Josh-Kerr.com

Well, it seems that I am now subjected to a common emerging problem. docbook-sgml-utils seems to be error that many people are having and I’m in the process of fixing it. A nice thing about Gentoo is that if you have a problem, odds are that someone else has a similar problem and there are a whole slew of people willing to help. On the flip side, if you have a problem in Winbloz, you’re assured that a ton of people have the same problem and you’ll be lucky to have a solution in 6 months! Good luck XP SP2 users :-)

Well, it seems that something is eating up my memory on my Winbloz box. Its been rather finicky since I removed XP SP2 a couple of weeks ago. I did download a desklet, Object Dock but that doesn’t use up but 4 of my 768 Megs. I checked it for spyware and viruses but none were found. The only conclusion that I’ve come up with is that it might be FireFox. This is puzzling me since I was running 9.2 without any problems. 9.3 just seems to be eating up my memory. Maybe I’ll reinstall Winbloz, its about time to do it anyways….

On the upside, my Gentoo Laptop is doing great. I used the Gentoo 2004.2 Live CD and it rocked. The 2004.0 worked but had to do some tweaking. The 2004.1 Live CD used the wrong modules at boot up and made installing fun! But like I said, the 2004.2 rocked and it was the cleanest install I’ve done yet.

M$ in all of its glory and wisdom has a nice little feature Windows XP to make it auto download SP2. My question is, isn’t that illegal? I’m all for updates, only when I feel that the update is worth it. But having my computer download something that I don’t/might not want?! To get around the auto download, M$ has a tool kit to ‘hack’ the registry, but still, that’s messed up.

I get to work at what some call and ‘insane time’, 7:00 am. I’m usually out the door by 6:30 am and hardly ever hit any heavy traffic, nor do I ever see any cops. The way I go to work allows me to see some interesting drivers out there though. My favorite type of driver is the one who goes 10-15 mph over the speed limit just to get around the car in front of him and wait in line. The car that just got passed was already doing 5 over and was 1.5-2 car lengths behind the guy in front of him who was also waiting in line! It gets better. When I get within the last few miles of work I hit 3 traffic lights. Bare in mind that the speed goes from 40 to 30 by the time you hit the first light. I myself am going 50 and slowing down as I approach the first light. However, I get passed by people going 60-70 that seem to want to get to the red stop light before I do?! Is there a point to this madness that I’m not seeing or is it just me?

While I don’t taste like burning, I do feel that way. Some of my family came down from the Big D this weekend and we all went to the coast. We all put sun tan lotion on but somehow we all got burnt! After looking at the bottles of sun tan lotion, we found that they expired a year ago. Nice. So no I’m a walking crispy critter!

The company that my company works for, Company X, is under the gun right now. Seems like everyone is running aground like chickens with their heads cut off. Ever since the Enron and MCI World Com scandals every large company has to go through audits. Some have called these audits the “Accountant and Lawyer Employment Fund” seeing as how they get the most business and money. The short version is that companies have to conform the SOX audit named after too guys in congress or something like that. The audit is designed to ensure that there is always a chain of command that must be followed so some ass can’t say “Write me a check for $50,000,000″ without approval. It just really sucks because of all the details that a company must conform too. While I’m sure it will be nice in the end, the process of getting there is not fun. For example, Company X needs a report or data pull for this audit and they always needed it ‘two days ago’. So they wait until it’s late to tell you about it and blame you for not providing it on time. Our view of the situation is, ‘I need a report and I needed it two days ago. I don’t know what I need or how you’re going to get it but I know that its late so where the hell is my report!’

Aside from that, we delivered an application that manages two separate systems. Company X wanted this so bad that when we gave it to them, they haven’t touched it yet! They’ve had the application for four months and have not touched. No with all the audits they want us to teach them how to use it and add more reports to it. The problem is that the reports they want added would break the way the system was designed. Company X asked for the system to follow a specific procedure and we delivered. No they want to break the procedure…. Go figure! In the words of Henchfig, “I’ll just kill myself.”

Its been one of those days! One of those days where you work your but off only to find that you worked in vain. You realize that all of your work to solve a problem was useless and you find yourself right back to ’square one’. Well, that was me today. Me and my co-workers. We’re working on a new App that will cut a six hour error prone job down to 30 minutes and remove 95% of all the old errors. Seems that you can never remove ‘User Error’! Anyhow, we busted our chops for the entire day to realize that we had to keep starting over. Alas, to be fair we did manage to find the solution. Was it worth what we went through? No. Brain melts are not fun!

I used to live on the Norht East side of town off of O’Connor and Naco. I remember the headaches of when the city began working on the Wurzbach Parkway. While the idea of providing a ‘quick’ route to get from I-35 to I-10 is nice, the construction was a major pain. The project lasted for about 2 years and despite being a major pain, it was doable. When the parkway was ‘completed’ I was happy because I had a faster way to get to work. Or so I thought. The speed limit is 45mph. Who the hell goes 45 on a 4 lane highway? Despite the fact that the speed limit is 45 and all the cops do 60, I still used it from time to time. Now that I live on the North side near the 281 & 410 area I have the other ‘half’ of the Wurzbach Parkway right by me. Yes the speed limit is 45 there too, but it does take me right to I-10.

