Category: FWIW

…but, just wait. I still say the Dhimmicrap liars, thieves and kleptocrats aren’t finished with this race. Sure, the Dhimmis will dodge seating Brown as long as they can and seek to “reconcile” the Obuma Healthscare & Enslavement Bill, but more, I still think the party of Christine Gregoire and Al Franken has some fraud up its sleeves. As soon as the “votes” can be manufactured…

Well, maybe the Dhimmicraps will save that for the coming Fall mid-term. Maybe, but it’s like the story of the scorpion and the frog. It’s just their nature.

Yesterday afternoon–about 26 hours ago, now, internet connectivity here at twc central went south again. *sigh* About 2.5 good weeks of decent service and… kablooey!

Yeh, yeh, I walked completely through the troubleshooting tree with the voice-prompt call-in (even though I had the process memorized long, long ago). No, that didn’t help. Yes, the first thing on calling in was a recorded message saying my ISP was experiencing an unusually large call volume from my area. No, according to the supposed customer service reps I eventually reached, there was no outage (then why the swamping with calls such that it took 7 hours before I could actually reach a live person?). No, going through the troubleshooting tree with a live person resulted in no different result than doing it with the automated process or on my own.

Nor did changing out the “modem” (cable “modems” are NOT modems; they are specialty routers–very, very different technology to a modem). Heck, in the process of many, many reboots of this computer as a part of the multiple efforts I made to comply with “support’s” requests, my primary hard drive scrambled Windows boot process to the point that the Win7 repair Environment wouldn’t. Repair it, that is. (S’all right, really. I had a spare hard drive I had really meant to install it on but because of a lapse of memory had failed to, so another easy-peasy quick fresh install from upgrade media onto a bare drive. *heh*)

Fresh install of Win7 (and yes, I had tried using Ubuntu and Puppy Linux to connect, as well–as well as attempting to connect directly to the cable “modem” with other computers) and still no connectivity. Went through yet another ineffective t-shooting process (which, BTW, included power cycling both the modem and the computer attached to it), called in again and got a sweet lil idjit who informed me that my modem had been “Online for the past 15 hours.” 15 hours during which I had power cycled it several times, had changed it out for another modem, etc.

Riiiight. Went through the t-shooting tree one more time and… magically, it worked this time. Not. While lying to me aboiut my modem having been active and online for the past 15 hours, the lil idjit reset on her end. At least, that’s the best I can figure from here, since I KNOW information I’ve received from my ISP over the past 24 hours (heck, the past 6 months) has been… suspect, at the very best.

It’d just be nice if–just once–instead of playing CYA even one person would say, “Oops! Our bad. We screwed you up. Sorry.”

Meanwhile, since Lovely Daughter and her fiance were going to be out “shopping for cake” (Gee, some sheet cake and a couple lil cakes, one for bride and one–if that–for groom. What’s the stinking big deal? Wedding cake all tastes like sugar-soaked cardboard, anyway… ), he let my Wonder Woman use his network/internet connection to take her mid-term for one of her grad school classes while I shoveled his drive and did some shopping of my own. 😉 (Yeh, didn’t have to shovel his drive, but since Lovely Daughter had borrowed my 35-year-old snow shovel–hey! another 65 years and it’ll be an antique!–I figured, why not?)

Aside from the uncharacteristic botched attribution (the line quoted is from “The Young British Soldier” not “Chant Pagan”–though both are Kipling) this comment by John Ringo, inserted into his translation of a (generally favorable!) French article on close association with American forces in Afghanistan, is telling:

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Kipling knows the lines from Chant Pagan: ‘If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white/remember it’s ruin to run from a fight./So take open order, lie down, sit tight/And wait for supports like a soldier./ This, in fact, is the basic philosophy of both British and Continental soldiers. ‘In the absence of orders, take a defensive position.’ Indeed, virtually every army in the world. The American soldier and Marine, however, are imbued from early in their training with the ethos: In the Absence of Orders: Attack! Where other forces, for good or ill, will wait for precise orders and plans to respond to an attack or any other ‘incident’, the American force will simply go, counting on firepower and SOP to carry the day.

This is one of the great strengths of the American force in combat and it is something that even our closest allies, such as the Brits and Aussies (that latter being closer by the way) find repeatedly surprising. No wonder is surprises the hell out of our enemies.

And in an afterward to his translation of the original article, Ringo goes on to say,

What is hard for most people to comprehend is that that attitude represented only the most elite units of the past. Current everyday conventional boring ‘leg infantry’ units exceed the PT levels and training levels of most Special Forces during the Vietnam War. They exceed both of those as well as IQ and educational levels of: Waffen SS, WWII Rangers, WWII Airborne and British ‘Commando’ units during WWII. Their per-unit combat-functionality is essentially unmeasurable because it has to be compared to something and there’s nothing comparable in industrial period combat history.

This group is so much better than ‘The Greatest Generation’ at war that WWII vets who really get a close look at how good these kids are stand in absolute awe.

My association with the current crop of American armed forces is second and third hand, but the boys (and they are largely still boys in many ways) I know from America’s Third World County who’ve “seen the bear” in Afghanistan and Iraq certainly fit the mold in upholding this standard. (Man, I’m getting old. I had some of these kids in children’s choirs… *heh*)

Little things, good:

Letting the second fermentation of the hard apple cider go an extra five days: good. Very good, as it turns out. Now for some bottle conditioning… Used some “unconditioned” raw product in some hot “mulled” (OK, microwaved) cider w/cinnamon. Nice. ‘Tis a small thing, but my own. 🙂 Nice lil kick, too. Only 8oz, so not too much on top of my “one or two beers/day” rule (that was one 16oz beer today).

Little things, bad:

Re-reading a book by a fav novelist and being gigged once again by his unusual vocabulary lapse in this book (very weirdly, strangely and uncharacteristically–wrongly–using “temporal” to stand in place of “sacred”–very, very strange vocab lapse in an author who’s usually very accurate in word usage.. Not just once, but three times, so far in this book. Petty of me, I know, but it almost ruins the story. Almost. [Edit: *argh!* I just ran across another weird word use, a malapropism that the author should KNOW is wrong, and if not the author, any number of proof readers or an editor: “Here, here” for “Hear, hear.” *sigh* Sure, on the vast subliterate web, “Here, here” out polls the correct “Hear, hear” but NO author with as firm a grounding in history and as large a vocabulary as this one should EVER make such an egregious error of usage.]

Little things, good:

Called up my ins agent today. I’d cleaned out my glove box and had “cleaned out” the current ins verification form I’m required to keep there (bad). Didn’t really want to call him and have him fax me another one. Faxes are just… so 20th century–and poor quality reproductions of documents at that. And his agency had never “been able” to scan (a much higher resolution image) and email me a copy before. Have a fax machine; I just hate the thing for faxing. But, surprise! surprise! I got him (not another agent working under him or a secretary or his office manager) on the first ring and… he’s muuuuch more tech savvy than the folks he has had working for him in the past. Simply made a pdf and emailed it to me. A Good Thing.

So, one bad little thing, two good little things today. Not bad.