My girlfriend posed an interesting question last night. Say you’re in a car accident. The police and fire department who show up are paid for out of our tax dollars, right? We don’t have to pay them hundreds if not thousands of dollars for this critical service. Why then should an ambulance ride cost so much? Shouldn’t that be paid for out of taxes as well (as well as healthcare in general)? Here’s a bad idea: let’s privatize police and/or fire departments. Oh wait, that was done already. If you didn’t have their medallion on your burning house… well let’s just say that “for profit” was the rule.

In stark contrast to the Mad Men line and Brett Williams book title, “You can be right or you can be married,” I believe that apologies are not concessions; in fact the first one to apologize wins. It demonstrates character, introspection, and a commitment to peacekeeping, even at the cost of “winning.” I also found this when searching the source of the above quotation: What is interesting about these “Right Fights” is that they are not about needing to be right, but come from the feeling of being wronged, hurt, or unloved.

So many times people have told me their “internet isn’t working,” yet I find their email programs and web browsers working, only perhaps that Internet Explorer is broken. I just realized this morning: Windows XP calls the default web browser “Internet” in the start menu. Microsoft really did a number on people’s perceptions all these years. Folks, the “Internet” as you know it is called the World Wide Web: you know that “www” before almost every website? There is so much more to the Internet than the web. Email, FTP, chat/IM, all that stuff is still on the Internet but they’re not all HTML: the language web browsers like Internet Explorer speak.

Sometimes… I’m just… so tired. Tired of job hunting. Tired of job hunting in this shitty economy. Thank you very much, American Greed. I’ve been looking for so long for a job that has… you know… things like health insurance and a wage that will pay for… you know… things like car repairs and dinner with my girlfriend and … life. A job that won’t slowly devour my soul. Is that too much to ask? Is it? Come on now… employment… please tell me where can I sell my soul for a decent income?

I just wrote this little bash script as a fetchmail MTA/destination. It automatically prints and adds to my gcal any new appointments scheduled for my by Fastteks. Since they have a crappy web calendar and only send notifications via plaintext email, I wrote this script to automate some things for me. Every five minutes it removes unnecessary information, sends it to my office printer, and adds an appointment to my business Google calendar all automatically. In addition to fetchmail, this script needs gcalcli. Cool. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 #!