Standard Mischief

…and I can’t find a single bill number. Well at least without a bit of google-fu. I mean, take a look at Google News and see how many mainstream major media mavens miss mentioning HR 3997.

I’m not seeing ABC or FOX news ranking highly in the results, rather it’s SooToday.com and TransWorldNews.

I mean really, what’s up with this crap? It’s twenty fscking ought eight, and the tubes of Intarwebz has had the humble hyperlink since what, May 1996? When are y’all gonna get on the bandwagon? I’m not even demanding a hyperlink, I’d be just as happy as a simple bill number.

Don’t even get me started on the whole bloated mass of the “blogsphere”, 9 out of 10 of which are willing to regurgitate the swill that’s been spoon fed to them by the media, tossing in their two cents in without even dropping a dime’s worth of effort to grasp the breath of the whole story. Thanks for ruining the signal to noise ratio, folks.

Here’s my weak attempt at humor, a blog post from over two years ago.

Oh, and before I forget:

standardmischief $ curl ‘http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-3997′|wc -w
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 366k 100 366k 0 0 441k 0 –:–:– –:–:– –:–:– 517k
31626
standardmischief $

Just in case anyone else is counting, that’s thirty one thousands, six hundred and twenty six words, roughly, all mashed together with in the last two weeks. How many congress-critters have read the whole bill? How many legalese land mines do you think are hidden within? Will we get another perpetual PATRIOT act or another DMCA? What are the odds?

Well I can dream, can’t I.

Periodic downturns happen in every market, but this cycle is notable for a “credit crunch”. You can point the finger at number of firms and individuals:

• “Creative accounting” by Fannie, Freddie, and a number of Wall Street firms
• The failure of these quasi government agencies to only buy conforming loans as set out in their charter.
• A number of firms that repackaged loans for resale with the intent to conceal risk.
• People who flat-out lied on their “Option ARM” loan application forms.
• Government regulators, congress critters and other maggots that looked the other way while the bubble was inflating, instead of enforcing regulations that are already on the books.

In the unlikely event that the people and lending institutes who committed crimes that contributed to the the current mess actually get any fines, I’d like to suggest the following:

Force them to pay the fines by putting 20% down, and having them pay off the remainder on a 30-year fixed rate amortization schedule. Require the CEO or individual themselves to personally sign the payment check within a thirty day window of when the payment is due (with the sincere hope that they will remember their lessons for the next time a bubble starts inflating).

Instead, I’m confident that the taxpayers’ own unborn grandkids will pay the check, Congress will respond by making fraud even more illegal-er, and today’s lessons will be forgotten with the next market upswing.

Inspired by countertop’s modest proposal.

I write a post, accidentally publish it and then yank it back before anyone notices. Then I schedule it for this morning and it never posts. wtf?

Why not tag your name someplace where everyone can urinate on it?

I don’t really talk much about my personal life in my blog, but I’m happy to report that my new “consulting” gig has at least a part of my duties and responsibilities occurring right at the command line. That self-directed Linux total-immersion course I undertook a few years ago has begun to pay off. A few observations:

• n00buntu makes you lazy, (in a bad way), with it’s fancy-pants GUI. I’m working partly in embedded systems. While looking at log files on these thingys, you don’t really have many options. You don’t have less, you don’t have more, and you certainly don’t have nano (a small, much more intuitive editor than the classic choices). I’ve ssh into my remote server for my websites and nano had always been available in the past to do the odd editing job. Locally, it’s always been nano or something like kedit, you know, something that does not require you to RTFM before you can figure out how to call up the help menu that would hopefully allow you to figure out how to exit the program. Anyway, for embedded systems when cat or head or tail -f isn’t enough, I’m getting reacquainted with vi.
• The breath of the Unices continues to amaze me. I got a rep I did not deserve by looking at a script that had my vastly more experienced mentor stumped for several days and seeing the problem immediately (sort before uniq, or sort -u). After that, he sent me off to debug his busted perl scripts. Not much success yet.
• If I ever had the idea that I could be a successful and lazy (in a good way) sysadmin without knowing perl, well that’s pretty much dispelled now. The basics of perl are fairly easy to learn when you put your mind to it.