Hmm, from BBC News: Radio warns Afghans over food parcels. It looks like we have been dropping cluster bombs that are the same color as the food packets. That isn’t the brightest idea in the world.

Embarrassingly, the bombs’ yellow casing means that from a distance they are hard to distinguish from the emergency food parcels wrapped in yellow plastic that US planes have been dropping over the last few weeks.

Now, I can understand why one would want both to be highly visable but you’d think that someone, somewhere in all the bureacracy that makes up our military someone would of thought about a color coding scheme that would work a little better than this.

Sometimes the irony is just too strong not to comment on. American Flag Afghan Throw — $65.95.

It looks like I’m getting back into the sporadic mode of updating this. I have been busy but that doesn’t explain all of it. I’ve also been playing with switching my computing platform over to Linux for everyday work just to see if it is possible. Updating this journal is one thing I haven’t incorporated fully in my work routine on the new platform.

This is not my first experience attempting to run Linux as my home workstation. I’ve fooled with the operating system on and off for the past six years. I never really got serious with it though. Until recently I haven’t had the hardware to dual boot two operating systems. Hard drives and memory are cheap now. I hadn’t fooled with Linux to speak of in the last two years. It’s funny how much you can lose in that time.

My biggest problem was in my aversion to RTFM and planning. I installed Mandrake’s excellent little package, Linux for Windows on my home machine and immediately screwed up. I did not want to choose the OS at boot time, I wanted to boot to Linux by running a program in Windows. That was the promise of Linux for Windows but I didn’t read the instructions and ended up installing GRUB, a boot loader, that defaults to booting to Linux. This isn’t good when I’ve got other family members that want to use this computer rebooting things from time to time. Regardless of how easy it is to learn how to boot to the proper OS, they don’t want to have to deal with that. I can’t say I blame them.

Eventually I’ll get around to configuring GRUB to default to booting Windows but that will be next week. For now, I’m going to bed. I’ll tell more of my experiences tomorrow.

It looks like I’m getting back into the sporadic mode of updating this. I have been busy but that doesn’t explain all of it. I’ve also been playing with switching my computing platform over to Linux for everyday work just to see if it is possible. Updating this journal is one thing I haven’t incorporated fully in my work routine on the new platform.

I’ve got several experiences that I want to relate later on tonight about the conversion process. It has gotten me to thinking about whether or not Linux is a viable workstation platform for the masses and if not, why.

It seems that Microsoft has taken it upon themselves to police our language. This would be funny except that MS Word has become such a standard in all offices now that it will affect the language used by people who do use a thesaurus. I wouldn’t mind it so much if their thesaurus was open so that third party packages were available but I don’t think it is.

Boy, talk about wreaking the mood, “Thong Panties Mailed by Secret Admirer End Up in Biohazard Barrel“. I’m really getting disappointed in America over the amount of hysteria anthrax is generating.

This article has me scratching my head about some state’s laws. Utah, on the one hand, seems to understand that young folks often find themselves with birthdays causing a young couple to be in violation of pedophilia laws. Utah allows 16 year old to have consensual sex with a partner no more than four years older than themselves without running afoul of the sex with a minor laws. However, on the other hand, they have these sodomy laws that make it illegal for unmarried couples to perform consensual, oral sex on each other. That’s the law that 19 year-old Derrick Sunquist ran afoul of with his 16 year-old girl friend.

Now, from a legal standpoint, the article is interesting in and of itself but for me the real kicker was this quote:

Sundquist was charged after the girl told police about the consensual sex in American Fork, 30 miles south of Salt Lake City.

Did this fact just come up in conversation with some police officers? Did the girl start worrying about her reputation after the fact and decide to report it to salve her conscience? Under exactly what circumstances did this revelation occur? That is what I want to know.

Hmm, I just ran across this: Press Release - Statement by Bill Harlow 5 October 2001.

It’s one short statement.

Numerous comments in the media recently have reiterated a widely circulated but incorrect notion that the CIA once had a relationship with Usama Bin Ladin. For the record, you should know that the CIA never employed, paid, or maintained any relationship whatsoever with Bin Ladin.

I’m going to have to dig into this a little further to figure out how the rumor started. I so want to believe this statement.