmmph! Only… most. LOL

One day, I’d love to meet and get drunk (even though I’m not supposed to imbibe these days!) LOL As an old Russian friend once told me (when we were drunk) “Never trust anyone you have not been drunk with!” LOL (And NOT that I don’t trust you. I thought you had probably heard that also in your time).

I have good and bad days. Some days I can work, others I can do nothing. Again, that’s improving.

I have access to a lot of tools and books (eBooks), papers, etc if I can help with anything. I’m currently studying UML2 (2.1 actually), XML2and others, and relearning IDEF (IDEF0, 1 & 1X) which being ex-USAF, you may have come across. And things I knew well, but have problems with now such as PHP, Perl and others. I am also rereading all my old notes and papers on BPR (Business Process Reengineering, which I have a cert in, but have forgotten most of the processes). Good fun! Student again (or still?) LOL

Cheers. And thanks for allowing me a venue to vent the spleen now and then. I am always aware that this *IS* your place! So I do try not to leave a mess.

Screw ‘em if they can’t handle the criticism.

I just don’t understand why people don’t understand that they are being lied to. They are living in the same world and they don’t seem to notice that what is being said has no connection to reality as everyone can see it. The surprise isn’t that Bush’s approval rating in this country is so low, but that it is so high. How do the people who approve of what he has done remember to breathe?

Yeah, doing something you have done in a long time sometimes takes longer than doing something new because you make mistakes based on false memories. I’m feeling that effect in the project I currently doing because it involves converting a system I haven’t worked on in decades in a language no one uses any more. Fortunately I still have the software and reference books. It is going a lot slower than I assumed because of the hurricanes. I have to stop what I’m doing to prepare my house and my Mother’s for a possible landfall, and decide if my Mother needs to evacuate. Totally different skill set.

It sounds like you are making progress, and as time goes along things will get better. None of us is getting any younger and the days of working straight through for three days to get a project out the door are long gone.

I’ve been called many things. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t care what people who have an agenda or simply don’t know me or can’t be bothered to ask what I mean etc, say about me or think about me. *shrug* I always have and will listen to people who’s opinions I care about. If you were to call me an antisemite (and I believe you would be more likely to point out that what I said or the way I said something was antisemitic), I’d try to explain and/or apologize, and mean it. However, in the above, I am auguring against the *State* and the way they use the language and beliefs as a weapon or a tool. IMHO, the State of Israel is as antisemitic as possible, and the State of the United States of America as anti-Christian as possible. I also don’t have time for *political correctness* garbage either, you may have noticed. LOL I have common sense, a good upbringing where manners were thoroughly taught, and a real education. I don’t need to be told how to behave or speak. I don’t have time for the many narcissists. They can get their ego’s inflated on someone else’s dime (to borrow a phase I learned when I lived in the ISA). The GOP Have proven by their many years of ignorance and lack of any creativity, that they are narcissists, and their loyal moronic followers also. It’s obvious to anyone who understand the meaning. Read my friend’s piece about that above. Sadly it seems, that whilst there is a majority of narcissists on the right, it would appear that the left has it’s share also.

I do not have any problem’s with a person’s beliefs, so long as they are true and follow their belief. Sadly, there are far too many hypocrites around the entire World. So I take them all with a big pinch of salt. I no longer care what anyone (I do not know well) says. I’ll believe them, or not, when I see what they do!

Put your money where your mouth is. Talk is cheap. Actions speak louder than words. Etc! This is what amazes me about narcissists getting away with so much! They are all talk! If one looks at what they *do*, one would quickly realize they are fakes. Because they produce nothing, other than what they can steal.

I am currently working on a complex design for a dear long-time friend who, because of our history, has faith in me, even when I’d lost faith, to be able to do it. I have never tried anything so difficult in my life! But… I am making slow progress. It’s painfully hard, but I am determined now. I am working at a fraction of my abilities from a decade ago when I believe I was at my peak. But that is improving also. I have won several industry and Queens awards for excellence. And now it’s all I can do to create a simple thing. But I am determined, and I will not allow my own mind to fail me. I have discovered through trial and error, that I can work solidly for up to an hour, and then I must do something basic (read, watch TV, garden, take the dog for a walk…) for at least a half hour. Then I can do another hour, etc. My biggest problem is memory. I have a lot of gaps and missing pieces, so I am forced to relearn things or learn new things. *shrug*

We all have our problems.

