I’d love to tell you why, but I can’t.

I wish I didn’t have to, but I do.

I hope I’ll be back, but one never knows how these things turn out in the end.

So, thank you for your patronage. Thank you for reading my musings. Thank you for your support and kindness.

If you know how to contact me directly, please feel free. I’d love to hear from you.

Since ‘Friendship’ seems to have been a theme lately, I will leave you with this:

Friendship ~ None of that Sissy Stuff
Are you tired of those sissy ‘friendship’ poems that always sound good,
but never actually come close to reality?

Well, here is a series of promises that actually speak of true
friendship.

You will see no cute little smiley faces on this ~ Just the stone cold
truth of our great friendship.

1.. When you are sad ~ I will help you get drunk and plot revenge
against the sorry bastard who made you sad.

2. When you are blue ~ I will try to dislodge whatever is choking you.

3 When you smile ~ I will know you are thinking of something that I
would probably want to be involved in.

4. When you are scared ~ I will rag on you about it every chance I get
until you’re NOT.

5. When you are worried ~ I will tell you horrible stories about how
much worse it could be until you quit whining.

6. When you are confused ~ I will try to use only little words.

7.. When you are sick~ Stay the hell away  from me until you are well
again. I don’t want whatever you have.

8. When you fall ~ I will laugh at your clumsy ass, but I’ll help you
up.
9. This is my oath …. I pledge it to the end. ‘Why?’ you may ask ~
because you are my friend.

Friendship is like peeing your pants, everyone can see it, but only
you can feel the true warmth.

Send this to 10 of your closest friends (including the one who sent it
to you).

Then get depressed because you can only think of 4.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

I’m generally pretty fast about approving comments. They are reviewed in the order in which they come in. Your comments are important to me. Please continue to hold.

If you want to send personal insults and such, you can continue to do that. I read and enjoy them all. I just won’t approve them for posting. Unless, of course, they are really funny in which case I might. if you want to make sure your comment stays private, just say so in the comment. I still reserve the right to publish it anyway if it’s just such a wonderful and glaring example of utter douchwankery that the world would be a richer place for having been exposed to it. Otherwise, just put the word “Private” in the first line and It will be read and deleted, not posted. Probably.

Again, I’m not censoring anyone from saying what they truly believe. I’m just trying to keep the comments tied directly to the issue(s) at hand.

Do we build preverify.exe? And if so, when and where? It is included in the spotbuild tree as a binary, which is why I ask. I am assuming that the preverify.exe is a 32-bit binary. We likely need to build a 64-bit binary as well.

And got back the following response:

My understanding is that preverify.exe was built by tribe of elf-people on a magical tropical island. After slaving away for two years they delivered the preverifier, were paid off with a boatload of Vanilla Ice CDs (as agreed), and the island was then destroyed by an assortment of nuclear devices in order to protect the secrets of the preverifier. So that’s why we don’t build the preverifier.

Note: the details of this story may be a little off, but the result is/was true.

There may have been an attempt at creating preverifier v2.0, with advanced features such as maintainable source code. The good news is that Schwartz used Sun’s remaining nuclear devices to blow up huge piles of cash (fun!), so the project and/or code may still be around. We’d have to track down someone in Java ME land to find out.

Right. Glad I asked. Thanks for clearing that up.

I probably shouldn’t be as excited about this as I am. I know I shouldn’t be going into the basement to look at the mechanicals 3 and 4 times a day. What can I say. I’m some kinda dork.

So here’s what we have:

The manifold that directs the water in and out of the unit and into those pipes, that then run outside and into the ground. There are 2 280-foot deep holes in my backyard, each with 2 pipe-loops in them. That’s a lot of pipe in my back yard.

This is the main air-handling and heat-exchanger unit. It looks like a big fridge. With lots of hoses.

And then … this is cool. It also functions as a pre-heater for the Water Heater. And by feeling the hoses when the unit is running (they are coming back Monday to insulate all the hoses so I won’t be able to) the water coming into the water heater is already pretty darned hot! Yes, having your water pre-heated saves a TON of energy. And money.

All that’s left is to further insulate everything — a blanket around the Water Heater, insulation on all the pipes — and we’re done.

I’ll still be going in there to check the equipment all the time I’m sure. What can I say? I’m a dork.

Of course, the screwing could get worse in the event that the Backhoe finishes tipping over into the neighbors’ new flower beds.

Yeah, it’s as bad as it looks.

That’s what it will be now.

If you want the new location of the old blog (did you follow that?), just drop me a line (davidgs@me.com) and I’ll point you to it.

Thanks for reading and come back soon!

It was in June of 1996, as I was moving from New Mexico to North Carolina, that I stopped by the site of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK. There was no building there anymore. The memorial hadn’t been built yet. It was just a field covered in grass and weeds surrounded by a chain link fence. It was a quiet and drizzly morning, grey and sad, which seemed appropriate. There were no other people around. No crowds anymore. No mourners.

The fence was completely covered in hand written notes. Covered with small and large stuffed animals. With ribbons. With every sort of memorial token you can imagine. Boots. Sneakers. Pairs and singles. Wilted flowers.

But there was one memorial tacked to the fence that day that I will never forget.

There was a small piece of wood, with a pair of worn leather gloves attached to it. The gloves had holes in them. They were burned and torn and scarred. They were attached to the board with two simple wood-screws driven through them into the wood. Someone had used a woodburning tool to hand-inscribe a message on the board. It wasn’t written in fancy script. It looked like it was written with an unsteady hand. I cried as I read it.

I came and I dug until my hands bled. I am sorry, but I couldn’t save you all.

Those were the words of a volunteer rescuer who had been there that day, and apparently for days afterwards. I will never forget those words. Those words summed up the tragedy that was wrought by Timothy McVeigh more than anything for me.

And yet we seem to have learned so little from that day. Here we are, 15 years later, and the Tea Party protesters are marching on Washington carrying guns. Pastor Stan Craig of the Choice Hills Baptist Church declared that he was prepared to “suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.” Which sounds an awful lot to me like he is threatening to do just what Tim McVeigh did in Oklahoma 15 years ago.

This is not what this nation is about. We do not threaten to kill people, or blow things up, or commit other acts of senseless violence just because we lost an election. Just because our side doesn’t get its way this year. We are supposed to be a modern, civilized country.

In a modern, civilized country run by adults, we do not have grown men cry because they “dug until my hands bled.” We do not have people who are “sorry, but I couldn’t save you all.”

The Tea Party is now trying to call today (the anniversary of the bombing in Oklahoma) “Patriot Day.” As if Timothy McVeigh was a patriot. As if they, the Tea Party, are patriots. He wasn’t. They aren’t. He was a coward. They are cowards. They are small people without the basic understanding of what makes our society function.

I mean come on, I have yet to start Firefox when I don’t get “Firefox is updating” which is just annoying and unnecessary and stupid. Let me decide when I want to update my software. Don’t do shit I don’t want.

But now you’ve really screwed the pooch. You won’t work with Google Analytics. WTF? And my site isn’t the only one. See here. So seriously, why do you suck so badly? Why can’t you act more responsibly? Why can’t you just stop sucking?

Yeah, that one.

I’ll add that Alita also gave me that interface, so she’s basically a genius and way too generous with her time.

So enjoy the new look from your mobile device. And thanks for all the kind words of support!