Super bug

I stumbled across this relatively new band and I am advising you people to check them out. The band is called WSNB and I think they have one album, Jomo Swamp Root Boogie. They are kinda blues, southern rock, from Western North Carolina and they do a cover of a Gillian Welch number so they got some cred.
I have partially recovered from the super bug. It seems to be going around but no one knows what it is. Most are given antibiotics to kill it, but I'm not convinced that helps. It has left me with one ear partially deaf, a continued dry hacking cough, headaches, and general fatigue. If my ear doesn't get better soon, I may start to worry. Ok, I'm already worrying. I can't look at people when they talk to me cause I have to turn my good ear to them. Awkward.

Under the weather

Me and the cat aren't feeling well today.

Raise the flag

Bjork made a statement at the end of her concert in Beijing by singing "Tibet Tibet" at the end of her song Declare Independence. It raised quite a ruckus with the Chinese government and the crowd apparently. My hat's off to her. Let the Dalai Lama back in Lhasa and leave Tibet alone.

Random detritus

Have you ever wondered what will happen when the world runs out of oil? It will happen some day ya know. I always thought of human civilization as one long linear improvement, but when oil is gone, we'll have to go backwards. There's just no way we can move all the stuff we do today without oil. How will airplanes fly? We can't all run electric cars or plant enough crops for biofuels. Will we take sailboats to Europe? Ride horses to work? Or we can all sit at home and virtualize ourselves to work. The highways will be empty. 95 could turn into a great bike trail. When you pump all that oil out, what fills it in?

Time

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
-H. D. Thoreau

I'm not liking this earlier daylight saving. After living without air conditioning for a summer, I'm not sure I like it at all. Arizona doesn't do it because they are smart enough to not want an extra hour of evening heat. It may save on lighting, but not on cooling. Tomorrow morning will be a challenge. Such is life.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may go marry :
For having lost but once your prime
You may for ever tarry.
-Robert Herrick

I cooked a chicken tonight and it took about twice as long as I'd thought and it had a strange texture. How does chicken develop a strange texture? Maybe it was an old bird. But that was a lot of time spent waiting on a dinner that was pretty lousy.

I started another new painting today and finished none.

Time waits for no one.
-The Rolling Stones

Lesson Learned

Before you burn a bridge, make sure you are on the right side of the river.

Government Cheese

So today at work, I get the news that the software I'd requested to be installed would not be installed because it would be hard to configure. We have a whole group of people who are your typical sys admin/IT types that do have a lot of weird things to juggle due to that nature of our work. But this software I want is free, open source, and used everywhere. It is almost as ubiquitous as McDonalds. And I had to jump numerous bureaucratic hurdles and approvals to get to that point, which all cleared breezily, only to be stopped by, "sorry, too much work for us." I have downloaded and installed it on both Mac and Linux at home, and aside from the download time, configuring takes minutes. And I know that the situation is not much different at work. So why would the group whose job it is to manage our computer systems not want to install this software that shouldn't take but an hour to get up and running? This is what baffles me. I have answers I'll keep to myself for now. I had to walk away from the reply button to avoid one of those venomous emails that one usually regrets sending at some point. I'm still struggling with a response that is appropriate and sadly sometimes I want to give up and relax into the fold of apathy that so many seem to have adopted as their only long term job goal. Ranting is not one of my visions for this blog, but sometimes it's good to vent, even if it is to the blogosphere.