July 2004 - Independent Thinkers Day
 RayzRealm (c) July, 2004

[July 11][July 18][July 20][July 31]

Sunday July 11

Thank you Lord for selecting me to be president, supreme ruler, king of the Mad King George entire universe and grand poobah in charge of all it's bounty, especially it's oil, which I know you put there for the benefit of me and my closest friends. Thank you oh gracious Lord for making the lesser of this country so dumb and naive, that they believe every single word that Faux news and I say. Thank you for delivering unto is this great promised land, that in thine wisdom we took right from under the Injuns' noses. If thou hadst wished that the Injuns kept this great land then we'd be saluting to some guy in a loin cloth and feathers named Chief Big Booty or Chief Running Mouth, or some heathen savage name like that.

Thank you also for the rich bounty of nukes, including the cute little suitcase nukes that thou hast entrusted into our care, and thou knowest that your humble servant is not at all afraid to send them flying at whatever rag headed, tree climbing or carpet flying savages that do not fully embrace the GOP's God ordained brand of Christianity "Is there really any other?"

Thank you Lord for fattening the bank accounts of my 1000 closest friends with untold riches, for it is said in the good book, "subdue and conquer the earth, that he who dies with the most toys inherits the kingdom of heaven.

And lord please send a plague upon that ungodly and America hating man, Michael Moore, and send swarms of locusts and ravens to peck out the eyes and torture all who see his movie who don't vote Republican this coming November, and oh most high, if satan should have him gain another sinful Oscar award for Fahrenheit 9/11, which as thou must know is full of satan's lies and blasphemies, please afflict him with an attack of the most foul uncontrollable flatulence as he accepts his award.

Your humble servant also begs that you send swarms of scorpions, killer bees, spiders and whatever other punishment you can think up in all your infinite wisdom upon Boston during the Democratic National Convention.

Thank you Lord for hearing my prayer, and I eagerly await your reply on the White House God phone by tomorrow at 5PM. God bless Unka Dick, Rummy, Condi, Colin, Turd Blossom and all my faithful flock. Also bless Ann Coulter, Rush, Mike Savage, Sean Hannity and all your servants at Fox News, plus your most loyal prophets, Jerry and Pat...AMEN!

Our beloved leaded and grand potentate will be right back with more praise and glory after these brief announcements.

Yes, I am still alive and have not been in the mood for working on my site during the past month. My life has consisted of work, walking aimlessly around Boston and Cambridge on weekends, downloading porno movie clips (better get'em before the minister os morality, Ashcroft makes it a capital offense to do, say, hear or see anything remotely sinful in the eyes of the American Taliban. The only other exciting thing in my life has been watching the first 6 seasons of the X-Files on DVD.

I've been getting weekly acupuncture treatments for the "still going on" urinary and prostate problems, plus the neuropathy I've been living with for the past 10 years. The effects are subtle, but I do notice an improvement, plus a calmer state of mind. A long time ago a fundamentalist Christian group I used to be remotely involved with gave me "dire" warnings about dabbling on acupuncture, Chinese herbs, Yoga and meditation when I brought up the subject of holistic health back in the 80's. Of course it's obvious that acupuncture needles are the devil's own cell phone antennae.

I know many more God loving, Bible believing Christians who have no problem with alternative, holistic medicine, meditation and Yoga, looking upon them as just tools to be used in supplementing our time tested Western nuk'em treatments. I figure if I can chill out and center myself using acupuncture, Yoga etc instead of pharmaceutical "happy drugs", then I'm much better off. If powers that be had their way we'd all be drugged into a happy couch potato stupor. Well our beloved leader and overlord is planning a nation wide mental health screening for next year. I wonder what will be considered good mental hygiene; voting Republican? not asking any questions? not critically thinking? buying stuff until we get way over our heads in debt?

I swear these people think that if a methodology comes from the East, it's evil, but if it's a mega expensive, toxic Western "nuke'em" treatment that Jesus gives his personal Good Soul keeping seal of approval. It's good to know that radiation, chemo, hiv and other drugs that come with 10 page lists of side effects and warnings, plus slash and burn surgery are all godly. Jesus healed with a touch. He'd be thrown in jail today for doing that.

I've been on vacation since July 3, returning to the IT Gulag on Tuesday the 13th. It's been another of those "all dressed up with nowhere to go" vacations. I was sick for the first 5 days with one of the many GI tract bugs that have been making the rounds and was without a car until Friday due to having a blown manifold gasket that the garage had to order.

