This Pilgrim's Progress

The Backpacker has Returned!

My daughter returned from her Sierra backpacking trip yesterday. It's great to have her home again. She had a great time!! And she managed to take some great photos too. If I can get her permission, I'll post some of them in the photo album. Her new pack and sleeping bag worked perfectly, and she was quite pleased with her equipment. They had great weather and no rain. They were at or above the tree line most of the time, true alpine environment. Sometime I'd like to do that hike, but maybe with the assistance of some packer-livestock!

"Reporting for duty!"

I almost forgot! The corniest line of the night was during Kerry's introduction of himself: "My name is John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty!" It got a pretty good response from the conventioneers. The only problem is that Senator Kerry has been pretty much AWOL from the senate floor and on important votes. They were really going for the hard-sell of "Kerry as commander-in-chief". I wasn't convinced, how about you?

One of the genuinely funny moments was during one of Kerry's daughters' speech. She told of the time that John rescued a drowning hamster and gave it CPR. A truly humorous thought-picture! Actually his daughters were quite charming and did manage to draw a picture of human warmth and love concerning their father. If he's smart, he'll let them speak more often!!

"Help is on the way"

That was Kerry's theme in his nomination acceptance speech. Like we need "help"? Of course for the dems the "help" will be higher taxes and more government spending. Kerry sounded very much like a Republican unless you know what they really mean and how they redefine the English language:

New cartoon by Chris Muir

I've added a category to the right today that will call up the latest "Day by Day" cartoon by Chris Muir. His drawing style is similar to Trudeau's ("Doonesbury"), but Muir is funny. Most of his stuff seems to be conservative in orientation too, which is refreshing. Yesterday's toon was great, poking fun at Kerry's Purple Hearts and bad throwing arm. Take a look at it.

9/11 Commission

I finished up reading the entire commission report today. They have some interesting and sweeping recommendations. It will be interesting to see which ones the President will try to implement. I think they did a pretty good job analyzing the issues of intelligence and how to address those issues.

For me, some of their technology suggestions were very interesting. They are recommending keeping the data distributed, but facilitating access at various levels. Professionally I work in the area of business intelligence (i.e. data warehousing, data mining, OLAP analysis, multi-dimensional modeling, etc.), and I can see a real need for using those same techniques for analyzing the tremendous amount of data that is gathered from wide-spread sources. I think they will need to implement some sort of real-time ETL (extraction, transform, load) process at these various sources into a star-schema model for analysis or further abstraction. The techniques are there to preserve the multi-levels of security and access they need, and still do meaningful analysis.

Their recommendations for reorganization of the various intelligence groups and functions is an attempt to address the problems of decision-making, accountability, and ownership that were evident in the events leading up to 9/11. It won't be easy to do, and a lot will depend on the people who will be selected to make it work.

DNC convention

I've tried to studiously avoid watching the democratic convention. I don't want to lose a tv set by throwing my shoe at it!! There's enough news about it on the web and blogosphere, I don't feel a need to watch it. The Dems are trying to talk "values" again!!

And they keep letting that twit Teresa Heinz Kerry out of her kennel!! I can't stand to listen to her!! The network we watched showed the "Last Comic Standing" rather than her speech last night!!

And of course, Michael Moore is the hit of the convention! The dems keep repeating Moore's lies, and they want us to believe that somehow Kerry will be a good President when he's never ran anything in his life. Of course Teresa will be there to help him. She at least knows how to marry money and hold on to it!

Will there be any of his advisors left before election day? They keep getting in trouble or their lies keep getting exposed. Berger, Clark, and Williams bit the dust, how many more will, care to wager??

Oh well, let's take a deep breath and clear our minds now....there I feel better.

9/11 Commission Report

I spent a lot of time reading the 9/11 Commission's report this weekend. I'm about half-way through it. I haven't seen any new revelations yet. But I have detected some distinct biases. There is one quote about the secrecy imposed on intelligence oversight committees that betrays an interesting bias:

"Secrecy, while necessary, can also harm oversight. The overall budget of the intelligence community is classified, as are most of its activities. Thus, the Intelligence committees cannot take advantage of democracy’s best oversight mechanism: public disclosure. This makes them significantly different from other congressional oversight committees, which are often spurred into action by the work of investigative journalists and watchdog organizations." (page 103).

I, for one, am thankful that some secrets are kept from our leftist/liberal press and media. Otherwise, we would have absolutely no chance to fight terrorism.

The other interesting thing I've noticed is how easy it was for the terrorists to enter and travel in the U.S. I hope we've now made it more difficult for terrorists, but I'm not convinced. I'll write more on this after I've finished reading the report.

DVD Burning

Well I got a good start transferring some tapes to DVD this weekend. I'm starting to get a good handle on the Roxio 7 software too. I found out that you can't use the 8.5 GB double layer disks to create a DVD-video with Roxio, but then I couldn't do it with Nero either. Maybe that capability will come later. Right now though, you can use the 8.5 GB disks as data disks with no problem in Roxio 7. I discovered this weekend that how you encode the sound can affect the size of the file when burning to disk. It also seems that the raw mpeg files have better sound quality than the DVD-videos I create with them? That seems a little wierd since the capture mpeg files are actually smaller in size than the DVD-video disk image. So, I still have some more stuff to learn.

Toor-Dee-Franzz

Lance did it!! Six time Tour Champ! It's been an exciting tour to watch. Last year's was exciting because it wasn't a sure thing for Lance. This year the historical significance made it even more exciting to watch. My son is glad it's over. He thinks watching the Tour is like watching grass grow! What do 13 year old's know anyway?

Toor-Dee-Franzz

Watched stage 17 last night. What an incredible finish. I couldn't believe how fast Lance Armstrong accelerated to catch and beat the leader. The guy must have had 10-15 meters on him, and Lance beat him by half a wheel!!!

Apparently Lance has been getting some abuse from the spectators the last couple of stages. I hope it doesn't get ugly, it would be a shame for someone to disrupt the Tour. Lance has been extremely kind and complementary to the French, even though he's being hounded by some French journalists trying to pin a doping scandal on him (with no success of course).

It should prove to be an exciting finish this weekend. I can't believe it's almost over already. But, when you've got someone like Lance to watch, the time goes quickly!!