FFEJWORLD:

The Economist of all magazines, endorses Kerry, with faint and almost damning praise. But then they back the war in Iraq, and think it a good thing, and don’t see it’s ramifications. They do see the ramifications of guantanamo and Abu Ghraib though, and quite clearly.

I scored 118 points. out of a possible 166 points. on the whippersnapper edition of Zorn’s quiz.

Zimmerman scored 106. I expect our own GS to get 166.

(Zimmy got 96 and i got 143 points. out of a possible 216 points, in the geezer edition.)

Well, here’s something else i don’t have to finish writing: The Survival Guide To Homelessness’ Guide to good grooming. More uses for sexual lubricant then i ever thought of, or tried. or need (follow the link and you’ll see why).

Would you vote for this man?

I just finished up a job for a customer, the last thing i did was a non destructive move of the client’s system’s partitions using PartitionMagic, one of the few really good utilities for windows, and one that I’ve spent way to much money on over the years, but one that saved me thousands of hours of labor compared to the ancient DOS utilities I used to use (highly recomended). The client was amazed.

“I tried that and it didn’t work,” he said. I muttered something, and he insisted that he had done exactly what I had done, and it hadn’t worked. He insisted again that he had done everything exactly as I had, EXACTLY. I started to sneer and stopped. One doesn’t tell the client about all the times you tried it and it didn’t work. You don’t bring up the bottom falling out of your stomach feeling, the fear sweat on your neck and the trembling every-time you throw the switch or click on the button. You do not tell the client about all the late night phone calls to Ben in California or Furball down the street. You do not tell the client about The Death Song Of J. Righteous Test Pilot, from The Right Stuff, the calm voice over the radio as the plane augers in to the ground: “I’ve tried A! I’ve tried B! I’ve tried C! I’ve tried D! Do you have any other ideas I might try?”

So I told him I was a Professional and tried to get back to what I was doing. He hit me a few times, and told me to cut the bullshit. I tried telling him that Pros have statistically better luck. He tried violently shaking me, banging my head on the table, and threatening to call my mother and tell her I was having a homosexual affair with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. I told him I just knew what I was doing, that I had read the manual. So he pulled a gun on my Powerbook. What can I say? You can beat me bloody, ruin my health, impuign my reputation and steal my stories, but you do not threaten my PowerBook. I will do anything for it. I prepped my self, prayed for strength and got out the heavy artilry. I pretended to cave in and told him the Big Lie. The one guarenteed to work on non believers.

The truth is, I told him, things don’t always work the way they are supposed to. There exists a law so powerful, it governs gods: The Law of Unintended Consequences. Simply stated, everything has unintended and unforeseen consequences-EVERY THING or EVERY ACTION. This is especially true in politics and software. No program design can take in every possible state of a computer, every possible combination of conditions it may have to deal with or operate in. A bit off here and one on there can really screw things up. In the Biz, we call it glitches, bit rot, wednesday bugs, or intermittent errors. I told him that the secret to avoiding them was to keep your machine virus and malware free, and not run too many programs at the same time. Keep the conflicts of state low, reduce the possible interactions and the outcome is likely to be what you want. You don’t run Norton Utilities and PartitionMagic at the same time. You don’t lie to Amerika and tell them you want freedom and Democracy in Iraq, when you know that would lead to another fundamentalist Shiite republic like the one giving you problems in Iran. I let this sink in, and packed my bag and exited stage left.

Now the reason I could pull off this line of shit is threefold. I am a righteous believer born again, and my client doesn’t read his email, let alone my or anyone else’s blog. He will never know the truth, nor need he know, since I have a need for him to keep paying me to fix his computer. And everyone knows the only way to fix a computer is by prayer. You can’t fix anything on a computer without prayer, and the more you try without prayer, the harder it is to fix it with prayer. Knowing how hard he had worked on fixing it this past week, I sacrificed a Moslem, a Jew and a Buddhist under his back porch before I even attempted to fix his computer. And I prayed on my knees for 120 straight minutes, for the strength and the prowess to affect the repair, right there, right next to the sacrifices, alone in the dark drizzle, right under the steps to his back porch. (The client wonders why I was late! I had to build an altar in the dark because of him, and scare up a trio to slaughter that wouldn’t be missed! On a week night! With the world series on the tv!) And I know he’ll never figure it out. He never uses the back stairs.

Besides which, heathens are by their nature clueless. They have been shown the light, and they refuse to see it. They have been told the truth, and they refuse to hear it. They have rejected our faith, they refuse to believe. They deserve to pay me and fellow Geeks the high wages and fees we demand. They are unfit and unclean, and the time will come when we will take their computers away from them, cast them out from their houses and make them slaves.

Or sacrifices.

So it was written, so it shall be.