I did manage to hop a bus into Cambridge/Boston a few times just to break the monotony of having nothing else to do. I spent a lot of time strolling around town, cafe sitting, people watching and book browsing. For some reason I've been noticing the growing number of people (a lot are kids) who are obese. We're not talking a bit chunky, full figured or robust...I mean "monstrously" obese here! It's almost scary.

I did get to visit my old friends Noel and Ellen a couple of times (always a treat) and made a long day trip to visit another old friend Bob (who I have haven't seen in 18 months) up in the back woods of Cow Hampshire.

Let's see, I've also seen Fahrenheit 9/11 twice in the past two weeks; definitely worth the price of admission, considering I saw it in Harvard Square.

So I will be sporadically writing from time to time, but for now.

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Sunday July 18

I've kept mostly mum for a few reasons; the muse hasn't been visiting me like she used to, stress and depression and lastly that my PC had become infected with about a half dozen of the most insidious, nasty and fascist trojan horses, viruses and spy ware that must have been dreamt up by the CIA. Despite the fact I have the latest versions of Norton Antivirus, Spy Sweeper, and Black Ice, these managed to slip under the radar, fooling, or actually turning my antivirus and scumware programs against themselves.

I finally got fed up and had a long chat with one of the security gurus at work, who concurred that the "malware" problem is exploding, suggesting I blow away everything and reload the entire system.

After I had my acupuncture session and lunch in Boston yesterday, I headed over to Micro Center and talked with one of their tech folks, who gave me some tips.

This was the first time I had ever done a restore of Windoze XP Professional. One thing from my old VAX days taught me to distribute the system, application and data across a number of disks, so whenever I buy a new PC the first thing I have always done is partition the disk, C: for OS and application software, then D:, E:....for the various types of data. To be on the safe side, I backed up about 10 GIG's of files to CD's, took a deep breath and inserted the XP recovery CD.

The process went very smoothly, moving on to re installing Norton, Black Ice and Spy Sweeper next, setting up my internet connection, logging in and updating virus and CIAware definitions. After that I re installed VB, Photoshop, Homesite, MS works, Roxio CD Creator 6 and the various other smaller programs I have registered copies of. The entire process from start to finish took just over 3 hours. I'm getting pretty good at doing system restores, almost as fast as a Marine can field strip his rifle and reassemble it for inspection. Everything seems to be working properly and Spy Sweeper, which I now realize was never working right before now catches everything.

It looks like it'll be another nice day, so it's off to the shower and then into harvard Square for some book and Newbury Comics browsing, lunch and sidewalk cafe under cover people watching.

Later that very same day........back from the Square. 

After taking a ride into Harvard Square, I had a l-o-n-g leisurely bucket of iced coffee as I sat on a park bench on Memorial drive along the Charles river, getting in lengthy phone conversations with Noel and my other mental partner in crime, Doug in Chicago.

Unlike cell phone zombies, who impress everyone around them that "I am important and have friends", while they blather on about nothing on their cell phones" I try to find a private quiet corner to make my calls, otherwise the phone remains shut off, nestled quietly in the little cell phone pouch of my shoulder bag. After I got off the phone, it beeped at me that I had two new incoming messages. Hmmm, since nobody calls me on my cell phone I checked the new messages, which were marked as text. I have read in the news that spammers are now pestering cell phone customers. The two new messages were for Cialis, promising stiffer dicks on demand, the other being for penis enlargement. Well, thank you very much, but I have no trouble getting it up, and my penis is quite large enough, at least that's what 99 and 44/100ths of all those on the receiving end told me w-a-a-y-y back in the days when I was a viable sexual entity in the global horn dog market.

I saw a few cute bumper stickers in one of the Harvard Square shops. I almost wanted to pick up a couple, but prefer to keep my generic Corolla free of any opinion.

"I have no problem at all with Jesus. It's his fan club that I can't stand"

"If war is hell, why do we keep sending people there."

"Yes I do have a big penis, but don't have it with me right now."

"I finally found Jesus. He was hiding behind the couch."

"Bush/Cheney in 04. Putting the fun back in fundamentalism."

"SUV's are for people who suffer from penis envy."

I didn't feel like eating heavy so had a cheap steak tip dinner at one of the local "Omar and Akbar's real Italian pizza and sub shops. It's funny that most of the "Italian" pizza and sub shops are run by Greeks, Mid Easterners, Asians and Latinos.

