Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Late 'spring cleaning', or what to do with old CDRs I *try* to keep a tidy work environment. One problem that I have in my home office is that I generate many CDR backups of my work, often 3 a week. Years of this wise backup policy has left me with tall stacks of CDRs. As a low priority project the last few days, I took the CDR stacks from the period of 2 years ago to 5 years ago and carefully copied the latest versions of stuff into a temp directory. Tossing out lots of redundant material, I was able to back up all of my work from this 3 year period in 500 megabytes. After making a few copies of this 500 megabyte save set, I was able to destroy and toss out a stack of old CDRs that was about 2 feet tall! I do use ZIP disks as backups also (otherwise the CDR situation would really be out of control :-) but I prefer CDRs. 2:46:33 PM

IBM shifting jobs overseas Bad news for IT workers but I can understand why IBM needs to do this to stay competitive. Except for some environmental concerns, I (mostly) believe in free market capitalism: shift work around to where it can be done most cost effectively. This happened to factory workers, and now it is happening to white collar workers like software engineers, radiologists, architects, etc. While it might sound good, I think that protectionism is a bad thing long term. 1:35:13 PM

Finally, some good news from Iraq The death of Saddam's sons will probably eventually reduce the guerilla warfare in Iraq - Bathist loyalists probably got at least some moral support from thinking that the Saddam government might return. 1:28:08 PM

Don't blame our intelligence agencies After the horror of 9/11, I hoped that as a country we could grieve and then move forward with our lives. At the time, I was frankly bothered that the CIA and FBI seemed to be made scapegoats. Certainly, investigations might have been made better, but we all have jobs to do, and most of us do the best we can with the resources that we have. Same argument goes for the people who work for our intelligence services. I find myself being dissapointed all over again at the Bush administration blaming the CIA for the famous "16 words" when from what I have read any blame (if there is blame - every government stretches the truth to justify war - this is business as usual - get over it) falls on political speech writers. What I guess bothers be the most (sorry if this sounds selfish) is: People who work for our intelligence services do a job that I certainly would not want to do - and I believe that as long as they respect U.S. citizen's constitutional rights that they should be left to do their jobs. It is in our interests that they be allowed to do their jobs - without political interference. 10:11:31 AM

Media blackout of peace protests I live in Arizona, and I don't usually travel to other states very often, so my comments here are "local": There continue to be peace protests in Arizona, but basically no media coverage. Strange! With the mainstream news media not covering important news like the real economic situation in our country (the Bush administration has stopped publishing economic reports that make for bad politics for them), you would think that there might be a little room in the news for wide and impartial coverage of what is going on that affects all of us. Call me old fashioned, but I still believe that news services, in addition to being businesses that have a right to make money, also have a duty to report all the news - not just the news that does not go against political agendas. As Al Gore might say 'Hey, this is America'. My opinion is that if you are not reading a wide variety of news from sources in many different countries (hopefully with a good dose of scepticism for everything that you read), then you are an ostrich with its head buried in the sand, afraid.... Our founding fathers recognized a free and impartial press as a cornerstone of our country. Smart people whose good work is now being perverted by harsh right wing political agendas. A young guy I was talking to last month asked me how in the world average Americans could possibly believe that the Bush administration cares at all for average people in this country. My response is that this administration's political handlers are very, very good at their jobs (unfortunately). 9:56:21 AM

© Copyright 2003 Mark Watson. Last update: 9/14/03; 9:52:07 AM.