Month: July 2003

Vindication! Slate’s TP makes comments supporting my take on the White House lies regarding the uranium claim.

Back on the intelligence beat, the WP fronts and others go high with word that the White House changed its story again on how claims that Iraq attempted to obtain uranium from Africa ended up in the State of the Union address. Yesterday, Bush administration officials admitted that the CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about the uranium claim. Previously, the White House said the CIA objected only to the technical merits of the intelligence, not the general claim itself.

Spin, spin and more spin! I’m getting dizzy here…

I’ve tried the el-cheapo Two Buck Chuck wine that Mike Steinberger ridicules on Slate. I couldn’t agree more with his key assessment, having recently tried the Charles Shaw merlot, I can unequivocally state that I would switch to beer or go on the wagon before making a habit of this plonk. This was the kind of wine that’s best dumped straight down the sink.

On the plus side, for about $15 a bottle, I picked up a few bottles of Syrah on my last San Francisco adventure. While I haven’t had the opportunity to finish them all, the ones that I have I enjoyed thoroughly. The extra $13 went a long way toward a product of quality, and one that was wholly worth drinking.

My friend Jess and I went to dinner last night at a Japanese restaurant in Somerville last night, and I was surprised by the quality of the food. I suppose, being in the middle of central New Jersey, I had low expectations, but it was good. If I had to rank my top three favorites, though, they would be as follows: Agathas, in Kyoto; a small yakitori restuarant in Los Angeles, where they spoke primarily in Japanese and the customers, with one other exception, were all Japanese as well (in fact, for an hour or so I forgot I was in the U.S.); and an inexpensive Japanese restaurant in Vancouver that had a friendly atmosphere.

I love summer thunderstorms…

I read something today at work that, the more it simmers, the more absolutely offensive I find it. The story itself, appearing on Free Republic (no surprise, really) was about rape in Iraq and the concern of faimilies about their children and women about their safety. In the article, for the sake of anecdotal evidence, they focus in part on a nine year old girl and the reaction of her brothers and father (they now physically abuse her, since she’s no longer “pure”).

The truth is, this in itself is offensive enough, but the comments that people made in response to the article infuriated me even more. These had to be some of the most insensitive, cruel comments coming from what I’m going to guess are the most WASP-y people around. One person, in response to the distraught statements of a family whose daughter had been missing since May 22, essentially wrote “Who cares? I hate those people anyway.” Others were dismissive of the society as a whole, proudly standing from the “moral superiority” of America. An America which, need I remind anyone, was founded on what would today be called genocide, enslaved a whole other race of people, and subjected them to cruel punishments and substandard living conditions even after their “emancipation.” Sure, we don’t react the same way to rape victims, disowning them or otherwise lashing out at them (including “honor-killings”), at least not anymore. But even today, we don’t always cloak them in sympathy and ease their sufferings as much as we could. And lest we forget, what about the cross-burnings, the murder of Matthew Shephard, the L.A. Riots, and the many other societal tensions we have here. I’d like to see us clean our own house before we go about condemning other societies.

Despite not falling asleep until 4 a.m., and not even being able to sleep all the way through until 8 this morning, I’m surprisingly awake and alert at the moment. If I can’t sleep tonight, though, I will start going insane.

Yet another night I find myself tossing and turning and otherwise unable to sleep. For about the past week I’ve really managed to throw my sleep cycle off, and now I’m just sick of it. I can’t figure out why, but I’ll throw up a couple theories.

1. The Theory of a Thousand Daily Stressors: Work, office politics, chores around the house, neglecting of any of the following: this blog, my friends and family, housework, laundry, putting those DMV stickers on my license plate, updating my photo album and scrapbook from my last trip, hanging up some pictures around the house, or any of the other myriad mini-tasks that exist to be done.

2. The Theory of Financial Fear: Let’s face it, traveling costs money and I’ve been doing a lot of traveling. And I don’t have nearly as much in my savings account these days as I should. While I don’t like to talk about finances, in so far as my own, I will say that while I’m not broke, I’m not rich, either.

3. Emotional, Mental and Physical Well-being: I haven’t been feeling my best, on many levels, and this has me stressed. That’s all there is to say about that.

4. The Irregular Sleep Schedule: Last Monday, I threw off my sleep schedule by heading in to work an hour earlier than normal. Since then I’ve been tired, taking naps and in general mucking up my otherwise regular sleep pattern. I’m almost certain I’m paying the price for that.

5. The Multiple Sources Theory: The truth is, it’s probably a sprinkling of number 1, a dash of number 2, and an oodle of number 3, all topped off with number 4.

Hopefully, exhausting myself tomorrow will force me back on track tomorrow night. It had better, because this is simply ridiculous.

BusinessWeek reminded of this site.

In other news, my process to consolidate F class seat availability in to a database to perform analysis on is actually working. Now I just need to reprocess it in to something meaningful and post that up on the web.

The DNC is having too much fun.

I want to put this on record. I do not much care for coffee-flavored ice cream.

I have now created a project for myself. I intend to automate the collection of first class availability data from airlines to build a reference site to determine the potential upgrade opportunities on a given route. This little project has me quite excited, as I’m playing with fun technologies and it presents a void in my airline booking process. If I’m nice, I may even provide this as a publically available web site. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Today I finally had the opportunity to relax in the evening. Friday, I ended up working nearly 11 hours on a production release at work that didn’t complete successfully. This led to several hours of work over the weekend, combined with an early morning start (i.e. working from home as early as 6 a.m.) Monday and an additional production issue that took all morning to resolve. Follow that up with an entanglement with another group’s issue during the afternoon, which led to another late night on Tuesday (until about 8:30 PM, a full 12-hour day), and my this morning, I was exhausted. Then throw in to that mix the fact that we moved our cubicles down to the first floor of our building this morning, and I was very stressed out.

Leaving shortly after 5 never felt so good, and taking a nap certainly was refreshing. Now I just wish it was Friday already.