The apple doesn't fall far from the Bush

It seems like George W. Bush passed along his alcohol problems to his daughters, according to reports of them getting caught trying to buy alcohol in Texas.  Is it a big deal?  No, not at all, most kids drink under age.  Does his daughter have an alcohol problem?  Yes, she does.  If your desire for alcohol is so strong that you do stupid things that hurt yourself and your family, then you have a problem.

If you're the son or daughter of the President of the United States, have the common sense and/or the restraint to not break the law.  Despite what Bush's daughters might like to think, they're not just average college students, and when they get in trouble with the law, the whole nation knows about it, not just the kids on their dorm floor.  Exercise some restraint, and save your dad some embarassment...

Irony

My definition of irony:  The Huxley Cooperative Telephone Company web site.

Why?  Because their phone number doesn't appear on their web site.  Oops...

A movie that shall live in infamy

Alas, it is just as I feared, Pearl Harbor is no good.  At least that's what Roger Ebert says in his review.  I was afraid that Pearl Harbor would suffer from Armageddon syndrome, in which lots of explosions and cheesy patriotism are substituted for a decent plot or any semblance of realism.  I can suspend disbelief, but I don't want a movie to treat me like a 5 year old.  It's too bad Spielberg or James Cameron couldn't have done this movie instead.  I'd gladly suffer through a love story element if the director had taken Cameron's obessive-compulsive approach to historical accuracy. 

I almost always agree with Ebert's reviews of movies, his tastes run parallel to mine, and he hates being insulted by a movie even more than I do.  Here's the first paragraph from his review:

"Pearl Harbor" is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialogue, it will not be because you admire them.

Party Crasher

Things just got a whole lot more interesting in Washington, thanks to the defection of Senator Jeffords from the Republican Party. I'm glad to see the Democrats back in control of the Senate, this will hopefully make for more centrist policy... My new Mediaform CD Duplicator arrived today. This thing is pretty cool, I can easily make at least 11 CDs in an hour now. The best price I found on it was from Insight, if you're interested...

Stata

I've spent much of the afternoon playing with Stata, a statistics program that the Political Science folks wanted.  We bought a ten user license for that department, and a 25 user license for the student computer labs.  Let's just say that their documentation on how you set up the networked version is a little sparse.  Here is the entirety of the documentation on this subject:

The installation for a network copy of Stata is very similar to that of a stand-alone copy of Stata. Install Stata on the server and create an icon for it on each client computer. When Stata is started on a client computer, it will load the master copy from the server into the client's memory and allow the user to work in Stata as if it was actually installed on their computer.

Unfortunately, that fails to provide necessary information about things like permissions, or if you can install it on a Netware server, and what about the Data folder, where does that go?  I think that I have everything working properly, so I gave it to two users to play with.  If they can use it for a few weeks without it breaking, I'll roll it out to the rest of the department...