Chris' Updates

I've just finished watching the inauguration of our 44th president. So much has already been said about the significance of this moment in history. Even though I can't lay claim to any African American cultural heritage, I was still deeply moved by the idea that we are closer to equality than perhaps ever before. This is one of the moments in history that I can tell my children and grandchildren about: those moments when you'll never forget where you were when you learned it happened. For other generations, those moments were the attack on Pearl Harbor and the assassination of JFK. I don't quite remember what I was doing when the Berlin Wall fell, and my recollections of the Gulf War are fuzzy at best. But I do remember a fateful morning in my sophomore year of high school. In Spanish, my first class, there were rumors of news from New York. A small plane, perhaps a single-prop, had accidentally glanced off of a building. Anyway, no matter, class had to continue. But in...

A few readers may know that the Pentagon publishes US military casualty data on a web page , and that every death from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom is cataloged and available for download on an Excel spreadsheet. (It's debatable whether every death is cataloged, but speculation is not the purpose of this post.) I have been attempting to mine data  on this Excel sheet for some time, but it's not nearly as convenient as having it in a real database. So after some thought and a little tinkering, I've developed a rough solution that will automatically download the latest spreadsheet, do some conversion, and import the data into a MySQL database. It's accomplished through a Linux shell script and a Perl script, so if you're on a Windows machine, you'll have to search for a different solution. This is the shell script, I call it oifdata.sh: #!/bin/sh filename=casdata printf "Grabbing xls from DoD..." wget -qNr http://siadapp.dior.w...

So, time to begin what I would consider one of my first "politics" entries, to describe current events and my reactions. Let me start by putting this out there: I hate politics. Today's American political system may be somewhat functional, but it's nowhere near perfect. The idea that elected officials are always thinking about the will of their voters, and not about their image in the next election, is laughable. I would consider myself a leftist moderate; neither the Republicans nor the Democrats really represent my ideals. With that context, here's whats been happening lately. In the past few weeks, Democrats in Federal Congress have been feebly attempting to push through resolutions that will set a calendar timetable on the number of troops in Iraq. On the one hand, I disagree that a calendar timetable is the right idea. If all troops are out of Iraq by July 2007 and there aren't enough Iraqi law enforcers by that time, then there will be civil war in Augus...

So yeah, last night was Bush's big State of the Union address for the year. I'm usually not all that interested, but I figured his decisions might have a direct influence on my daily life for a few more years. I'm glad to hear that Iraq is going well. As much as I'd like to just have us pull out, I know we have to stay. The fact that he talked about Iran really sort of frightens me; I don't think we should be picking new fights. I have this sinking feeling that Bush is planning on expanding the War on Terrorism before the end of his 3 last years, and I'm still in service for another 5 years. Bad mojo. And it may be Bush's usual hot air, but it was really nice to hear him saying we have an "addiction to oil" that has to be broken. It makes me think that this whole thing in the Middle East is fought with the welfare of people in mind. And a gasoline alternative competitive in 6 years? That's incredible news, if you ask me. I wonder if he can actu...