It looks like some Gmail beta testers aren’t as impressed with their status as charter Gmail users.

Okay, so I haven’t posted here in over a year. My real blog is over at Larry’s Log and this has just been left here to keep links from being broken. However, I understand that active Blogger users. will get an invitation to try out GMail and I want to play.

I think I’ve enabled Trackback in Larry’s Log. This is a test of that.

In a short time this site that you are now reading will go dormant. I’m not giving up bloggin, I’m just moving to Larry’s Log. I’ve gone by Justin Thyme here for a little over two years. I did it because I didn’t know if I really wanted to be so public with my writings. I’ve decided that I do.

My real name is Larry Burton. I live in Lawrenceville, Georgia with my wife of 25 years, Gerri, and youngest son, Nick. I have another son, Drew, living in Chattanooga, Tennessee trying to make it on his own. I am in the process of starting a business with my partner, Jahn, after he and I were laid off when Hampton-Tilley closed their Atlanta office. We are in the factory automation business.

I’ll post here a few more times, probably, then I’ll leave things just as the are here and continue my posting over at Larry’s Log. I hope you see fit to follow my move. I’m really looking forward to extending Blosxom and would love to hear from other Blosxom users on ideas.

I’ve been using Blogger for the past two years and I think I’ve taken it about as far as I can go with it. I’m looking real hard at moving to Bosxom.

Yeah, I know, everyone else is using MovableType and I’ve looked at going that route but that isn’t for me. I do believe that storing the entries in MySQL or another DBMS is the way to go for storing the content long term but too much of some of the things I want to play with have already been done with MT and I’m not sure I want to spend the time figuring out the perl scripts in MT to change things. Bosxom is simple and I think I can make it do everything I want it to do and adapt it to storing its data in a DBMS.

I’ve had some very mixed feelings about the upcoming war with Iraq and I haven’t completely understood them all. I still don’t understand all of them but I’m getting a grip on more of them every day. I finally understand that it isn’t really the war that’s bothering me as much as the uncertainty I have over what’s next.

I don’t think many people will tell you that Sadam Hussein is a nice guy and a leader with the best interests of his people in mind. The man is a tyrant and a threat to the region, if not the rest of the planet. It isn’t only the US that wants Hussein to disarm. He isn’t going to do so unless he is forced, by force, to do so. That means war. We either go back to war with Iraq or allow Sadam Hussein to continue his arms build up. That’s the only two things that can happen. We are going to war.

I’ve come to grips with that. It’s going to happen and it’s probably good that it is going to happen even though in the short term this war is going to kill and maim a lot of people. I have no doubt that in the end Iraq will be defeated.

What’s bothering me is that I don’t like a lot of what could happen in the aftermath. Who’s going to fill the vacuum? There will be a stabilization period after the war where the US will more or less be in control of that country. The UN may have its name on the provisional government but it will be the US pulling the strings. How are those strings going to be pulled? That’s what’s bothering me.

The new govenor of Georgia, Sonny Perdue, ran on a platform with one of the planks being a referendum on the state flag. Roy Barnes, the old govenor, pushed through a change in the Georgia flag back in 2001. The change was made to get rid of the old Confederate battle emblem that adorned a major portion of the flag. While this made a lot of Georgians happy it also made a lot of Georgians madder than hell over the way they saw it being pushed through without any say from the general populace.

Now there is talk of a non-binding referendum to change the flag back or keep the flag as it currently is with the Legislature making the final decision. Gov. Sonny Perdue is pushing for this referendum in order to sort of fulfill his campaign pledge, a non-binding referendum not being exactly what his supporters had in mind but close enough to call it a promise kept. If there is a referendum the Rev. Joseph Lowery, president emeritus of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is ready to call for a boycott of the referendum in order to make the results of the vote unclear and reduce pressure on the Legislature to make a change.

I’m disappointed in Rev. Lowery’s lack of faith in Georgian’s to do the right thing. I’ve talked to a few people around here and from what I can tell the referendum might be close but I believe it would result in keeping the current flag. If that is what happens then this whole mess is settled. Of course it its settled then that removes one more soapbox and some folks just don’t like not having a soapbox to stand on.

I use to get in my truck and drive to my office. The traffic was horrible and I’d arrive at work grumpy in the morning and arrive home grumpy in the afternoon. Well, that office got closed and I was out of work for a few hours until I decided to throw in with a fellow ex-employee of that office and go after the work that was out there for ourselves.

Mostly I’m working from home now. I walk down the hall from my bedroom to my office at 7:30 each morning, arriving at work in a good mood with a fresh brewed cup of coffee and start organizing my day. Around 10:00 I stop for a break, grab a snack (usually carrot sticks or fruit and another cup of coffee) and then go back into my office to work a little more and make a few phone calls. I eat lunch around noon, take another break around 2:30 and then work until 4:30. At 4:30 my son arrives home from school so I shut down what I’m doing and walk out of my office and declare myself “home”.

