Month: October 2011

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Another example of the fallacy of Domestic Partnership

An article from an Ann Arbor news source reports that UofM may lose a percentage of it’s teaching staff if a stupid bill is signed into law.

The bill in question was proposed by Republican Rep. Dave Agema in an effort to save Michigan some money

His justification is;

“It is not the responsibility of taxpayers to support the roommates and unmarried partners of public employees,” Agema said in a statement. “Providing benefits in this way is not the role of the state, especially when tax dollars are in short supply and there are critical programs being affected by the decrease in revenue.”

It appears the representative is saying, If marriage between two consenting adults was permitted then he wouldn’t have introduced this bill

This law, if passed will also cut benefits for the children of domestic partners who are currently covered.

I love the hypocrisy.

Republicans like this will trot out the “We have to protect the Children” argument as long as it’s against same sex marriage. But in back room deals they’ll cut benefits to those same children without any twinge from their conscience.

This highlights again how Domestic Partnership is NOT the same as marriage, and demonstrates why same sex marriage must be made legal in this country. The only way for gay men and women to have parity in their rights is through marriage.

Everyone in this country must have equal rights or none of us will.

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Well I was worried about space…

I’ve reconciled myself to the loss of almost 6TB of data.

I’d been kinda worried that the drive was 80% full and was wondering what I was going to have to do to address that situation.

Should I buy another Array? Should I start dumping and backing up the stuff on this array that didn’t need to be out there?

Fate it seems had a far more direct solution.

After formatting and checking each drive preforming a variety of diagnostics and surface scans, some of them taking as long as 20 hours. The drive checks out fine. There is no explanation for the failure other than some act of the cyber gods.

So I’m waiting on the final check and then I’ll have a brand new clean drive to begin filling again. This time, I’m going to be a little less cavalier with the data and make sure that I have a better backup scheme.

On the negative side, I lost a lot of data. On the positive side I saved myself a lot of money. I’m not sure exactly how balanced the equation is. Since I’d gotten in the habit of scanning financial records and then shredding them. Most of that information was lost.

I’m also suspecting that I lost a lot of photos. I’m going to wait until the drive is done with it’s last check then start searching for the original files.

Lesson learned.

I think the CD/DVDRAM burner is going to be a busy little camper over the next few weeks.

Word of advice… have a couple of backups of your data. You’ll be glad you did.

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Wow, Herman Cain is uhhh interesting…

I doubt he’s going to be elected.

In an interview on TV this morning, he asked the American people to “look up the history” of planned parenthood.

Uhhh Americans having to do research? Not likely!

But since he is an “Un-Politician” he may carry the day in a few more weeks in the polls.

I think Mr. Cain is sincere in his desire to do the best for the country.

How do you define “best for the country”?

That’s where Mr. Cain is going to lose his momentum.

Like all the Republican candidates vying for position, he’s pandering to an “Ultra” Conservative segment of the American people.

The problem is, the Republicans perceive this segment to be much larger than it really is. This very conservative segment is in reality just very vocal.

The average Joe in America isn’t into telling everyone else how to live.

Average people just want to have a job, raise their kids, pay their mortgages, and not have their backs broken by taxes. They also want medical care that doesn’t rape them and the ability to take a vacation from time to time.

Why is it so hard for politicians to figure out?

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HPV Vacine for Boys? It’s a good idea!

Was reading an article this morning about vaccinating boys against the HPV virus.

