Stephen has taken to calling John McCain “your candidate”, to which I object. Yeah, I voted for him in the primary, but I said then:

But John, just because you’ll get my vote today doesn’t mean you’ll get it in nine months.

In that same entry, I listed three topics that would likely shape my vote:

1. Technology funding
2. Fiscal policy, especially towards health care
3. Foreign policy

Well, McCain’s health policy is a non-starter with me at this point, for pretty much all the criticisms of it in that NPR story. And McCain’s push to holding the line on discretionary spending sounds nice and all, but good luck getting any Congress to hold up to their end of the bargain. And suspending the Federal gas tax is … terribly short-sighted populism. Egad.

[I don't have a huge issue with McCain's foreign policy, because I think that pulling out of Iraq would be more destabilizing than pulling out of Vietnam, and I think the "100 years" business is a bit blown out of proportion when we still have troops in Europe and patrolling the DMZ in Korea. The bit I most enjoyed, in a cold and calculating way, in the last couple weeks was [i]Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil[/i] running a clip of Dick Cheney in 1994 talking about how invading Iraq and removing Saddam would be a quagmire. Thanks, guys. Seriously.]

The Obama take on manned spaceflight funding still concerns me, but I probably overstated my point in that post. If I was closer to the two being even in my mind, this would sway me more away from Obama than it does.

I’m slightly leaning Obama, but it’s still just mid-April.

[Will someone go check and make sure that Dad didn't have a heart attack? Thanks.]

march16bennett14

Originally uploaded by verticalhouse

I aggregate all Flickr photos tagged with “Huntsville”, just because it’s fun to see how people see our fair city. [This does mean that I see photos from Texas and Ontario, but far less often than the city that put men on the moon.] There are times when I sometimes wonder why I do this.

Photos like these remind me that doing this is definitely worth doing. This is an absolute gem.

Here’s me on Wednesday:

Here’s me today:

A big difference, no?

When I started my Whiskerino journey, I never really thought that I’d get that involved. I figured that I’d stay out of the Hall of Shame—I actually got thrown in there shortly the first week, but begged my way back out—until work made me shave. Oddly enough, work never said a thing about it—okay, there was a little discussion of it at my last staff meeting, but that’s really been it. [My cover story from the start of 2008 on was that I'd trim the beard when we shipped our next set of flight hardware---because I knew we'd ship on 29 Feb, the last day of W'rino.] I never expected to win a King Beard or have Stephen pose with me. [Closest I got to a second KB was last weekend with a photo of my friend Megan in there with me. W'rinos like redheads, apparently.]

All I know now is that I’m hanging out some in the Talk and I can’t wait for 2009. I am happy that I’ve trimmed, though: I was getting tired of eating my beard, and it did hit 75F in Huntsville today. But I’m also very happy that I participated—because in doing so, I became a part of something larger than myself, which is always a fulfilling thing to do.

It’s like it’s 2003 all over again. Oi with the memes already.

The Rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

This is all Jeff Holland’s fault.

Six Non-important/habits/quirks about me:

1. My keys are always in my front left pants pocket, my iPhone is always in my front right pants pocket, and my wallet is always in my right rear pocket. If I’m in pocket-less shorts, well, my iPhone and wallet always stay to my right, and if I’m not carrying my keys [usually in my left hand, with my left pinky through the keyring], they’re tucked into the waistband of the shorts on my left side. Asking me to change might cause spontaneous combustion.
2. Because I slept for years on loft beds and bunk beds without rails, I have to have my head against a solid surface for me to sleep. It’s the only way I can locate where I am as I sleep. I think if you moved my bed to the middle of the room and removed the headboard, I’d never sleep again. I might kill you first, though.
3. I check all numbers that come into my worldview for divisibility by 3 and 9. One does this by adding the digits; if the sum is divisible by 3, the number is divisible by 3 as well. [Same goes for 9.] I used to while away time whilst bored in classes by putting a long number into a calculator, then factoring it down to 1 by adding or subtracting a number and dividing by 3. [No, I didn't date until college. Why do you ask?]
4. I tug on my chin whiskers as I’m thinking, usually with my left hand. My theory for using the left hand is that I’m trying to stimulate creative thinking, so I use the motor skills on that side.
5. I lock everything. Even when I’m pumping gas, I lock my car door. When I walk into the house, I immediately lock the deadbolt behind me.
6. My passive soaks usually find me out driving. In fact, I haven’t had a good passive soak in far too long. Maybe I’ll do that as I leave the office today … drive out east into the Appalachian foothills and see what I can see.

Victims:

• Misty
• Jonathan
• Amy
• Adam
• Kari
• Ronzilla

You know you love me.

