Hey look! The home system is back on line! Wooo-hoo!

WeddingPlanning -- A guide for men. As some of you may know, I have a wedding to Sweet Jessica coming up real soon. I would like to share some wisdom gleaned from my experience, to make the job easier for other men who must travel the same road in the future. Gentlemen, when you ask your love to join you in the sacred bonds of marriage, you have started a chain reaction that will become an all consuming wave of effort that will last until the Great Day. Your love will become detail obsessive -- plates, napkins, even which particular style of shoelace on your shoes will become her immediate concern. She will pass all this by you, telling you that she seeks your approval and wants you to have input for the event. This is deceptive. She does want your input. She wants you to tell her that the tablecloth that will adorn the reception tables is magnificent, that the flowers are beautiful, and that the bridesmaids dresses will make men sit slack-jawed in admiration and women furious with envy. She needs the assurance. And you must provide it to her. Even if you can't tell linen from latex, you must reassure her that her decisions are the best that can be made under the circumstances. And that is the extent of your usefulness. As reassurance. This is her day, and you can do nothing to help beyond being her reassuring sounding board. You can attempt to aid and abet the process, but understand this one rule -- You can't do anything right. Whatever you do will be vetted by your fiance, and you will either have your hand held while you do the task, or she will have to go back and redo the task to her satisfaction. Either way, she is intimately involved in the task. Eventually, you'll realize that all you can provide is moral support, and you'll back off and leave it in her hands. So be nice to her. Rub her shoulders. Tell her how lovely the cake will be. Tell her how beautiful she'll be. Tell her she's picking such lovely stuff. And stay the hell out of the way. Take your father in law for a movie or a game of golf. God knows he needs a break from the whirlwind. Play the part of an infantryman in front of the advancing tanks -- get the hell out of the way.

Oh, obviously, I'll be offline this weekend if I can't get the home system sorted...

Good morning, and TGIF! (Put it on your shoes for "Toes go in First", a handy reminder when you're drunk or stoopid) Last night was a veritable Night of the Living Dead for my home systems. My computer, with a recent XP update, contracted a Virus and lost network connectivity. Something funky is going on -- I get a backweb process running that comes from somewhere I haven't yet discovered. It's probably a disguised virus. So the home system is cut off from the world for now, until I figure this out. It's firewalled and I'm keeping it quarantined while I explore the problem, so as to keep it from spreading... Gamers -- for your amusement, please check out Dork Tower. War News -- this month's Reason Magazine has a nice article on the press's inability to report military affairs accurately. It's not on the web site, but there's some other cool stuff there. Media figures are an enigma. They are patently Liberal (socialistic liberalism, versus classic liberalism), which is understandable, considering the nature of their job, but they patently deny this essence of their nature. The new bestseller by Bernard Goldberg (Bias) provides some interesting insight. Well worth the read...

Oy, what a day. It's been rather dull. I've been reading some documentation on some cool stuff we're doing, but like most documentation it's a bit dry. I've also been making a dry run to practice some things for future knowledge, but that's dull, too. Today's Joke: A priest is working in the confessional when he sees the little light go on. He slides the screen open and say "Yes, my son?" A quavering voice comes through the screen -- "Father, I have something to tell you." "Go ahead, my son." "I should tell you that I'm not Catholic." "That's all right. Please go on." "Well, Father, I'm ninety-three years old, and last night I went to my neighborhood bar and met this beautiful young woman. She has lovely red hair, an incredible body, and a face that makes the stars seem dim." "Yes." "'Well, last night when I met her, we got to talking, and then she kissed me. So I kissed her back." "Yes. Go on." "And then we went to her apartment, and we made passionate love all night long -- six times! It was amazing!" "And why do you feel compelled to tell me this, my son?" "Hell, Father, I'm telling everyone!" Ciao 4 now...

Some comments on EuroLand, from NRO. With the advent of the Euro I'm feeling a little nostalgic. I've been to Italy and France, and one of the more charming incidents for me was changing over $100 in Rome for lira. I ended up with about L600,000. It was, in its own way, a thrill to get SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND of anything for a hundred bucks. I had a wad of cash that made me feel like a mafia Don on a bender. Also, the advent of the common European currency means the end of one of the most beautiful coins ever -- the two tone 5 Franc coin. I have a half dozen of these in a drawer at home. I always liked the coin for its unique dual pressing and its cool dual metal look. One more unique thing that has passed... The European Union creates a lot of havoc for motorcyclists -- Eurocrats are trying to cram German style regulations down on the rest of the European market. Germany's regulations are such that any aftermarket item must be type approved and go through a government approval process before it can be sold. This includes tires. It's called type approval -- the item must be factory and state approved for the vehicle before it can be installed. If the manufacturer only chooses to approve Brand XYZ tires, you can only install that specific tire. The same applies to exhausts, engine mods, wheels, etc. etc. etc. The same rule applies to cosmetic changes as well as functional items. The cops can pull you over and give you a ticket if something on your car or motorcycle doesn't meet type approval. Of course, this would kill off the aftermarket. As a minor virtue, it would eliminate the annoyingly loud pipes some folks run. However, you then come at the mercy of the original manufacturer for parts and repairs. Plus, shopping for the best deal becomes a disaster. It enforces a mini-monopoly on the various bits and pieces of the vehicle, preventing smaller manufacturers and mom-and-pop shops from solving problems and improving the breed. In computers, this would be similar to the government saying that you can only use Compaq approved video cards in your Compaq computer, or only use Sony monitors with Sony computers. In general, I favor setting standards and letting them be met by whatever means the end user wishes. If the standards are reasonable, the end user can meet them without difficulty, the manufacturers can build to them, and the aftermarket can experiment with new ways to meet those standards.