To recap, there are essentially two halves to the Wurzbach Parkway. One on the North East and the other on the North side. Which means that there is a big gap in the parkway. And where did the city, in all of its wonder and glory, decide to run the parkway thru? Bitters and 281! For those of you who don’t live in SA, Bitters and 281 is a nightmare. Traffic is fine if you’re on 281, a nightmare if you’re on Bitters. While some might say, what’s the big deal, you won’t fully understand the situation unless you live by the area. The NE side of the parkway stops at Bitters and Jones Maltsburger. Now the city can finish the NE side of the parkway and make it run right by the airport. The only problem is that they’ll then be building over houses and small businesses. As for the North side’s parkway, I live right by it. It just stops at Blanco road, mainly because of the apartments right in front of it! The city has bought some of the buildings from the apartment complex and has torn them down. But just 100 yards behind the torn building are houses! All around that area are houses! Needless to say, it will be interesting to see how the city pulls this one off.

CNN is reporting an article about an anti way billboard that was to be placed in New York’s Time Square. The billboard was blocked by Clear Channel but after some negotiations, the billboard will go up. So what’s all the fuss about? The billboard is to have an image of a bomb with the words “Democracy is best taught by example, not by war.” by it. Clear Channel rejected the billboard “because the image of a bomb would be offensive in a city that had been a target of the 9/11 terror attacks.” There are a couple of things I find wrong with this.

To start off, doesn’t it seem a little strange to place an anti war sign in New York where attacked on 9/11. When 9/11 hit, everyone including New Yorkers wanted retribution. I’m sure the New Yorkers we’re “screaming for blood” more than others since they were the one hit. Based on that, we then again tell the world that we will not tolerate terrorism and we’re going after all terrorist. We even warned other nations that if they harbored terrorist, they were acting as a threat to us. Everyone was in unison with this statement. The mission was to rid the world of terrorist and the USA rejoiced. So we go kick Al Queda’s butt and everyone is happy. But remember we said that we’re going after all terrorist. It only makes sense that we turn our eyes to Sadaam. My question is why the hell is America upset with the war? America wanted the damn war. America screamed, “Give me blood” and they got it. America screamed, “Take out the other possible threats” and they got it.

OK. I know some of you are thinking what about the CIA’s false intelligence, the prisoner abuse, beheadings, etc. First of all I’ld like to point out that Bush apologized to the world about the prisoner abuse and the Secretary of Defense said that it was ultimately his fault. Shit rolls up hill. I’ve never heard of or seen another country admit they were wrong like that. The beheadings were going to happen one way or another. The prisoner abuse just added fuel to the fire. Now the big one, the CIA’s false intelligence report. I seem to remember that the CIA was reporting that Sadaam had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ when Clinton was in office. If we had known that the Iraq didn’t have ‘weapons of mass destruction’ should we have still gone to war? Read the paragraph above. Iraq was harboring terrorist and lets face it, Sadaam needed to get the boot.

America wants action and as soon as they get it they claimed to have never wanted it. As for the billboard’s words, “Democracy is best taught by example, not by war.” Yes democracy is best taught by example. But when words fail, action is required.

It seems that the city of San Antonio is planning to put a toll road on 1604 from I-35 to I-10. This is a pretty good chunk of road, 19 - 20 miles I believe. The reason they say is because of all the horrible traffic at 1604 and 281 which is halfway from I-35 to I-10.

While I’ll admit that intersection gets pretty bad, I don’t understand the city’s logic in adding a toll road right there. Lets see, we have a 4 lane highway (2 lanes on each side) with bad traffic and we need to help it get better. So lets put a toll road there. Not too smart. The 1604 - 281 interchange gets busy for a reason, its the only way for those that live in the Hill Country to get to the city. Yes there are some back roads, but they’ll take you twice as long. If there we’re quicker ways for the thousands of people to get home besides 1604 and 281, we wouldn’t have this problem. So instead of trying to make the ‘quicker way’, they want to make it worse.

Aside from the 1604-281 interchange, 1604 is still a 4 lane highway with a small medium between the 2 sets of lanes. The city’s idea is to add another lane to each side for either something of another. I need to read up on that part still. The question is, ‘is there room for another lane between the 2 sets?’. Yes and no. Yes there is room. No there is not room because of all the overpasses over 1604. The support for the overpasses go right dab in the middle of the lanes the city is thinking about adding. Needless to say this should be interesting.

I’ld like to point out another observation. While driving through Houston a couple of times I’ve noticed that even with their 8 lane highway, their toll roads get backed up all day long. Maybe its me but that didn’t seem to alleviate traffic….