After lunch I decided to head back home to finish the final reload of my PC, but had to stop at one of the corner markets that have really good produce at prices much cheaper than the crap that tries passing itself off as produce in super markets. The market I stop at carries Iggy's bread and bakery products. Iggy's is a Cambridge bakery that (in my humble opinion) has some of the best bread on Earth. I just had to pick up one of their sourdough (well hung) 2 foot plus baguettes and some bagels. After satisfying my Iggy's fix, I returned to Chez Bigboote.

Micro$oft update lizard pestered me to let it download patches for many of XP's sins I began the process at 6AM this morning, and as of 5 minutes ago, it reported it was 60% done, which serves me right for still using a 19th century hand cranked dial up connection.

I'm realizing now that my PC and "department of hard disk security" software had not been functioning properly. It's like a new machine again...almost.

I still cannot fathom what possesses people to create and unleash such insidious and evil viruses, scumware, trojan horses, hijackers and other malware on the surfing masses. Is it repressed anger? greed? psychosis? xenophobia? or do they do it just because they can? I may be wrong, but it seems to me these software sociopaths have a similar profile to terrorists, suicide bombers, snipers with rifles who hide in the bushes taking pot shots at passing motorists and other assorted vermin. There are a lot of crazy people out there who are about 5 cans short of a six pack. Shhh, rest easy, sleep tight, don't worry. There are over 7 billion people on the planet, and only a few hundred millions are truly nuts.

Let's see what sort of person writes and unleashes such evil...

(1) Some zit faced, pierced and tattoo's emaciated looking teen sitting in his bedroom in his Calvin Klein undies, totally stoned, listening to death metal music as he angrily raps away at the key board. 

(2) A guy named Abdul, sitting at a lap top, hidden in a cave in Afghanistan, striking out at the great Satan.

(3) A neocon think tank full of angry, pissed off, joyless programmers with an agenda to convince the sheeple that the Internet is a scary place full of bee's and spiders, lions and tigers and bears, terrorists, child pornographers and godless tabloid liberals that the masses need to be protected from. If they scare us enough, the masses will scream for a savior to make the Internet safe and "family values" friendly.

(4) CIA spook programmers, perhaps linked to (3) above.

(5) Satanists.

(6) Satan

(7) God unleashing plague upon the unsaved cyber masses as punishment during the end times.

(8) Disgruntled ex MicroSoft employee's

(9) All of the above

(10) None of the above.

I'll have to see how long I can go before my PC gets infected with another cyber social disease, but fools rush in where angels fear to click. Well it's back to work tomorrow to write more totally bug free software for the accounting and business masses at the office.

Here are this week's short list of news items and articles, harvested from various nooze sites.

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Tuesday July 20

Something Wicked This Way Comes!

I now realize I was surfing without much protection, like browsing the web without an electronic condom. Before I blew everything away and did a virgin install, my machine was probably already infected with 1 or maybe many more trojans, hijackers, viruses, bacteria, fungi and other assorted "spookware", so Norton and Spy Sweeper were dogs without fangs. I was also dumb enough not to enable Micro$soft's automated service pack updates, which is their way of doing penance for creating such big ridden programs in the first place.

It's not all their fault because I know what meeting software rollouts entails. The bean counters corporate suits and marketing folks are like the hounds of hell barking at the heels of developers to "ship product" on or before deadline, and worry about the fallout later. But we programmers "never" write bad code, and if you believe that, the Bush administration are men and women of the utmost honesty and integrity, who have only the best interests of every Joe and Jane Six-Pack in mind. I dunno, but Windoze XP must contain billions and billions of lines of code. When I was in the Navy, back in the 60's, computers were mysterious instruments of black majic and tended by people who wore wizard's robes, pointy hats and carried majic wands. There was a gummint study, probably related to Murphy's law that stated any computer program containing greater than 30 lines of code stands a change of containing one of more bugs, and debuggers don't always report all bugs at compile time. Hey we try!

Throughout my 25 years of programming in one language or another, I've been lucky that I only have had to produce software that was used internally, and not for shrink wrapped sale to the unwashed billions around the world. I don't think I'd ever want to work as a programmer at a major software house like Micro$oft, etc, etc, one of thousands of programmers, shackled to their work stations, working 80 hour weeks in software sweatshop, but that's mostly done in third world countries now.

Since the Redmond Empire has a large part of the computing world sewn up in their monopoly, I can see why thousands? millions? of computer geeks view them as the great Satan, and instead of crashing airplanes into buildings or blowing themselves up, they create malicious code targeted at crashing MS operating systems and products.

