Ambrose's Antidote: ARREST

ARREST, v.t. Formally to detain one accused of unusualness.

  God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

_The Unauthorized Version_

daily dose of w

We will "use our technology to enhance uncertainties abroad."

GWB
7 Mar 2000
The president was referring to foreign threats, including terrorism. Quoted in the New York Times.

Abroad and at home as well.

Ambrose's Antidote: ARRAYED

ARRAYED, pp. Drawn up and given an orderly disposition, as a rioter hanged to a lamppost.

daily dose of w

Marching for war doesn't instill a lot of confidence in the future.

GWB
19 Feb 2004
Washington, D.C.

Ambrose's Antidote: ARMOR

ARMOR, n. The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.

daily dose of w

My pan plays down an unprecedented amount of our national debt.

GWB
27 Feb 2001
From a speech concerning the proposed federal budget.

See, it works like this. You shake it around in a crick, and gold comes out. Freedom is on the march! You're either with us, or against us! Evildoers! Axis of Evil!

Ambrose's Antidote: ARISTOCRACY

ARISTOCRACY, n. Government by the best men. (In this sense the word is obsolete; so is that kind of government.) Fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts -- guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.

daily dose of w

They want the federal government controlling Social Security like it's some kind of federal program.

GWB
2 Nov 2000
The presidential candidate speaking in St. Charles, Missouri. Reported by USA Today. (Note: Social Security _is_ a federal program.)

This one has gone out before, but it captures the the combination of fervor and cluelessness that unfortunately has characterized the worst administration in the history of America. It's good to remind ourselves, and the folks that voted this administration into office that all the clues were there.

Software Project Post-Mortem

I've written a few software project post-mortems in my time, but I now realize that I can save myself a lot of time and hassle with the cut-and-paste version that will capture the essence of the problem:

Project X Post Mortem

1 Conclusion

No one gives a shit.

Ambrose's Antidote: ARENA

ARENA, n. In politics, an imaginary rat-pit in which the statesman wrestles with his record.

daily dose of w

I hear the voices and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But, I'm the decider, and I decide what is best and what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.

GWB
18 Apr 2006

I stay away from that 4 20 bullshit since I discovered coke!

OK, maybe he didn't say that, if you close your eyes, you can *hear* him say it. You too, can hear the voices!

Ambrose's Antidote: ARDOR

ARDOR, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.

I also believe that some of the decisions I've made up to now have affected our standing in parts of the world. I remember in the debates, somebody asked me about Europe. And I said, well, they wanted us to join the International Criminal Court, and I chose -- I said, that's not the right posture for the United States of America, or some saying I should have negotiated with [Yasser] Arafat for the four years I was president -- obviously, prior to his death.

GWB
14 Jan 2005
Aboard Air Force One

Ambrose's Antidote: ARCHITECT

ARCHITECT, n. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.

daily dose of w

Then I went for a run with the other dog and just walked. And I started thinking about a lot of things. I was able to -- I can't remember what it was. Oh, the inaugural speech, started thinking through that.

GWB
22 Jan 2001
From an interview with U.S. News & World Report.

Ambrose's Antidote: ARCHBISHOP

ARCHBISHOP, n. An ecclesiastical dignitary one point holier than a bishop.

  If I were a jolly archbishop,
  On Fridays I'd eat all the fish up --
  Salmon and flounders and smelts;
  On other days everything else.

Jodo Rem

daily dose of w

And by the way, I'm still negotiating with myself ... And good Americans such as yourself are trying to get me to negotiate with myself.

GWB
29 Mar 2001
White House press conference.

Ambrose's Antidote: APRIL FOOL

APRIL FOOL, n. The March fool with another month added to his folly.

daily dose of w

I regret that a private comment I made to the vice presidential candidate made it through the public airways.

GWB
5 Sept 2000
Alluding to an unfavorable comment (unpublishable here) he had made about a
certain reporter. Allentown, Pennsylvania.

W: There's Adam Clymer -- major league asshole -- from the New York Times!
Dick: Yeah, big time!

Huh huh... huh huh. Bevis and Butthead win the Whitehouse!

Ambrose's Antidote: APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE, n. The echo of a platitude.

daily dose of w

We're laying the groundwork for a national campaign -- a national campaign that I believe will result in a great victory in November 2002.

GWB
30 Jun _2003_
Tampa, Florida.

Ambrose's Antidote: APPETITE

APPETITE, n. An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labor question.

daily dose of w

I think it's important for those of us in a position of responsibility to be firm in sharing our experiences, to understand that the babies out of wedlock is a very difficult chore for mom and baby alike ... I believe we ought to say there is a different alternative than the culture that is proposed by people like Miss Wolf in society ... And, you know, hopefully, condoms will work, but
it hasn't worked.

GWB
21 Nov 1999
From an appearance on Meet the Press.

Ambrose's Antidote: APPEAL

APPEAL, v.t. In law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.

daily dose of w

But we've got a big border in Texas, with Mexico, obviously -- and we've got a big border with Canada -- Arizona is affected.

GWB
24 Jun 24, 2004
Washington, D.C.