The surnames of most of them weren’t noticeably Jewish and they were spread out geographically. It was the luck of the draw, because we scored the best two dorms in both years, and I was on scholarship, so money didn’t matter.

Watching the recent prime ministers in videos I can imagine some of the cracks my friends would have made, because they made them about other Jews on campus who attempted to prove how observant they were.

They have a lot in common with the Shrubbery when it comes to religion, i.e. it’s used as a political tool not a belief.

I’ll add more this tomorrow, as I need sleep.

I had read this (and the following articles) some time ago and it’s appropriate here.

Consumer Angst

In this story there are no heroes or villains, just people who believe they can buy happiness, and advertisers who support this belief. Consumerism is one of religion’s modern replacements, and, like religion, it actively encourages, then exploits, dissatisfaction with everyday reality.

And this:

How we confuse symbols and things

In my opinion, the greatest single failure of American education is that students come away unable to distinguish between a symbol and the thing the symbol stands for.

It is no accident that modern education doesn’t teach the distinction between symbol and thing — if it did, education as we know it would fall apart. After that, after education reshaped itself to provide actual knowledge instead of the symbolic representation of knowledge, the society around us would be transformed.

But in the meantime, most “educated” people cannot tell the difference between a fact and an idea, the most common confusion of symbol and thing. Most believe if they collect enough facts, this will compensate for their inability to grasp the ideas behind those facts. And, because of this “poverty of ideas,” most cannot work out the simplest conceptual questions, such as “why is the sky dark at night?” (unless you are in a small minority, the actual reason is not what you think — see more here ).

(That’s a fairly succinct summation of one of my rants a while ago). LOL

A Society of Victims, or, How to Whine your way to Sympathy

On Being Perfect, or, The narcissist’s guerrilla war against reality

To expand a bit on the above points, narcissists are typically rather shallow people, forever stuck in a preliminary stage of intellectual evolution. In the normal course of individual development, one goes through a phase of acquiring established facts from what seem to be sources of unimpeachable authority, followed by a much more creative phase in which one may make a personal contribution to the store of human knowledge by assembling known facts and ideas into something new. In a narcissist, the second of these phases of personal development never takes place. Instead, the narcissist gets stuck in phase one, complete reliance on external authority, and may never realize the second, more risky stage, that of of personal creativity, even exists.

I actually have a couple of friends in Israel BTW, one I have known for almost a decade now and is ex-military. They don’t like it either.

I supose the best way to explain is that when I talk about the ‘USA today’, I am really talking about the *criminals-in-charge*(tm), and the same goes for Israel. If I am talking about the people per-se, I usually say so, though I know I am sometimes somewhat ambiguous. Apologies for that. I still have some *mind* issues I’m trying to deal with.

Two years ago, before my breakdown, I was actively investigating the link between the GOP and Israel, and began to see some… curious… patterns emerging, stretching back some ways in time. When I’m better, I might revisit that research and see where it eventually leads. For now, it’s all I can do to focus on one thing for more than an hour at a time. And I get tired easily. But I am improving! And I am (as always!) determined! LOL Determined people can be dangerous people, right? LOL And I am getting seriously pissed off about several things. Various people will not like it when I am *seriously* pissed and in some position to do something about it! Believe me.

Hey… (I have no idea why this popped into my head just now… My mind currently works in mysterious ways! LOL) There is a site that I have been visiting for more than a decade. He created a HTML tool at the dawn of the modern *Internet* called Arachnophilia. LOL It’s GPL (and everything he has on his site is GPL, or as he calles it, CareWare). He is a very interesting guy and has some very interesting topics of discussion (or, rants) on his site.

Home Page:
Arachnoid – A playground for thinkers

His views on the state of the OS (Operating System) industry:
An introduction to Linux, including some history

I thought you might like a bit of a change.

PS. Try out the Arachnophilia Editor! It’s completely written in Java (1.5) so is platform independent (though he does have a Windows install package version also.) It’s a deceptively simple editor with a lot of customizable power hidden in it’s depths.

He also has other nifty app’s, tools and code in Java. PHP & Ruby.

Cheers.

The problems I have with Israel have nothing to do with their religion, which they wield as a shield to protect them from valid complaints. Not all Israelis are Jews, and not all Jews are Israelis, not matter how much the Likud wants it to be true.