Merry Christmas!

Why I'm up at this hour working on reinstalling and restoring 1.9 gig of files to a friends laptop I'm not really sure. Particularly since I have to be up tomorrow for usual Christmas morning and church, too. It's the spirit of Christmas, I guess.

And last night, of course, I was up till 3:00 (am) getting schroeder fully upgraded. He's been needing a good apt-get dist-upgrade for a while, not having had the chance since early May. But, of course, I had to pick a slow day for RoadRunner(tm) and had to do other stuff all afternoon, so the morning was spent watching him download (1.5 gig of packages to DL - at 30-80kB/s) and the late evening and wee hours babysitting the rest of the process. Fun fun fun.

Aside from that, however, this week has been remarkably relaxing and productive. Cleaned out my pack and filed (most of) my junk from this semester, hacked up an A/V connector and tested my $15 Nintendo 64 (it works! Goodwill rocks), got my Flickr thing going, spent a bunch of time getting acquainted with LibraryThing, fixed the powersupply for my Boss multieffects pedal (broken wire), reassembled a friend's Digitech RP-2000 and fixed the powersupply for that (two broken wires), whacked together a dual head linux config for my cousin, updated schroeder, completely dissasembled the old iMac (dead analog board, but PS & mobo still fine - build a linux firewall/router box, I think), slept in a lot, and did a whole lot of research on website pre-processing tools. I think I'm going with tt2site for now, I just have to figure it all out and migrate NateNet over. More fun for the Holidays. No school until January 17th, though, so plenty of time to work on Things In General(tm), read and see if I can help Dad get more of the basement organized. I need more boxes to put stuff in...

After the Holidays. I've got a solid week of goofing off to do with family, the other stuff can wait until post-New Years.

Killing Father Time

I'm learning (or at least realizing) just how time-driven our society/my life is, and I hate it.

In the three weeks I spent at Tauernhof's Upward Bound program this past summer, we weren't allowed watches while we were out on tour. It was awesome. Our leaders took care of waking us up and keeping us on schedule. We got up when someone yelled "Rise and shine! Brekky in half an hour!", we didn't know how many hours of sleep we got and didn't worry about it. Minutes were no longer important. Everything was somewhat flexible.

Now in contrast, these last two weeks of school would be fairly normal except that my church's annual Dessert Theatre production is next week - so, added on to the normal routine, I have to finish the lighting before this weekend and we have four performances next week. The last two weeks of school. Since my school schedule is pretty much a fourty-hour week, I usually do a bunch of homework on weekends. Now I have setup, dress rehearsals, and performances on weekends, on top of the usual midweek activites that take up a couple evenings.

I recalled this summer last week while putting together a robot during Lab - I happen to enjoy working on stuff like that and suddenly realized that I had been happily working on Olaf for an hour and a half (say that five times fast), oblivious to the rest of the world. That's when I realized I don't like time. Those three weeks with I spent mostly time independent and it was the proverbial breath of fresh air. (And I'm sure being in the Austrian Alps didn't have anything at all to do with it. ;) Regardless of where I am, I don't want to have to care so much about scheduling and time management and making sure I have enough time to do all my homework for PreCal. (And that's the kicker - I'm slightly behind and it's not because I don't understand the math. It just takes so much time to crank through all the problems.)

This is why I hate time: it waits for no-one, we can't kill it, all we can do is waste it (to borrow the cliches). But at the same time if we try to pack as much as possible into our minutes, we end up wasting ourselves instead. Which is really better?

Going for the Polls

We return for a special broadcast on the weirdness of CNN. On the front page today is a poll with the blaring healine: Most doubt Bush has plan for Iraq victory.

Initial reaction: then what in tarnation is this?

After reading the actual poll article, we find some interesting things.

(CNN) -- As President Bush launched a new effort Wednesday to gain public support for the Iraq war, a new poll found most Americans do not believe he has a plan that will achieve victory.

But the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Wednesday night also found nearly six in 10 Americans said U.S. troops should not be withdrawn from Iraq until certain goals are achieved.

Just 35 percent wanted to set a specific timetable for their exit, as some critics of the war have suggested.

White House officials unveiled a 35-page plan Wednesday to achieve success in Iraq, and Bush used a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, to tout what he said was progress in getting Iraqi security forces in place to protect their own country. (Full story link)

The poll conducted Wednesday does not directly reflect how Americans are reacting to Bush's speech, because only 10 percent of the 606 adult Americans polled had seen it live and two-thirds had not even heard or read news coverage about it.

(...)

Among poll respondents, 55 percent said they did not believe Bush has a plan that will achieve victory for the United States in Iraq; 41 percent thought he did.

Bold text mine. Now, we would like to point out that the percentage of people polled who think that Bush has a plan for vicory (41%) is higher than the percentage (33%, derived from the 2/3rds figure above) who have heard coverage of President Bush's speech Wednesday.

How can this be? Assuming that those who have not heard any news coverage (66%, the 2/3rds figure above) also have not heard of of the plan (released Wednesday), I personally would count those poll numbers to be out of date.