Don't Back Down

For those of you who don't like to hear me bash the government, listen up. Another monster is on the block today - the National Football League. For those of you who don't know, the Carolina Panthers are in the playoffs this year, and they have a game against the St. Louis Rams, to be played in St. Louis this afternoon.

Some folks here in Charlotte put together a nice fund-raising idea for the Make-a-Wish foundation to try and wind up collections on $1 million. Local folk hero Hope Stout, featured on the NFL telecast of the Panthers victory over Dallas last week, cast her wish to have the wishes of all other Make-a-Wish participants granted. The cost? A cool $1 million.

Read "No Football Here Today" »

Recently, I wrote about how Mecklenburg County has implemented an ordinance requiring every family dwelling in the county to have a carbon monoxide detector. If you've read that piece, you know that it may not be a bad idea for every home to have a detector, I simply object to the government deciding that it is their decision to make.

Read "Regulation Never Ends" »

Recently some transportation geeks in Spain and Morocco have decided that they will build a tunnel, which will run beneath the Straits of Gibraltar, in order to linke the two countries. Coupled with the development of the Chunnel a few years ago, linking England and Paris under the English Channel, this raises the possibility that you will one day be able to take a train from Northern Scotland to the South of Africa.

It's probably more likely that flying is a more geek-like pursuit, but it seems that even those who had a blueprint and more than a million dollars at their disposal could not get a replica of the Wright Flyer to actually, well, fly.

Meanwhile, SpaceShipOne recently demonstrated its capabilities in the first manned supersonic flight by a private (non-government) effort. Lest you think this is not geeky enough for inclusion here, the craft is the entry of Scaled Composites into the XPrize contest, which is $10 million US to the first team who can launch a manned ship into space (100 kilometers) and then repeat the feat with the same ship within two weeks. Building technology in pursuit of money sounds like the most noble of geeky pursuits to me. But if that's not enough, the bulk of the prize is financed by Paul Allen of Microsoft fame. With all the hubbub about Mars lately, I'd say this is definitely geek material.

Until next week...

My apologies for the recent absence. Some news.

Earlier this week, the company that had been paying my bills for the last five and a half years or so decided that my services were no longer required. No hard feelings (really), but it did mean that I needed to concentrate on some other issues for a while. Most of those seem to be ironing themselves out, but I'm not quite there yet, so postings will probably stay slim for the next couple of days. Don't fret - I'll be back full-speed very soon.

Read "We Interrupt this Blogcast" »

I needed to concatenate some information in a table, and I wanted to do it with a SQL query, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to combine the two strings (one a constant, the other a field name) in order to produce a joined value.

Finally, I found it- concat.

  update tablename
    set fieldname = 'constant' concat 'fieldname'

Read "AS400 SQL Concatenation" »

I'm thinking that life would be much more entertaining if we would leap months other than February during leap year. I mean why do we always pick on the little guy? To be fair, we could just start with January, the next month could go to February for old time's sake, then we do March, and so on.

The only downside is for those born on leap day. If it's February 29th, they only have a birthday every four years. When do they celebrate their birthday anyway? I digress. In this scheme, they'd only have a birthday every 48 years (12 months to use, 4 years per cycle). The highest age for a leap baby would likely be 2, since no one is likely to live for 144 years (at a minimum).

I know I complain about it a lot, and I understand that there are certain instances where the government is perhaps trying to do the right thing. What I don't understand is why we're not allowed to do our own thing if we recognize the potential consequences and make that choice.

If there are people who want the protection of the government inspecting/validating food and drugs, that's fine. Let them pay for it. On the other hand, if there are people who want to forego those options, they ought to be able to do so.

Recently the federal government announced that states aren't allowed to get drugs from Canada. This sounds like protectionism at its finest. There is likely a component of such a ruling that's trying to keep the US drug makers from having to actually face competition. There is also surely a part of this decision that allows the government to keep control of things. Neither is healthy in the long term.

Meanwhile, officials in Montgomery, Alabama are on track to save nearly half a million dollars by challenging this sort of ruling, and that's exactly what should happen in a free society. If you want to pay for the FDA, by all means you should do so. But if I don't, then I ought to be allowed to opt out and escape all this unnecessary government regulation. I'll take my chances with the alternatives, thank you very much.

Sometimes we must depend on our own judgment, and simply live with the results of that judgment. If I want to buy drugs from another country, be they legal, prescribed drugs or those that the government has deemed illegal, it's none of their business.

