End of the week...worn out...must rest...BLEEP!ing Fibre Channel...have just a few tidbits before I...can't keep my eyes open any longer...sorry...BZZZZZZZZ...
1. An important insight.
Yesterday on Fox News's "Special Report," the subject of greatest interest was the current state of the immigration bill being drafted by the Notorious Gang of Eight in the U.S. Senate. The details of the "Corker Amendment" were laid out, and the panel was invited to comment.
As is often the case, the most important observation came from Charles Krauthammer: the amendment speaks only of inputs, never of outputs. That is, among its provisions are various things to be done and amounts to be budgeted to "strengthen border security," but not one word about metrics of performance or how such measures would condition our attitude toward our present gaggle of illegal alien residents.
This is commonplace in faux-"reform" legislation. Inputs tell us nothing about whether the problem under discussion is being addressed effectively. Inputs, however, allow legislators to posture about having "done something," while the actual results of their "efforts" can always be attributed to suit their purposes at a later time. (Do not expect a politician to take responsibility for a failed effort, ever. That's what his predecessors, the opposition, and faceless bureaucrats are for.)
I recall an exchange from some years back in which one colleague, a left-liberal, was arguing the merits of a proposed program with a conservative. The liberal orated passionately about how bad the situation was, and how massive funding must go to its remediation. The conservative listened in silence. When the liberal finally ran down and demanded a response to his declamation, the conservative said, "So? You're just going to throw bundles of dollar bills at it? How has that worked in the past?"
It was a valuable lesson for all concerned.
2. Critical cutbacks to a much-needed government program.
This "austerity" binge has gone too far:
The Ministry of Defence closed down its UFO desk because it served "no defence purpose" and was taking staff away from "more valuable defence-related activities", newly released files show.The desk was shut down in December 2009 despite a surge in reported sightings.
The disclosure came in National Archives files relating to reports of UFOs - Unidentified Flying Objects - between 2007 and November 2009.
They show UFOs were reported at several UK landmarks, including Stonehenge.
Really, now! How is the United Kingdom to deal with the ongoing alien invasion without a functioning, well-funded UFO desk? Surely we of the United States have enough experience to counsel them:
Close encounters of the first kind: Visual sightings of an unidentified flying object.
Close encounters of the second kind: Physical evidence of a UFO.
Close encounters of the third kind: Contact.
Close encounters of the fourth kind: Complaining to your drinking buddies about not meeting any aliens.
Close encounters of the fifth kind: Meeting an alien through an online dating site.
Close encounters of the sixth kind: Dinner and a movie with an alien.
Close encounters of the seventh kind: Marrying an alien in Las Vegas.
Close encounters of the eighth kind: Fighting with an alien over money, sex, and the state of the lawn.
Close encounters of the ninth kind: Negotiating joint custody of the larvae with your ex-alien's lawyer.
Close encounters of the tenth kind: Receiving nasty phone calls from a lawyer at Alpha Centauri about the child support.
And (unfortunately) on it goes...until:
Close encounters of the last kind: Complaining to your drinking buddies about your ex-alien.
3. He meant exactly what he implied.
On June 7, the federal Department of Education announced its plan to “redesign” all government high schools in America.Creating yet another federal enticement program – this time called the “High School Redesign Initiative” – the feds will offer “competitive grants to local educational agencies” to do such things as “redesign academic content and instructional practices” as well as “strategically use learning time in more meaningful ways,” whatever that actually means.
Similar to the feds using Common Core “state” standards to exercise a greater role in state and local education, this initiative will once again employ the persuasive power of the federal government to affect the culture of local schools and what they should teach. It follows the natural progression of creating a national education system.
So while the Obama administration is promoting the standardization of what should be taught, the centralized education bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. is also promoting the standardization of the schools themselves.
Meanwhile, President Obama took to the podium in Ireland yesterday to attack Catholic education – to a room full of Catholics!
That's for anyone who thought yesterday's emission was just a poorly chosen phrase. No one will ever convince me that Barack Hussein Obama, who was educated in Djakarta as a Muslim and remains a Muslim sympathizer in all his public words and deeds, is a sincere Christian.
4. Beware!
I wrote on several occasions back at Eternity Road about the horror that is Fibre Channel:
Fibre Channel, or FC, is a high-speed network technology (commonly running at 2-, 4-, 8- and 16-gigabit speeds) primarily used for storage networking.[1][2] Fibre Channel is standardized in the T11 Technical Committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), an American National Standards Institute (ANSI)-accredited standards committee. Fibre Channel was primarily used in the supercomputer field, but has now become the standard connection type for storage area networks (SAN) in enterprise storage.
Don't believe a word of it. Fibre Channel is not a "standard" in any sense worthy of the word.
You want proof? A prominent vendor of Fibre Channel adapters, with which I have the extreme misfortune to be compelled to work:
- Makes adapters that are incompatible with one another;
- Sells adapters with device drivers for Windows that crash Windows XP on installation;
- Refuses to fix the bugs in its own products unless paid to do so;
- Absolutely refuses to consider providing support for Windows 7 or any subsequent version.
I'm currently collaborating with the Fibre Channel expert at another company -- a gentleman with far more experience in this domain than I possess -- and asked him, after a long conversation about our shared difficulties, whether this was characteristic of this so-called "standard," and whether we should expect further problems of this sort in the future. He replied in the affirmative, sadly but without hesitation.
Stick with Ethernet, friends. Trust me on this.
5. A Fiction Query.
It's gratifying to watch Which Art In Hope and Freedom's Scion selling well -- "flying off the e-shelves," as it were -- but I can't quite decide where to head next -- after Freedom's Fury, that is:
- Should I write another Onteora Canon novel?
- Should I write a Stephen Graham Sumner presidency novel?
- Should I write more about the Spooner Federation and its evolution?
- Then there's "The Warm Lands" novelette; should I take that somewhere?
- What about Todd Iverson? Does he deserve further adventures?
- More Christian-themed material?
- More erotica?
Each of these paths has its attractions and its hazards. I'm in the position of the proverbial donkey who found himself standing equidistant from two equally large piles of hay, and starved to death because he had no way to choose between them!
Now's the time to get your cards and letters in, Gentle Readers. And please, please, please: Post reviews of the works you've read and (hopefully) enjoyed. It really does help sales.
4 comments:
I agree, FC can be a headache (though in my case it's often the storage vendors causing issues), but iSCSI gives me nightmares. And then you get businesses trying to save a few thousand dollars by using NAS when they've already spent millions on clustering licenses...
I vote Onteora Canon or Sumner.
I am tempted to assert that the answer to #5 is "yes", even if only to maintain my reputation as a snarky jerk. :)
That being said, however, had I the moral and practical right to make the decision unilaterally and then impose it on you, I'd go with Onteora Canon first, out of that list. (I'd also like to see "Sumner Presidency" stories, but I suspect that those would be better served by more shorts than by a novel. Likewise Todd Iverson. The origins of the Spooner Federation would be interesting too, but I wouldn't be surprised if you wanted to take a break from that fiction for a while, and I suspect that if you did want to, and didn't do so, the work would suffer.)
"Warm Lands" was never especially my cup of tea, nor, I'll admit, is your particular taste in erotica.
And while such explicitly-Christian stories as "Names" and "Last Vigil" are transcendently awesome when they come, I suspect that such transcendence is unlikely to appear merely because we (or, for that matter, even you) desire it to. :)
Warm Lands.
Seriously.
Warm Lands.
However, the book that needs to be written will be the one you decide you want to write.
I can still hope for Warm Lands though, can't I?
PS: I need to reread all your books on smashwords so I can review the rest of them properly. That's next on my list.
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