Popular Science has an interesting and somewhat amusing article on Augmented Reality. Interesting idea... make the real world more like a game environment. I wonder if you could add a facial recognition feature so you could find out the goods on folks you spot on the street. < click! > This is Mary. She's a sweet, kind girl, regularly seen at church on Sundays. She's looking for Mr. Right and has ambitions of marriage and many children. She's working as an accountant and makes a solid $40K/year. < click! > This is Martha. she makes $4.2K/day and has a fetish for whips and chains. She currently has six partners, and five STDs. < click! > This is Mark. He thinks he's a player, but he hasn't scored in years. Martha even rejected him. Twice. He's making $12K/year as a clerk at the local QwikiMart. < click! > This is Josh. He's got a thing for redheads and motorcycles. He's a geek. What the hell are you doing clicking on him?

Evidence of a transnational Arab conspiracy of Terror. As the evidence mounts, this is slowly turning from just a problem with Radical Islam, and more to a problem with Arabia. We've been running blind for 25+ years now. It's beginning to look like the time for some middle eastern dictatorships to fall. The Soviets are no more, and the Russians seem to be more or less on our side. Radical Arabia needs to be cleansed of those that would immanentize the eschaton(See Jonah Goldberg).

Non-techies -- this is an eye-glazer! I have a minor complaint to lodge against Microsoft documentation. If you've ever used Visual C++, especially the alter versions, you should know that it's a pretty tight package. I'm fairly impressed with it, and i don't generally like MS products. One of the cool feature that exists is the ability to hook in the Micrsoft Developer's Network CD/DVD and use that as a slick online reesource. The one weakness of MSDN is that it makes a lot of assumptions, and those assumptions are not easy to discover. For instance, if you start exploring Microsoft networking using the WNet functions, you can find the documentation on the specific functions readily. Of course the functions detail all sorts of useful information about network entities that you can enumerate, connect to, etc. The problem is that rarely will you find a detailed explanation of what the information you can extract really means. For instance, in the WNetGetResourceInformation() function, you can extract a bunch of information on a named resource. Some of the bitfields that are dedicated to describing the resource are described (i.e. Resource Display Type of "SHARE"), but getting a detailed explanation of what constitues a share is not so easy. It's not that the information isn't there, but rather that it's not readily available from the documentation. It just makes it a little trickier to learn the nuances of a subset of the system. It's an annoyance... and i'm being bitchy. Oh well....

Well, that was an interesting evening... I discovered that my net connection was toast, tried for about an hour to figure out why, discovered a virus, banged my head against the wall for effect, and gave up. I ended up dozing off watching FOX -- I'm a sucker for redheads and they had That 70s Show and Grounded for Life on last night -- Laura Prepon and Linsey Bartilson, along with Sweet Jessica, make for a good evening for me. My favorite trio...

A nice review of Teddienomics at National Review OnLine... Update! I have always wondered why JFK's and Ted Kenedy's economic sensibilities are so different. JFK recognized the need for lower tax rates, and cut taxes by ~30%almost 40 years ago, setting the stage for the prosperity of the 60s. Reagan and JFK are cut from similar cloth -- both were educated pre-WWII, both were products of having served against the Nazis and Japanese in WWII (granted, Reagan couldn't serve in combat and JFK served in combat, but both did what they could), and both seemed to have an immense respect for the capabilities of the average person. Ted Kennedy was too young for WWII (born in 1932), and thus came of age after the War. JFK was born in 1917 (Reagan in 1911), before Joe Kennedy amassed all his fortune. He had his defining life experiences before WWII, while Teddy was educated post-war, and never faced the harrowing events that shaped his elder brother. I think that the fact that Teddie came to adulthood after FDR also shaped his perception of government and its place in the world. After all, FDR 'solved' the problems of the Depression through government, and 'solved' WWII through government. Just thinking through the influences. A difference of 15 years in age is big, and changes the defining era for each Kennedy. That doesn't mean that Ted Kennedy is any less a fool for taking the path he did, but it does kind of explain the road signs he was following...

A bit of amusement from the Onion. BTW, Sweet Jessica is a Redhead.

Hey all -- my apologies for typographical errors. My typing sucks, but I am getting better... I think I've fixed most of them...