The author mentioned that the rate of vaccination for girls was somewhere around 33% (Defined as girls having all three shots). Then the article goes on to say that the vaccination may be a hard sell for boys.
I don’t get it.
If, as statistics suggest 75% to 80% of all adults have been or will infected with HPV then it’s kind of a no brainer to give protection to our kids so that they’ll never have to worry about HPV as adults.
Since transmission goes both ways shouldn’t we be treating this like measles? 
The author points out that the low vaccination rate for girls may have to do with parents not wanting to think about their daughter being sexually active. Wake up morons!
Unless parents are going to put their daughters in a convent…  A simple vaccination is preferable to the alternative. 
The “hard sell” aspect for boys seems to be that HPV appears to be linked to throat and anal cancers. Therefore parents don’t see the need… Especially since their son isn’t gay and won’t be gay.
This view is completely unrealistic, and based on the fallacious argument that missionary sex is the only kind of sex ever engaged in.
We as Americans MUST get past our puritanical (and hypocritical) beliefs about sex.
How many men have not enjoyed a good blow job? Raise your hands… Now go find someone to suck your dick and tell me it’s not a lot of fun.
How many women haven’t had a man go down on them? Raise your hands… Then smack your husband! Women in general like it just as much as men and they deserve it, so men if you’re not doing your woman you need to get down there and eat some pussy!
There is absolutely nothing new in sex. 
Boys have always gone for the record when they figure out how to jack off. 
Most women seem to do the same when they figure out how to please themselves.
Objects and organs of various sizes, have always found their ways into the vaginal, oral, or anal openings of both sexes. 
It’s a fact of life and denial serves no purpose except to insure that sexually active people contract diseases needlessly every day.
My parents don’t need to know all the situations where I’ve been skin to skin with someone. They sure as hell don’t need to know what I was doing after I got home from school!
Thankfully, they had the presence of mind to realize that I was probably going to be just like them…
… I was going to be a horny little fuck & I was going to have an active satisfying sex life.
They were wise enough to make sure that I had all the information necessary to enjoy my sex life without too many complications.
I can’t believe that after 35 years or so we’re still having dumbshit discussions about sexuality in this country. This is not the 15th century… and even then people were going at it as often as they could.
Look around people, there are more humans now than there were even 30 years ago. We do know how that happens, and it’s a sure bet that not every little darling was an immaculate conception. 
People FUCK.  We always have, presumably we always will. 
Realistically would you deny your children the joy, ecstasy, and unrivaled pleasure of having sex with another person? I didn’t think so… 
So why is it so hard for you to make having those experiences as safe as possible? 
Vaccinate, provide all the information your children need to make informed decisions about their sex life. 
Think about it another way, do you want your son or daughter having their first experience thinking something stupid like if they pee right after sex they won’t get a disease or pregnant?
Wouldn’t it be better for you to give them accurate information? Would it have been better for you?
I was lucky and I thank god my parents were forward thinking. They gave me all the information I could use and they did it without being judgemental. All I knew was that Gay, Straight, Bi, or whatever they were going to love me. 
As an aside… Dad, it would have been nice if you’d given me a little more information on jock itch, and creepy crawlies that can infest body hair…
Of course, you couldn’t anticipate everything but you were in the Navy! And the same goes for my beloved stepfather, actually it goes double for you… You were a Marine!
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This has not been a good morning…

Looks like my NAS server is having some serious problems.

And it looks like the hard drive in my laptop may be on it’s way out OH JOY!

Well the first thing I should do is see if any of the data on the NAS is recoverable… That is of course based on IF (a BIG if) I can get the system to actually finish a diagnostic check.

Right now I can see two of the directories, but neither of them has any information  that appears useful This could be a real pain in the ass since it had been a while since I backed up all the data on the NAS. The failure is very strange and I’m beginning to wonder if Drive 1 of the array is just really jacked up.

The question is, can I get away with just reformatting the 1st drive and then letting the array rebuild itself? Or am I going to have to replace one or more drives?

If I’m having to replace more than 2 drives I don’t think the array can reconstruct and all the data may be lost.

On the other hand if I’m going to have to buy new hard drives… I wonder if I can get a quantity discount?

My laptop is making noises that I usually associate with imminent drive failure so it’s time to decide either to replace the drive with something bigger or to replace the computer. I’m leaning more toward replacing the drive. The machine is an Apple and that means even getting to the drive is a MAJOR pain in the ass.

Maybe It would be easier on my nerves to send it out and use the netbook while the Mac is out of commission.

Uggghhhh!

I hate diseased machines!

I think it’s my Karma coming home to roost. I must have been a real asshole in a previous life… Oh wait, I’m a real asshole in this life Karmic justice isn’t supposed to work this quick is it?

Yeah I’m annoyed but I’m trying to maintain my sense of humor about it.

Gentle Reader, I hope your day is going a lot better than mine.

Update ———- 2011 12 12

For those of you that seem to find this post interesting. This one get read a lot don’t know why…

The Raid array has been rebuilt 3 times now. The individual drives appear to be fine and pass all diagnostics that I can throw at them. When placed back in the RAID 5 Configuration (After complete data loss) the NAS runs fine for a few days then the OS crashes requiring a reboot.

This has resulted in my re-flashing the OS in the NAS taking 7 days to reformat and test each of the disks in the array and now I’ve configured to RAID 10.

I’d begun to think that the NAS OS was compromised, nothing added up drives don’t sequentially fail. Especially not after having been reformatted and reconfigured a couple of times. So the NAS has no access to the internet, and I’m going to let it run with no data for a few weeks just to see what happens.

If it turns out it’s some script kiddie playing around with hacking my small little system, I really feel sorry for them that they don’t have something better to do.

I’ll be contacting some of my more interesting friends to see if I can have an nasty little surprise waiting for them before I re-enable internet access.