Greatest Band in Any Space-Time Continuum

Since I'm tuned into Ween Radio listing to The Grobe, I'm pleased to announce that Ween has reclaimed the title of Greatest Band in Any Space-Time Continuum.

Yes, Celine is out of town, covering The Master. No, The Masters. With Tiger Woods, Superstar Billy Graham, Arnold Palmer and those guys.

I can barely finish this post... they are playing Band on the Run from: 2000-07-23 Beachcomber, Wellfleet, MA. Notice how they do dates -- correctly!

Boop Beep Boop Beep... 24

One of the silliest, most addictive shows ever is 24. Serendipity led me to a silly and addictive site in its own right: Blogs 4 Bauer. Do not miss Bauer Kill Counter. If you're into 24, this site is the Cape Canaveral of launch pads into the Jack Bauer universe.

Serendipity: Whenever I finish a blog post, I'll click the Next Blog link in the top right corner. This was last night's reward.

CVS Under SVN

We're having inclement weather here in Atlanta, and I suspect it might have something with me not having access our CVS repository. Not good, as I have a sluagh of hacks that I need to get done by Monday just to get back to being remotely on schedule.

Nuts.

There are two types representing bands in a spectrum: thems that use tools and thems that don't. I know some people who treat version control (SCM) as some necessary evil. They'll hack hack hack for days, get everything just the way they want it, then do a big shotgun commit. They'd rather give up their right nut than invest the time in learning how to make whatever source control they're using work for them. And by "invest the time", I mean something as simple (and abhorrent) downloading some free GUI front end and fiddle till it works. The other end of the spectrum are folks who'd damn near be paralyzed without some sort of SCM. They'll often make many small changes, test the change to make sure it does what it's supposed to do and doesn't break anything and commit that change, and *only* change, and recurse.

Hrrmm... wonder which end of the spectrum *I'm* on.

So I *know* that I've got a lot of hacking to do, and I've got to have some sort of SCM in place. So in Emacs shell:

svnadmin create svn
svn import my_cvs_sandbox                      \
      file:///path/to/svn/cvs_prj_name/trunk   \
     -m "why trunk? i might *branch* beeatches!"
svn co file:///path/to/svn/cvs_prj_name/trunk svn_sandbox

M-x to Emacs mini-buffer*:

svn[return]

Let's hack!


* svn-status is autoloaded in my .emacs file, so until I load up the svn package, svn-status is the only symbol that starts with svn, so Emacs knows what I want.

Fantom Planet

Fantom Planet is a geoblog wherein you can discover how GeoMullah survived a NAD Shift. From the site:

FANTOM PLANET is "some random geographer's" opinionated output about all things geospatial, geotechnical, and whatever else on location based information and services. ... And kickball.

Ambrose's Antidote: APOTHECARY

APOTHECARY, n. The physician's accomplice, undertaker's benefactor
and grave worm's provider.

  When Jove sent blessings to all men that are,
  And Mercury conveyed them in a jar,
  That friend of tricksters introduced by stealth
  Disease for the apothecary's health,
  Whose gratitude impelled him to proclaim:
  "My deadliest drug shall bear my patron's name!"

G.J.

daily dose of w

If you don't stand for anything, you don't stand for anything. If you don't stand for something, you don't stand for anything.

GWB
2 Nov 2000
Quoted by the Austin American-Statesman.

Jack Handey, the President.

Ambrose's Antidote: APOSTATE

APOSTATE, n. A leech who, having penetrated the shell of a turtle only to find that the creature has long been dead, deems it expedient to form a new attachment to a fresh turtle.

daily dose of w

Well, it's an unimaginable honor to be the president during the Fourth of July of this country. It means what these words say, for starters. The great inalienable rights of our country. We're blessed with such values in America. And I -- it's -- I'm a proud man to be the nation based upon such wonderful values.

GWB
2 July 2001
Spoken during a visit to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Ambrose's Antidote: APOLOGIZE

APOLOGIZE, v.i. To lay the foundation for a future offence.

daily dose of w

It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.

GWB
24 Oct 2000
From speech delivered in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Ambrose's Antidote: APHORISM

APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom.

  The flabby wine-skin of his brain
  Yields to some pathologic strain,
  And voids from its unstored abysm
  The driblet of an aphorism.

"The Mad Philosopher," 1697

daily dose of w

Unfairly but truthfully, our party has been tagged as being against things. Anti-immigrant, for example. And we're not a party of anti-immigrants. Quite the opposite. We're a party that welcomes people.

GWB
1 Jul 2000
Spoken while in Cleveland, Ohio.

Ambrose's Antidote: ANTIPATHY

ANTIPATHY, n. The sentiment inspired by one's friend's friend.

daily dose of w

The role of government is to create an environment that encourages Hispanic-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, anybody-kind-of-owned businesses.

GWB
19 Mar 2001

Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer

Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer is the book by Warren St John.

Great quote, gotta find the book

Just rapped with neighbor Jason, and he regaled me with snippets from a book about the college football scene. Quote:

I'd rather root for the University of Hell than Tennessee!

I understand the sentiment. Gotta find out what the title is and track it down.