This is making the rounds on the 'net.
I don't agree that all the items are accurate, but its food for thought.

This is the Vietnam 2 Preflight Check.

1. Cabal of oldsters who won't listen to outside advice? Check.
2. No understanding of ethnicities of the many locals? Check.
3. National boundaries drawn in Europe, not by the locals? Check.
4. Unshakable faith in our superior technology? Check.
5. France secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
6. Russia secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
7. China secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
8. SecDef pushing a conflict the JCS never wanted? Check.
9. Fear we'll look bad if we back down now? Check.
10. Corrupt Texan in the WH? Check.
11. Land war in Asia? Check.
12. Rightists unhappy with outcome of previous war? Check.
13. Enemy easily moves in/out of neighboring countries? Check.
14. Soldiers about to be dosed with our own chemicals? Check.
15. Friendly fire problem ignored instead of solved? Check.
16. Anti-Americanism up sharply in Europe? Check.
17. B-52 bombers? Check.
18. Helicopters that clog up on the local dust? Check.
19. Infighting among the branches of the military? Check.
20. Locals that cheer us by day, hate us by night? Check.
21. Local experts ignored? Check.
22. Local politicians ignored? Check.
23. Local conflicts since before the USA has been a country? Check.
24. Against advice, Prez won't raise taxes to pay for war? Check.
25. Blue water navy ships operating in brown water? Check.
26. Use of nukes hinted at if things don't go our way? Check.
27. Unpopular war? Check.
Vietnam II, you are cleared to taxi.

How do you wipe a machine before you e-bay it?

Autoclave v0.3 - April 9, 2002
hard drive sterilization on a bootable floppy

http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/install.html

From the FAQ:
What does Autoclave do?
It securely erases everything in the writable space on a hard drive. Everything. All the files, all the free space, the partition table, the boot sector, the works. This includes the operating system and any preinstalled packages your hardware vendor may have included on the drive when you got it. Everything. I don't know how to say this more emphatically. When Autoclave is done running, you will have a hard drive filled with zeros, and nothing else.

Experimenting with family collage pics for the web site.
No one appears to like their own photo, so until they give me one they like, I'm going to post the best I can find.

Yesterday, A Technology Song

Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,
There's not half the files there used to be.
An there's a millstone hanging over me.
The system crashed so suddenly.

I pushed something wrong.
What it was, I could not say.
Now all my data's gone and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.

Passed on through Dave Farber's IP list:

"You know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the German's don't want to go to war!"

Holy Crap. I changed my format again.

Must be living in a house full of women. Googled for Blogger templates and found Blogfrocks. They are pretty awesome designers. Some stuff is 'over the top' for me, but I liked this format very much. Very clean and I think it works for me.

I swapped out an edited picture of our cat, Chloe. I will have to get a mosaic of the girls posted over the weekend.

Our sump pump died. Actually it didn't die, the check valve died. It didn't really die, it just locked shut every so often and required us to reset the power on the sump pump. What a pain. We were also pumping about 4 gallons a minute out of the sump. I think I know what the problem is and I will re-grade one side of the house this summer.

Since I had already replaced the sump pump itself as well as some old clamps on each side of the check valve, the moral of this story is to replace all the components of the sump pump at the same time! An $8 part wasted several hours of my time as well as stressing me out.

The War continues.

I got the latest O'Reilly DNS & Bind book. Its very good. I had two of the previous editions, but think I loaned them out or left them at a client site. I also bought the DNS & Bind Cookbook. Its more of a roadmap for various DNS tasks and its generally useful. I wish it has more information on differences between BIND 4, 8 and 9 versions, best practice and illustration of why BIND 9 has improved over 8. I really need to give the book a through read, compile the latest version of BIND and test on my Linux 8 box. I will post an update in a few weeks.

Like everyone else, I have a morbid facination with the Iraq War II news. Now that they are committed, we have to let the Military do its job and get the hell out of there.

I also anticipate that France will object to US/UK management of the rebuilding of the Iraq infrastructure because they want to do it. They have more of an interest in Iraqi oil than the US and UK. It should be interesting to see how this develops.

Tommy Franks is too polite and professional to refuse questions from French journalists. Darn.

The Bush War has started.
We are praying for the soldiers even though we have significant reservations about the timing of this war.

I'm going to sleep on this a bit and revisit tomorrow before I break something else tonight.

Just changed the menu to fix the links and enlarge the box.

I just tweaked my home page, as you may have noticed ;).

The main page of my site has become more of a diary than anything else. I have also irregularly maintained a web log (or Blog) using Blogger, so this is my first effort in combining the two.

I will maintain the other pages on my site and will incorporate them into sidebars or other static content of my main page. The original frame design is outdated and will be replaced with a 'flat' interface. Also, the entire site will be indexed and I will increase the content to support my consulting as well as resources for family and friends. This will include 'how to' articles for home networking, wireless, anti-virus and other information that people have requested.

If you really hate this, send me a note.
If you really think this is cool, send me a note.
I have only received 5-6 e-mails over the past year from the web site or about this web, so I'm interested in any feedback.

blogger.com

Geez! I just spent several hours installing, tweaking, reading documentation and uninstalling Microsoft SharePoint Services and Portal betas.

Yikes! I was looking for an all-Microsoft blogging solution as well as something I could integrate with Exchange to publish my calendar, link documents, publish photos and have as a generally useful tool.

Not today! I will re-group and attempt again on the weekend and hopefully get my FrontPage web site back online shortly.

This is an interesting site that tabulates most of the Weblog tools and servers currently available.
WebLog Tools

Just fixed Blogger.
I didn't create the Blogger web when I moved to Server 2003 (we are an "all beta" household - all beta, all the time). It just keeps life more interesting.