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Sun. Mar 12, 2006

More Thoughts And Observations From The Road

I’m still in Mississippi, as I have been for 11 of the past 16 days. My Dad has been in and out of ICU three times now, but we’re hoping the coming week will bring progress in our plan to “get his life back.” What time I’ve had at the computer has been devoted to taking care of client work, and communicating with my most understanding wife, 300 miles away. But as always, there’s other unrelated things going on that create reactions which end up here.

First things first. Last time, I published Thoughts and Observations While Travelling from a McDonalds, using a wireless connection they didn’t even know they had. It was a welcome wifi happenstance, but frankly, their seats are too hard for my old butt. That was last Monday, and on Monday and Tuesday night, by the time I got back to Mom and Dad’s house I was too tired to even open the laptop.

But on Wednesday night, I booted it up to make some notes and get some work done. Which leads to the following two observations and pieces of advice. One, if you buy a wireless router, I know it can sometimes be hard just to get it to work at all. But when you do … you’re not done. You need to change the SSID to something other than “default” (it’s a dead giveaway) and you need to add a password. Otherwise, your 6Mbit cable access is wide open for a desperate traveller who hates hard seats and is hungry for a connection (please, no morality lectures, I know I shouldn’t, but I have to). Oh, and if you do set a password, and WEP encryption requires a 13 character password (which can be hard to choose and remember) don’t make it something painfully obvious, like “1234567891011.” Just some advice … which I hope Mom and Dad’s neighbors hold off on until I can get their own broadband installed.

The empathy level one finds within the walls of a hospital can alter one’s view of their fellow humans. It’s an unspoken thing. Any “civilian” you encounter there is in the hospital because a loved one is in there. And they know you are, too. This makes interactions among total strangers far kinder than out in The Real World. Conversely, when you find someone who’s a sourpuss in the hospital, you can be sure they are even more unpleasant out in The Real World. Thankfully, they are few and far between.

Some guy with playdoh for brains decided he wanted to “punish the government of the United States for [its] actions around the world.” So how does he do it? He uses his car to try and run over college students at UNC. Which, in terms of logic, is about like shooting your mailman because you’re mad at the UN. Is this supposed to impress us with the alleged “courage” it takes to run down unarmed innocents while wrapped in an iron machine, or make us scared to go to college for fear of roving lunatics in cars? Mohammed Taheri-azar, Jim Jones, Eric Rudolph … there’s not a whole lot of difference when it comes to nutballs who try to kill in the name of religion. Just their level of success. In Taheri-azar’s case, none of his victims were even hospitalized.

When it came to defending his country from US attack, Saddam was a paranoid incompetent. However, he clearly took sectarian strife far more seriously than our Department of Defense did. It crippled his defense, as our near complete lack of concern over it crippled the post-war effort. And there’s this from three months before the war: “Mr. Hussein wanted his officers to know they could not rely on poison gas or germ weapons if war broke out. The disclosure that the cupboard was bare, Mr. Aziz said, sent morale plummeting.”

Rental car comparison: the Chevy Impala is a boat, if a fast one. Its interior is not just unremarkable, it looks cheap. The Ford Fusion is not quite as peppy engine-wise, but it’s a far better designed machine, inside and out. The interior was pretty plush, well laid out, and far from cheap looking. If I were in the market for a car, it would get pretty strong consideration. Now, if I could just find a rental company that rents the Chrysler Crossfire. No, I don’t care if my luggage won’t fit. I’ll pack light…

John Kerry: “When you get knocked on your ass and lose a race, you’ve got to stop and reflect on what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, what matters, and what’s important. And I did.” Now, you and I might make such an assessment in Kerry’s position, and it would be plain as day: I took my best shot, mortgaged my wife’s house, and failed. Time to move on. But not Kerry: “There’s a very different John Kerry now who is absolutely crystal clear about how I communicate what I need to communicate. ... People are going to be looking for leadership.” Yes they are. That’s why they’re going to look right past Kerry without even a pause. This is ego talking. To itself.

And for now, I’m done talking to myself here, as I’m sure folks think this site is dead. And that’s OK. Once a year or so I like to try and drive traffic down. This time it wasn’t planned, but I’ll consider it “spring cleaning.” My Technorati Rank is currently 16,312 out of 30.3 million blogs. Let’s see if we can get that up over 20,000.

My next planned entry (no, I don’t know when) should help: a detailed timeline of the hell I’ve been through over the past two weeks, entitled “Jack Bauer or Joe Btfsplk?” My, won’t that make for uplifting reading…