At long last, I think I have resolved all outstanding issues with the footer. It seems, as usual, that IE and some funky handling of perfectly valid CSS was to blame. So after tinkering with things and breaking the valid CSS so IE could parse it, I've also managed to add enough hacks so that Firebird can handle the footer too, and so that it displays as expected.

I probably shouldn't mention that Firebird handled the footer perfectly well to begin with, and IE was the one that choked. That might bring the Wrath of Bill. So instead of complaining, I will happily continue to work away until my fingers are raw from trying different iterations of valid code to make IE work like it should.

What's that, you haven't seen the footer? Press CTRL-END. It's the stuff between the lines that talks about copyrights and validation and such, way down at the bottom of the page. At least take a look. Please?

I also updated the footer to include a validation link to the page in question, rather than just to the index page by using a little PHP. The problem with this is (gasp) that some of my pages are, well, not exactly vaidating. So I certainly have some more work to do. This should at least make the work a little bit easier.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, three Texas counties opted out of the federal Social Security program. After twenty-something years, they've had pretty decent results, with workers earning two and three times what they would have with Social Security.

What I don't get is that no one sees this as a success. I mean it's easy enough - create a program that bests the one the government has and phase that one in instead. Why hasn't it happened that way?

Because the government has found themselves another way to keep things funded. All they have to do is keep the program running well enough to pay out some benefits, and everyone thinks that it is wonderful and no one will touch it. It's long been considered the third rail of American politics, with no one wanting to get near it. So in the meantime, the federal government gets this tidy source of income that doesn't have to be earmarked for the day they actually have to pay it back, and we fall further in the hole every day.

I tell you what, Washington: Take your program and shove it. I want out. I realize that this means that I will not be able to collect Social Security when I turn 62 or 65 or 90 or whatever the date is when I actually get that "privilege". I don't care. I want out, and I will relinquish all rights to money or any other benefits in the future, provided you let me out now.

Obviously this is not an open-ended offer. If I pay into the program all my life, you're absolutely correct in assuming that I'd want to get something back out of it. So in the spirit of cooperation, I'll let the offer stand all year. Until December 31, 2004, if you let me out of the program now and forever more, I will not ask for a dime when that date comes later in my life.

You want to save money? Start here. I'm sure a number of like-minded individuals will only too happily give up the "privilege" of allowing you to handle a part of our retirement. I know I can do a lot better with my money, and I'm willing to make this deal to prove it. This country isn't about liberty any more, it's about seeing how many places the government can stick their nose in where it doesn't belong. Some people might like that. I don't.

Trying to find a really interesting toy that's all about you, now that you've taken all the others back? How about a new Hello Kitty USB hub? No? Then perhaps another USB device, thanks to Les?

Perhaps you'd rather spend the day messing with an operating system of one sort or another. Perhaps a new OS for that Texas Instruments calculator? Or perhaps you'd just like some tips on how you can run multiple operating systems - like 55 - on a single box! Thanks Slashdot: I, II.

Or maybe you'd rather hack into your Onstar, so you don't have to pay those ridiculous fees all the time. Naturally, you may void your warranty too, but hey - sometimes being a geek is risky. More on geek travel next week. See you then!

Beginning yesterday, every family dwelling in Mecklenburg County is required by law to have a functioning carbon monoxide detector. Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

Read "Regulate This" »

Everyone knows that divorce is a common theme in our world these days. Witness of the phrase starter marriage that has worked its way into our vocabularies.

What has got me puzzled lately is how all the details work out down the road. Life is confusing enough when you get a couple of siblings together to divvy up the family jewels (figuratively speaking, I hope). What happens when you bring the stepbrothers and in-laws into the mix?

How about burial plots? It's hard enough to share custody while the parents are alive. What happens when they're gone? Does everyone in this extended family get their own section of the graveyard? Is a whole cemetary dedicated to those of you do this time after time?

My grandmother passed away not long ago, and I'm trying to figure out how these things work. I never knew her husband (my grandfather), as he died before I was born. She never remarried, so there really weren't too many complications, as far as that goes. But it was 30-odd years before my grandmother died (after my grandfather passed). In many cases, that would have resulted in at least one more wedding.

For instance, my grandmother on the other side died several years ago. Her husband, my grandfather, has since remarried. As I understand it, this is at least his third (he is actually my mother's stepfather). I think that this grandmother will be buried next to her husband - her first, and my mother's birth father, who died while my mom was young. But what about my (step-)grandfather? They were together for forty years or more. Will he be buried on my grandmother's other side? What about his new wife (or his prior one)? What about the children?

I'm not making a judgment here - I'm just curious.