So being a slave to Micro$oft and getting bitten by cyber terrorist attacks, I've beefed up the perimeter and let the dogs out. I'm now up to date in XP service pack upgrades, many of which were patches to fix critical security bugs. Anyway, my home PC is once again performing like new.

Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of Micro$soft products; really enjoy programming in Visual Basic and SQL Server, and Use Works for any Spreadsheet and Word Processing I have to do at home, although I use other vendor's products for performing other tasks; Norton, Photoshop, Roxio, etc.

While I'm on the subject security, I still have the nagging gut feel that the neocons are planning something wicked and evil by November, whether it be taking Osama out of cold storage just in time for the election, orchestrating another 9/11 or whatever else Karl Rove can dream up. These people have tasted almost unlimited power and they are not doing to give that up without a fight to the death, and I fear the Democrats will roll over and play dead to appease their masters, but I hope not. I just fear things are going to get very VERY ugly during the next few months.

Since I live in the shadow of Boston July 25 through about August 3 should prove interesting, since that's the week of the Democratic National Convention. A lot of people I have talked to are planning on taking vacation or just plain skipping town until the DNC blows over

Like many other states, Massachusetts has a Repuglican governor. Out last governor, Bill Weld was also Republican, but he was a moderate and a pretty good governor. We now have Mitt Romney, a rich Rupug, that Resident Bush proclaimed would be good for Massachusetts when he was elected. If Dubya says Romney is good for the bay State, then the poor and working class had better stock up on lots of K.Y. Hmmm, Mitt Romney, sounds sort of like a cartoon hero's name like Buzz Lightyear, "Mitt Romney, Space Ranger to a Bush second term and beyond..." At least we don't have The Gropenator.

Computer viruses, hijackers and spyware, terrorists, neo Nazis and Neocons....what's a normal dues and tax paying citizen who makes well under $100,000 a year to do. I love my country and I'd like it back please. Oh, how silly of me, it's not my country and never was. It belongs to the billionaires and major corporations.

I'll end today with a prayer to my fellow military Vets, "God bless and protect you" and for everyone else, "God help us all!"

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Saturday July 31

Boston survived the Democratic National Convention, and from all I have read in the alternative press (is there any other) and saw for myself on TV, it went very well. Now if only the Democrats can rid the White House of the present infestation of weasels, which will require super human strength and will; the country may return to some sense of democracy if Kerry wins and can pull it off. The show won't be over until the fat lady sings, or karl rove and company find way to stop the election.

One side effect of the DNC being in town, is that I have not seen Boston streets this spotless in years. Even the legendary potholes in the streets that can swallow a full sized SUV whole were filled in.

I took a ride into town early this morning to lounge on the patio at Au Bon Pain and walk around in the city. I can never seem to go into Newbury Comics without finding something for my music or video library and today was no exception. I picked up a copy of "Wag The Dog", the first season of "In Living Color" and "Parting Glances" on DVD, all much cheaper than in the larger national chain stores. I really enjoyed the first couple of seasons of In Living Color, when Keenan Ivory Wayans was the producer; it went downhill after FOX replaced him. Parting glances is probably one of the only enjoyable films I have seen where a leading character is gay and has AIDS. The character with AIDS makes the film and has a lot of chutzpah. I've seen Parting Glances once or twice in other stores, but it was $10-15 more expensive.

On the way back to my car I stopped in Marshalls. Once in a while Marshalls will have something I want or need and today they had a ton of 2(x)Ist men's underwear, and in my size no least. I've mentioned 2(x)Ist before in the flight recorder, sort of a cultish brand of men's undies and sportswear.

Since Marshalls sells mostly overstock from manufacturers, seconds and out of style clothes, the prices are 1/2 price or less. Every time I've seen 2(x)Ist in a Marshalls, they only seem to have Large, Extra Large, XXX Large, and Titanic, and they seldom have the athletic briefs. But today they had a ton of the athletic briefs in Small, which is my size. I can wear either small or medium, but medium tends to be a bit loose and baggy. Needless to say I bought 10 pairs at $5 each instead of the $12-14 each in the haughty totty shops that sometimes carry them. They are very comfortable and flattering to those of us who have a svelte figure. For some reason I tremble at the thought of a guy with a 48" waist prancing around in athletic briefs. Ya can never have too many pairs of socks or underwear.

I can't believe that July is over already and I have not done one darmed thing all Summer. Here's this week's rather long list of articles and journals that I bookmarked during the week.

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Shalom, Ray