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This is the time of year when the sun is rising as I got to work and it’s the time of year when storms are passing through and beautiful clouds billow in the sky.
Well, the other morning, there was a incredible sunrise.
This was a get-out-of-the-car-and-take-a-picture type incredible sunrise.
Enjoy
all the pictures.

I’m still finding my way around WordPress. I think I have all my content and comments moved over from Moveable Type. I origionally decided to move because I kept getting PILES of comment spam and they didn’t have the tools I needed and, since I’m not a PERL wizard, I needed something I could hack on. PHP is more my cup of tea.

Anyway, I finally installed comment moderation plugin and cleaned out the latest round of online poker playing spam. Sigh.

Now I’m on a program of finding security tools to manage my Linux system. So how can I be sure my system hasn’t been rooted? Even though I have a firewall and I don’t read mail on the server machine, there are many bad things out there and many scary stories. The Internet used to be so easy.

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The reason I wasn’t here to fix my server when it went down was that I
was spending the weekend in
Des Moines, Iowa
for the
Des Moines Marathon
.
I was going to run the half marathon but the real reason for being there
was supporting my
wife’s business
at the marathon expo.
Many sunglasses and
Sheddable Shells
were sold because it was just the beginning of winter in Des Moines
and there was just a chance of snow and temperatures in the 30s
with lots of sunshine and wind.

I grew up in Portland, Oregon and have watched it change from a metro size
of 500,000 to it’s current two million. That changes a city.
Des Moines is still a small town with 500,000 in the metro area. Downtown is not crowded (on Friday I had assumed it was Sunday because of the traffic downtown)
and the people are friendly and close knit.
The whole town turns out for a city event.
There was not much new building downtown and there was a lot of office
space for lease.
What building was happening was a stadium (state/city money), the interstate through the city (federal money)
and a new
Science Museum of Iowa (state/federal money).
If it wasn’t for the government borrowing money like an insane person,
there’d be nothing happening.
Other than that, all in all a pleasant town.

Boy, go away for the weekend and power supplies start dropping like flies.
I’ve replaced the power supply in the server and things are back up again.
Well, I haven’t actually replaced the power supply yet.
I have two computers downstairs that look like two cars beside the road with one giving a jump to the other — two chassis are side by side with the power supply from one running into the other chassis.
I have a trip to Frys planned to get a new supply (and probably a UPS to prevent these power glitch problems).

Sorry for having gone AWOL.

I don’t know how it’s done in other states, but here in Oregon the state mails out “Voter Pamplet”s a few weeks before each election. These include descriptions of the candidates and other items on the upcoming ballot.

Well, last week we received Volume 1 of our pamplet for the November elections. Volume one only covers the 8 state measures — those populous, voter-initiated measures which set out to change the way the government works. This year we have initutives ranging from Measure 36 (defining marriage as between one man and one woman) to Measure 32 (delete reference to mobile homes in certain tax laws). Some are VERY contentious.

What makes this years voter pamplet into an 150+ page volume are all of the arguments. Here in Oregon, anyone can include an arguement for or against a measure. The text is limited to a certain number of words and they cost $500. And this year, people not only included opinions — and there are a lot of those in this opinionated year — but some people went overboard with sarcasm and volume.

For instance, one fellow included three arguments for Measure 36 (one man/one woman). One argument included the bold admonition “AGREE WITH US OR BURN IN HELL” which gives you a sense of the sarcasm being used. Another one of the arguements points out the often ignored biblical marriage rules and argues for striking down all divorce laws and ends with the admonition that “Love is not good enough a reason for marriage, because marriage is only for” heterosexual breeding.

A little later, under “Arguments in Opposition”, one person gave 100 reasons to vote against the measure. The allowed word count for one argument was too small for all 100 so they submitted 5 opinions (one has reasons to vote against numbered 1 thru 20, second has reasons numbered 21 thru 40, …).

In other news, a local sheriff is reporting that the level of election type vandalism is higher than he’s ever seen.

This is being a very odd election year.

The scary news this morning on the radio was….. there are only 75 more days until Christmas!! So, get out there and start shopping and planning people!! Time is running out!!!

There is a starling rookery over the highway. There are power lines from one side to the other and, in the evening, there are hundreds of birds on the power poles, on the power lines, reaching from one side of the highway to the other.

This is the time of year that I drive home from work just before sunset. As I drive down the freeway I watch black swarms of birds flying one way and then the other — block clouds in a special, odd fast/slow/fast motion in the air. As I drive down the freeway, I get closer to the power lines and I can see that the power lines are “thick” — they look black from all the birds that have settled on them. Birds everywhere.

This has gone on for serveral years. I wonder how long I will enjoy the flowing clouds of birds in the fall.

The garage sale is complete. I fibbed a little saying that it was going on the Sunday — the runners in the family had to be free for the Portland Marathon on Sunday so the sale was just Friday and Saturday. Hope you stopped by to check out the action.

But, as with any garage sale, you are left with your garage and all that stuff that no one purchased.
We are now spending Sunday sorting, repacking, creating the “EBay pile” and the Goodwill pile.
It will take us days to recover.

If you haven’t figured it out from the news, the Mount Saint Helen’s eruption is not really that big a deal. Here, in the Portland area, life goes on and we cannot see or hear anything from our neighborhood volcano.
The media even is a little over blown — unlike the volcano.