I didn't have college yesterday, so I had a day to catch up on some things that have been hanging around half-done: cleaning, organizing, finding places for everything that's just lying about, etc.

Spring is officially here in the Frost household. I switched the snow tires on the truck for the regular ones and removed the 1,500 pounds of ballast from the bed of the truck. I do need to put the plow on the truck one last time for a good wash at the spray bay and to take it over to the garage that sold it to me for some checking out and tuning up. This was a tough year for my poor plow with all the snow. I'm sure the check valves need to be replaced and the cutting blade certainly needs to be. The corners have been completely rounded off and it has several good-sized chunks missing from plowing our dirt road.

I took advantage of not having class yesterday to get a good solid start on homework for next week. My goal is to complete at least most if not all of the reading assignments for the entire 5 weeks so I can concentrate on the three papers I have to write (philosophy of leadership paper, reflective journal on each class session, paper and presentation on a leadership topic to be determined by our PLT). Unlike the last three classes, I'm looking forward to the next five weeks.

I've started getting several e-mails a day from my ISP that my web site is using over 90% of the 20MB that I am allowed. Understand that when I signed up, there were no space limitations. I specifically asked that question and the only restrictions were no warz and no porn. Otherwise, there were no restrictions on space or on bandwidth usage. I have received no notification that this has changed in any way. In addition, I resent being bombarded on several different e-mail accounts with a message every few hours stating I am over my limit. Understand, I haven't updated the site in several weeks. Ah well, as a cost saving measure, I will likely take down that site anyway. I'll keep the domain rdfrost.com for now and may even try to find an e-mail provider so we can keep our ric at rdfrost dot com and debbie at rdfrost dot com addresses without paying for them through my ISP. I think Yahoo allows that sort of thing. I should look into it. I need to de-couple my e-mail accounts and web site from my ISP. I don't like having everything tied to one company.

Politics:

This article talks about something I've noticed since going back to school. A lot of textbooks are going for flashy illustrations that have little or nothing to do with the text, bundled CD's that I've yet to use, and the use of cartoons and other licensed material that, again, seems to have little use other than eye candy. All this adds to the price of the book for no reason other than publisher greed. So what's new.

Jerry Pournelle and Joel Rosenberg had a good exchange on what is next in Iraq. Jerry used to have access to the highest levels in DC, but that was several presidents ago in another country. I doubt our current rulers are listening.

Technology:

The root cause of the massive black-out last year was a bug in the code that controls the alarms for one of the control systems. There were other reasons for the failure, but this is root cause of the black-out. The code was written in C and C++, two languages that have no business being in use today. The article doesn't come out and say that, but the bottom line is that this sort of error is inexcusable in the 21st century. There are languages, techniques, and processes that have been known and taught for 20 years that could have prevented this, but no one uses them. Programmers prefer to think of themselves as artists (or artistes) instead of engineers, valuing clever hacks over readable, comprehensible, maintainable code. This one bug has been found and squashed. It took weeks for an entire division of one of the largest companies in the country to find it. I'm sure it's the only bug in this particular system. And I'm going to really enjoy talking to the Easter Bunny on Sunday over a breakfast of chocolate and grapefruit juice.

And I should get to work.