Re: President Bush’s Address to the Nation

So I missed Family Guy this evening because our President wanted to dominate the airwaves in an attempt to save face…and possibly divert some eyes from the whole spying on citizens scandal that he’s been under fire for lately. Is it just me or does it seem like the man’s been trained like a parrot to throw in the words liberty and freedom every sixth word or so?! Well, I’m happy to hear that he thinks that we’re doing well over in Iraq, but here’s just a little something that came to mind while I listened to his incessant banter this evening…

Dear Mr. Bush,
I’m glad to hear that you have a plan for us to finish up this whole Iraq-thing in 2006 – maybe when that’s all said and done, we could focus on some of the problems we still have here at home…that is, if you’ve got any time left in office at that point…

Maybe we could start with all of the hospitals that I pass by each day on my way to work, filled with diseases that have no cures and patients who couldn’t afford to pay for them anyways. I’ve heard good things about that “Let’s just give everyone free healthcare”-plan that Canada’s got going – maybe you could give them a call and pick up a few pointers?

Then a bit of time shining up our classrooms – that might be nice, don’t you think? We could buy more books for the libraries that are still stuck in the 1990s, and perhaps even some more classrooms for the schools that are still praying for class sizes of forty or less. And I know this one is a little crazy, but I hear that there are still some schools that are connecting to the Internet via dial-up – there must be a telecommunications corporation that’s looking for a little primetime spotlight these days, isn’t there?!

And last but not least, and this should be an easy one because I can only assume that the situations over in Iraq must be horrendously worse than here – how about a solution to our homelessness and poverty issues? I just have a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit when I pass by several street corners in downtown Tampa that feature folks scavenging for breakfast out of the garbage cans, so I was thinking that once freedom and liberty have been restored over in Iraq, maybe we could get these citizens something to eat…

Just a few ideas from another one of those guys who thinks, “we’re wasting time, money, and American lives rebuilding Iraq in the name of freedom” – I hope I got that quote right because I had to step away from your speech for a few minutes to make myself stop laughing … a man can only take hearing the word “terror” mispronounced so many times … you’ll understand, though – I’m sure. Best of luck with Iraq – if you need me, I’ll be back here … at home …

Sincerely,
Scott Sevener

Walking to Mars

Who else remembers NOVA???

I caught an episode this evening (in HD, no less!) and was kind of taken back – I guess I just haven’t really geeked out on the whole space exploration gig for a while, but this one was pretty interesting. An hour of highs and lows about two of the Mars rovers that we’ve explored the red planet with, highlighting a system failure that nearly lost us one of the vehicles and of course, its miraclous comeback. It’s been a while since I’ve searched out some decent high-res photographs from abroad – maybe I’ll have to take some time to do that tonight!

Mental Note: Next year, a trip to Kennedy Space Center most definitely needs to be on my list of weekend adventures. To infinity and beyond… 🙂

computer surgery

I replaced the NIC in my desktop PC tonight because I’m just plain tired of it losing its connection all of the time. It had gotten so bad that I’d actually created a separate folder on my desktop to save all of the files that I was working on from network drives to after the card went down and I would have to reboot to restore the connections. With the old 10/100 back in, I’ve got multiple torrents running, the FTP, and all of my usual IM and web apps, so I guess now we’ll see if that really was the problem…

I think this just really urks me because this happens to be the second port that’s died on this motherboard in the past couple of months (NIC in this instance is actually an onboard gigabit ethernet controller). A few months back, you might remember my parallel port crapping out one random day and I’ve been connecting my printer and scanner via USB ever since. I bought an ASUS because I always hear everyone raving about them, but so far I’m not impressed. I suppose it does have a three-year warranty, but you know what kind of a pain it would be for me to be without this computer for the weeks that it’ll take them to replace it?

Why can’t things that I buy just work right the first time?!

12/16/2005 – To-Do List

– go to work, collect slightly more than $200, provide ~9 hours of quality service, come home
– prior to coming home, pick-up Christmas gifts along the way to ease the burden of doing all my shopping this weekend
– get new fish at PetCo so Oscar and the gang won’t feel lonely
– upon returnng home, hang some pictures and clean up odds ‘n ends
– go spend at least 1/2 hour at the gym
– eat “healthy” dinner
– watch The Polar Express
– bedtime

Also…

I’m none-too-pleased with my dishwasher right now, to the point of almost considering actually doing them by hand…and those who know me well can vouch that it’s certainly gone to extremes! The “heat dry” setting doesn’t dry anything…even overnight, half of my dishes come out with spots still on them, and as long as the thing takes to actually run, you’d think it’d be doing a decent job in there…

I’m going to switch back to Cascade this weekend and see if that helps any – if not… 🙁

It’s beginning to look a lot like…December…

So am I the only one that just doesn’t really feel in the Christmas spirit this year? And I don’t mean that in a mopey, depressed sort of way – I just don’t feel overcome by the “holiday spirit” like I typically do. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been so busy lately, I really haven’t had much time to stop and smell the gingerbread or something … I don’t know. I did put up my Christmas tree this evening and still have a few more lights that I need to find places for – who knows, maybe it’s just a 2005-thing or something. *shrug*

I did, however, also get a chance to watch Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on TNT HD this evening, which was nice…and would’ve been even nicer without commercials every twenty minutes! I’ll tell ya – I still don’t plan on re-purchasing many DVDs when these HD formats finally come out, but that series is going to be one that will certainly get a second thought. I think maybe Christmas weekend will end up hosting my Lord of the Rings DVD marathon; I ended up watching The Matrix last night instead, but I hadn’t seen that one in quite a while, either.

Come to think of it, aside from watching movies and renewing my lust for Warcraft 3, I guess I didn’t do a whole hell of a lot this weekend! But then again, I guess we all need weekends like that every now and again, and if I can get the most of my work done during the week, then I suppose I’ve earned it… 😛