A fair reading of the constitution beats even “tort reform” anyday.
– Tom Van Dyke

As Tom also says, “Even the Supreme Court can largely agree on what the Constitution means every once in awhile. Thank God and may He continue to bless This Here Republic.” Hear, hear, and let’s have more of that.

Or, Computer Weirdness.

I’m trying to build a dual-boot server box for R&D. It happens to have an Intel DG33TL motherboard in it, thanks to a decision I made a few months ago. The Ubuntu 6.06 and 7.10 releases won’t do dick if you use the i386 release…the machine just sits there like a bump on a log So, I had to use an AMD64 release. That, in turn, does not support my partner’s server & client software. This means I have a nice purty tricked-out server sitting here, with a 300GB HDD partitioned all to hell and back, that’s only barely able to run Windows XP with a lot of hackish trickery. Thanks, Intel. It looks like I’ll have to run all that partner stuff on an ancient, slow-as-molasses Celeron laptop. Hopefully, though, I’ll be able to get a development environment up and running on it, though.

I’m also dorking around with embedded Linux. That’s some fun stuff there, boys, let me tell you. Building images, flashing memory, editing with vi, downloading packages, running everything over a null modem cable using minicom. At some point, I will have to integrate a non-integrated set of software, and as a former mainframe systems programmer who did all of his work in System 370 assembler for heavy lifting or REXX for short-life fooling-around stuff, I just can’t wait to bang my head into the brick wall of C and object-oriented programming. I mean, I can read html & PHP, at least. C, and all of it’s derivatives, is like trying to read Russian. My eyes cross, and I get an intensely sharp pain in my brain. At least there are plenty of explanations online that I can read. Makes for a lot of sitting and concentrating, though, something I’ve lost the ability to do in the last 17 years.

All of this for a thin-as-a-hair Next Next Tiny Bidness scheme cooked up in two weeks of intense, um, refocusing. And it’s been raining in California all weekend, so there’s no racing going on, and I therefore have no chance to go vegetate and flush my buffers clear my mind in front of hot rods turning left.

For those of you reading this with no idea what the hell I’m talking about, this is the reason I need two pots of coffee, a pack of Marlboros and a sixer of cold beer just about every day. I don’t understand most of it, either.