Here's an interesting comparison of LOTR & Star Wars. Personally, I don't see what the big deal is -- both are moralistic fantasies, the same sort of stuff I like to play at when gaming. Good vs. Evil is an old and new story. Telling tales of fighting Evil is as old as mankind. Oh, fwiw, I was terribly disappointed with Episode I. It just didn't have the feel of the first three. George Lucas should have made those movies in the eighties, and filled out the trilogy before he went soft and started throwing in condescending kiddy crap like Jar Jar Binks. Star Wars had solid, believable characters helping drive the action. Binks was a joke -- nothing that stupid could survive in a harsh world. Adding it to appeal to five year olds steps too far away from the original concept. I guess it started in Return of the Jedi with the Ewoks and that silly scene with Chewbacca swinging from a vine emitting a Tarzan like growly-howl. The cheap laughs knocked the pleasant reality off the movie. I'm afraid that by the time Lucas is through he'll be creating a parody of himself with the goofy characters and "just because I can" scenes. It's the same way with the revamp of the original Trilogy. The scenes added to Star Wars were pretty much junk, with the exception of the conversation between Jabba the Hutt and Han Solo. The addition of the long necked dinosaurs didn't make sense, either. I know that not all the stuff in sci-fi and fantasy needs to be explained or explainable, but there is such a thing as going too far.

Glenn Reynolds has a nice piece on 3rd Places at Tech Central Station. Personally, I like the evolution towards making mercantile palaces like Barnes & Noble into comfy hangouts. There is, however, a critically missing market in this trend -- Women's Clothing. I often end up wandering the local mall with my beloved, Sweet Jessica, and she naturally gravitates towards the fashion shops, such as The Limited, Arden B, etc. All of these places have seats for the waiting compatriots to a shopping woman. Some even have fashion magazines or TVs tuned into fashionable shows in the waiting zone. Nine times out of ten, however, the person occupying a chair is a man, and men generally don't give a rat's ass about Redbook or Cosmo, or some show featuring the latest ladies fashions from Milan. Some smart entrepeneur is going to recognize that the market for these shops includes the Reluctant Male, and that if you entertain him, he will be far more willing to let the Shopping Female run free for a little while longer while he catches up on the Big Game or reads up on Detroit's latest. Someone is going to dedicate a few square feet to a TV with ESPN and SpeedVision, or a magazine rack with guy rags like Motor trend, Motorcyclist, Cycle World, Car & driver, Sports Illustrated, etc. When they do that, expect men to drag their women to that particular shop, since the guys can relax and watch Guy oriented TV or read Guy oriented magazines while the women shop. I bet a guy would willing hold a woman's purse if he could do it while watching the Superbowl. Hey -- what if they added a tap with decent beer? Hmmmm....

I just recalled an amusing conversation i had a while back. I made an observation about Ronald Reagan and his efficacy as a President. The person I was talking with made a disgusted face and made some derogatory comment about actors not being smart enough for politics. So I asked him why he thought Barbra Streisand (sp?) was so important politically. After all, she's just an actress/singer. Anyway, that just popped into my head, so I thought I'd share an interesting example of Reagan hating hypocrisy. And yes, I am a Reaganite to a great extent. I admire the man more than any president I've lived under. He's one of the greatest we've ever seen, the right man for the right times.

Howdy, folks. Welcome to the Blog of Xanadu, the semi-realtime live action extension of the ever so slowly evolving Garage of Xanadu. This is a semi-political, semi-motorcycle, semi-software oriented blog. I was inspired by the prolific Glenn Reynolds and Virgnia Postrel. Both are thoughtful, prolific writers, and amazingly enough they each live in a favorite place of mine -- Mr. Reynolds in Eastern Tennessee, and Ms. Postrel in Dynamic Big D, my home town, sort of. If I can match a fraction of their production, and a tenth of their quality, I'll have done quite well. As for me, I'm a software engineer, with a penchant for motorcycles and politics. Bikers tend to be of the "Leave me the hell along" school of politics. I haven't decided if the nature of motorcycling is such that it draws people of this bent in and of itself, or if the experiences that ensue create a certain exhaustion with the Meddling Classes such that it begins to drive your politics. Bikers certainly hear enough of the "Motorcycles are bad" bullsh*t. Everyone wants to relate the sad saga of their Uncle Henry who was killed by a vicious motorcycle, and only after four beers, or after hopping on and assuming that the presence of a penis results in the capability to successfully navigate on two wheels. There is a certain truth to their words - motorcycles can be very hazardous if you don't think through your actions and if you don't take the time to really learn how to deal with the unusual characteristics of the bikes relative to cages (cars). But once you take the slight bit of time to learn the skills necessary to riding a motorcycle, you can be very safe. The statistics bear this out - licensing and the MSF courses change the dynamic - drastically. The majority of motorcycle fatalities (and even serious injuries) are to untrained or inebriated riders. My garage is a little full right now - I've got a BMW R1100RTL, two Yamaha XV920s (one R and one K, the K with a sidecar), a Ducati 900SP, an old BMW R100/7, and a bunch of disassembled projects. I unintentionally evolved toward a troop of twin cylinder machines. The funny part is that all five of the runners are different in their behavior, even the XV920s, because of the chassis and intent of the design. I guess that's a good start; more will come, of course…