Jeff posted this on The Rumor Forum today, and it was fun seeing folks’ responses, so I’ll replicate it here:

1. Go to Wikipedia’s random page generator. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to Random Quotations. The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to Flickr’s Interesting Photos from the last seven days. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Put it all together, that’s your first album.

I had: The Killing - End of the Gun:

[If you blog this, make sure to link to the Flickr photo's original page so you don't violate their TOS. Thanks. ]

Well, looks like my photo from the SFA Honoree thing ended up getting me King Beard.

You can call me the King, or Kinger, or El King Bearderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

[I'm trying to arrange a meetup of the Huntsville Whiskerinos. If you are one, holler at me. Pip and I have been talking.]

If you want to see me in the Marshall Star, well, it’s online. I’m on Page 7.

I’m headin’ out Sunday. Gonna be fun.

Alternatively, I could have titled this “Thursday nights in 2001″. Ahh, the dumb shit you do to blow off steam in college.

I love it … I’m getting all sorts of PHP XSS injection attack attempts on GFMorris.org purely because I’ve mentioned phpBB there before. Shoot, until lately, I’ve hardly been a phpBB admin, choosing Simple Machines in the meantime.

Even funnier is that the two or three phpBB installs on the box? Going unattacked.

So as I realized I needed to do some laundry tonight, I said, “Dang, I need something to do to keep me awake until about ten o’clock.” What do I do? Bootleg work! Hacked and slashed and out comes the finished product. Then the fun begins: as noted before, my G4 iMac eats keyboards. So when I went to connect to upstairs on my mini to grab the files over the network … nothin’. The keychain had lost my password for the mini. :sigh: And what’s worse, the keyboard being out means there’s no way to load a CD-ROM, so I can’t just burn a CD-R [which I'd do anyway] and copy over.

So I head back upstairs, thinking that I’ll just connect down to the iMac from the mini. No go. Won’t connect. Then I grab my iBook. Connect to the iMac? Check. Connect to the mini? Check. Use network aliases to send folder from one to the other? Check. So, here are the lessons:

1. iBook FTW! It heard me talking about letting it go now that I’m rocking my iPhone, but this is one way it can say, “I’m not done yet!” [Plus, it was very handy last week while my mini was in the shop.]
2. I really need to see about getting that iMac into the shop to get it fixed. Sadly, I’m afraid that the answer on that one is “needs a new Logic Board”, and I’m worried that they don’t even make ‘em anymore.

Okay, off to bed with me.

So, I’m good friends with the LOLTrek guy. [In fact, I'm already having happy thoughts about having beer with Stephen after work tomorrow.] I’ve watched him degrade into this LOL$-obsessed guy over the past few months, though, and I’ve joked a couple times about staging an intervention. [What I want to know is this: why have we not seen LOL-Zombies yet? Really.]

All that said … when SOG tweeted, “um, ING, where’d my external accounts go? you’re not much good if i can’t get money to or out of you,” my first instinct was to grab a large image of the ING lion and break out the Impact, and the lion say, “I made you a pile of money … but I eated it.”

I think it’s time to go to bed.

Misty and Liza

Originally uploaded by Geof F. Morris

Earlier, Misty tweeted: My birthday: day of disappointment and suffering for my family & friends. it sucks! And heck, that’s an understandable reaction to have, given what’s been tweeted in her world today.

I responded: I’m with [Amy]. I may be bitter, cynical, & frustrated, but you always listen and provide perspective. And are a lot of fun.

Misty is, undoubtedly, one of the better friends that I have. When she thinks that I’m wrong about something, she’s not in my face about it; she says it in a gentle, correcting way, trying to provide me some perspective. I value that, because we … do. not. think. alike. And that’s a great thing.

I am better off for knowing her. I can think of few ways to state the value of someone’s friendship than that.

Happy birthday, dear.

I’ve read many an attack on Twitter. I think that Kathy Sierra’s likening Twitter to a slot machine is actually pretty apt. But tonight, the Twitter slot machine brought me: Mennonites at the Costco would be a great band name.

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My aunt [okay, okay, my second cousin once removed] Donna sent along this photo on Sunday of my grandmother and one of my … hold on … third cousins, once removed. [I think.] It was too priceless not to share. Even though it wasn’t taken today, that smells “Happy Independence Day!” to me.

Jessica off-handedly mentioned it yesterday, but today is the Kings’ fourth anniversary. One would think that such a date would be easy to remember for me, seeing as, well, I was kinda there, but it’s made far easier by the fact that they got married on the same day, six years later, that I graduated from high school. Chances are that you don’t have to be an MSMS grad to figure out that I graduated high school a decade ago. Oi. No wonder I feel old today. [Couldn't have anything to do with driving 1400 miles last weekend.]

But anyway … happy anniversary to some of my favorite people.