journaling: enabled

I don’t normally don’t say much regarding political issues. I have a general distaste for politics. I was reading digg tonight and the latest post was a link to an article regarding some comments Mr. President made to regarding the Constitution. The article disturbed me enough to investigate its veracity. Sadly, I haven’t found anything that refutes it yet and it’s apparently been reported in other locations as well. To sum it up … Bush calls the Constitution a “goddamn piece of paper.” As has been pointed out, the presidential oath of office includes wording regarding “upholding and defending” the Constitution.

I’m almost at a loss for words. I’m somewhat surprised that this is the first I’ve seen of it given that the incident occurred last December. Anyway, how can this man still, with “good” conscience, stay in office? With all his emphasis on God, values and the Bible … he conveniently forgets an oath he swore on the Bible. Suffice it to say, this bothers me. I wonder what the men and women who are out there defending our freedom would say to this. Kind of along the lines of “do as I say, not as I do.”

On a different note, my oldest uncle got his legs caught in a combine today and ended up at Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire for surgery. He survived and is recovering, but will need at least one more surgery. Hopefully things go well in that area.

Anyway, on to more positive things. We had visitors today. My good friends Brandy & Jake and their children came over for lunch and play. It was a good time. I don’t think we have really had significant visit time with them since July ’03. Definitely have to work on improving the frequency of visits. Anyway, we had a good time eating a yummy salad creation of my wife as well as grilled chicken. The children were very quiet at first but warmed up, especially when food was had. For part of the afternoon we went outside and took advantage of the winds out here to fly their kites. After crashing one of them several times, we improvised a tail of duct tape, which improved its performance greatly. We also had fun picking green stuff from the yard and feeding it to the horses in the neighbor’s pasture. Sadly, our visiting time came to an end a little after that. I hope our next interval between visits is considerably shorter.

Tomorrow, we’re hoping to take a drive up along the river to St. Croix Falls to look at tree colors. Things are looking pretty good down here but I’m expecting them to be awesome along the river.

A quick math funny … just about split my gut laughing. I know. I’m a bit of a geek that way.

I’ve been working like a crazy man lately. Work is usual nutzo for September. At home, I’ve been working on the church website. I’m redoing it with Joomla to give other people the ability to contribute more easily.

I’ve been doing a few video editing things too and will be doing some more in the not too distant future. So, I finally ordered another drive for my system … a 320GB Seagate. From what I’ve read it should perform very well though may run a bit on the warm side. Oh well. It will allow me to keep my video projects on a separate disk from my apps and OS. This is generally a good thing.

Back on the work front, I now know what three “tasks” (= projects) I’ll be involved in this fall: “Footprints” (I’m project lead on this one), desktop operating systems (yeah, like we’re likely to get rid of anything) and CMS implementation (for campus website). There’s also a bit of shuffling going on … I now have an interim manager above me who happens to be a former faculty member. Should be interesting. Of course, this also means we needed to create an office for her, so there’s been a lot of re-arranging going on. One of the staff from Information Systems in North Hall is also moving to our side of the street, so we’re feeling even more like sardines than we were.

Home computer projects I’d like to do: