Monday, May 24, 2004

Wow, I thought I might write more often in this blog thing than I have. It's been like a month again already. A few random thoughts:

Bush talked tonight. Supposedly he laid out a plan for turning over Iraq to some Iraqi leaders. Maybe I wasn't listening well but I had a hard time following it. He kept using the term "terrorists" to describe anybody that has it in for the US. It seemed a little disingenuous to keep using the term terrorists to describe the Iraqi insurgency. I don't think they have our best interest at heart, but there seemed to be a deliberate attempt to confuse the Iraqi insurgency with the Taliban in the minds of the American people. That somehow this Iraq thing and 9/11 are all interrelated in some terrorist plan. I grew up a long time ago and it all seemed to remind me of when the term "communists" was used in the same way. I will admit that although I doubted the claims of WMD, I was supportive of tossing Saddam out on his ear. But I think we were mislead into thinking that the Bush administration actually knew what it was doing. I have this perception of arrogance that was not at all dispelled by tonight's speech.

On another front, I discovered something interesting. A friend of mine recently saw a new publication of mine and sent me an e-mail. You know, "Long time, no see, what have you been up to the last 87 years?" type of thing. I replied but I didn't hear back for a while. Then I got the same e-mail again. I wrote back that I had replied and then forwarded the original reply. She got the short reply but never the long one. I tried a bunch of times until I finally realized what the problem was. I mentioned in the e-mail that something went to sh.. (the joy in my last job), except that I wrote out the s-word. Apparently, some e-mail filter was tossing my e-mail because of the offending word and never telling me or her about it. I resent the e-mail by changing the real s-word to "s..." and it went through fine. It was a company e-mail address that apparently was protecting their employees from such offensive stuff. So if your e-mail seems to be disappearing for no obvious reason, check it for content.

Oh yea. One other thing, because I write this thing on rare occasions, I was offered a gmail account. Pretty cool. I got to use a simple name and not a real ugly one like you get if 5,423 people have already chosen your preferred name. If you read this send me an e-mail at phughes@gmail.com

And one other thing. "email" is slightly more common than "e-mail" but I started writing this using e-mail so I decided to stick with it. And another interesting thing. If you do a spell check in this blogspace, both "blog" and "gmail" get flagged as misspelled. Even more funny is that the spell checker suggest that you replace "blogspace" with "Bolshevik."

Bye for now.

Actually, before I go to bed I'd like to try posting a picture.



Hey it work!