Yes there are times that I need to work late so I do that and I make a note of it on my timesheet. There are times when I need to be at a customers site at 8:00 or 8:30 so I go into my office early. My routine changes fairly often but if there is nothing required out of the ordinary then I ordinarily stick to my above schedule. If one doesn’t do this then one is going to find themselves screaming, “I can’t do this anymore!“

The Ivory Coast has been having its problems lately and the French, in their sense of responsibility to a former colony, have stepped in to help broker a peace accord between the rebels and the civilian government there. Not everyone is happy with the deal. In a turn on things:

Anti-French demonstrations in Ivory Coast calling on “President Bush and the American people for help to confront Jacques Chirac’s France, which is seeking to murder Ivorian democracy,” the paper argues, “is a reflection of the deep feelings of the majority of Ivorians who want to sever the umbilical cord that ties them to France.”

With the current political disagreements going on between Washington D.C. and Paris over the handling of Iraq, I imagine that President Bush may be fantasizing over granting this request.

I apologize for the lack of updates. I’ve been busy trying to get a business off the ground. I’ve had time to write but my mind has been elsewhere. It seems like by the time I get my thoughts together on current events they’ve already been commented to death elsewhere. I’ll try to put some things down about what I’m doing a little later but for now just please bear with me.

There has been much discussion over copyright around the web here lately. What with the Eldred v. Ashcroft decision and Aaron Swartz’s Tips for Book Authors where he equates holding onto a copyright for longer than it takes to recoup the cost of writing the book with piracy the discussion has gone all over the board.

I want to discuss derivative works. I’m sure y’all have heard of The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall. The lady wrote a book about Scarlet O’Hara’s mulatto half sister. No, that character was never in Gone With The Wind but the character was derived from Gone With The Wind, in fact the whole book is derived from Gone With The Wind. Margaret Mitchell’s estate didn’t want the book published and sued over copyright infringement. I won’t go into the legal wranglings of all this. That isn’t what I want to dwell on.

What I want to dwell on is the fact that everytime I read a book that I thorougly enjoy little subplots spin off in my imagination. Now, I don’t have the patience or discipline to turn those subplots and stories into anything I’d care to publish but I know if this process happens in my mind it must happen in other peoples minds, people who do have the patience and discipline to create new works. By keeping these potential works trapped in the minds of their various authors with copyrights that prohibit derivative works I think we are all a little poorer.

Just an opinion.

Linda McDougal was told she had breast cancer. Linda McDougal was told that her best chance at survival was to have a double masectomey, followed by radiation and chemotherapy treatments. Linda McDougal had the surgery. Oops!

I woke up to this report this morning on GMA. I heard it again on Fox News just a few minutes ago. What Ms McDougal went through was horrific and my heart goes out to her. I believe she should be awarded a huge settlement of at least a couple of million dollars just for this being done to her and in saying that I’m bringing up the rest of the story.

President Bush has proposed limiting judgements in cases like this to $250,000 for pain and suffering. This point was brought up on both GMA and Fox News. I’m going to do a little fence straddling on this issue. I agree that there needs to be a way to keep emotions out of these types of settlements and to find an objective method to limit pain and suffering awards to reasonable amounts. I reject the idea that there should be a set dollar amount figure for these types of judgements. I don’t see a way to do it and keep the system just. I especially disagree with the $250,000 amount. That is a way low figure. $250,000,000 is also way too large for anyone for any reason for a pain and suffering judgement.

With that said and out of the way let me finally get to my point. I’m troubled with the way that news programs are being used so blatantly for lobbying efforts these days.

Mark Pilgram: It appears that I am trapped like a velvet, paisley-covered Chesterfield in a hallway: unable to go either forwards or backwards.
from Eddies in the Spacetime Continuum.

Shelley points to a post on the W3C forum that tells us that Marks little tirade over the cite element being dropped from XHTML 2.0 working draft of 11 December 2002 was a little premature. Yeah, that appears to have been a mistake by the XHTML 2.0 working group and it will be back in the next revision of their working draft.

I liked the phrase Jonathon Delacour used for Mark’s tirade, spat the dummy, with a dummy being what Australians call pacifiers. Anyway the whole episode is for the best. It made people aware of what is going on with XHTML 2.0 and Simon St.Laurent has written an article telling us how we can become more involved in the goings on of the W3C. It’s been very educational for me.

I’m not a bit surprised that Apple doesn’t think Microsoft is doing enough to settle it’s anti-trust problems. What I can’t understand is why it would matter what Apple thinks in this case. The only way Apple would be satisfied is if Microsoft turned over everything it has to Apple. Then Sun wouldn’t be satisfied.

Now that doesn’t mean that I believe that Microsoft has done all it should, I really don’t have an opinion one way or another on that topic anymore, it just means that I get tired of these news stories being protrayed as news stories.