Four more years!

Boy oh boy, do I miss Bill Clinton. C'mon, who's up for a constitutional amendment allowing him to run again?

Seriously, the guy wasn't perfect, but he was smart, reasonable and likable. Plus he shares my fondness for plump young women. Remember when he refused to sign that bullshit budget and the resulting showdown actually shut down the federal government? Talk about leadership. Can you imagine George W. Bush doing anything like that?

I sure don't think friggin' John Kerry would have it in him. Probably Howard Dean was our best chance at outdoing the Clinton administration, but someone sure fucked that up. I have to admit that I'm about ready to start considering Hillary. I dunno. It's like: What choice have I got? I'm not going to vote Republican, and I'm too pragmatic for a protest vote. I know I'll toe the line like a good little Democrat because that's just what I did for (grr!) Kerry.

I'm a fairly young man, but I remember (barely!) when the words liberal and conservative both represented positive values that I wished to balance in my life and my government. I also remember when Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, and Rush Limbaugh started to twist the term "liberal" into a catch-all pejorative. Of course, the term conservative is now poisoned as well. I've always been mindful of the many true conservatives of this country who must be incensed at seeing the word associated with lying (watch how his eyes tick to the left with each one!), secrecy, outrageous spending and crass Constitutional blasphemy (Note: Bush lost the case mentioned in that piece).

Side Projects

I've been hacking a lot lately. Since the MacBook is in the shop due to random shutdowns, I decided to perform a long-anticipated (and dirt cheap!) upgrade to Cyclops, my aging workstation. I pretty much ended up replacing the whole machine, reusing only peripherals, power supply and hard drive. Cyclops is now a dual-core Athlon 64, which means faster compile times for indulging my favorite pastime: software research. I've been building the development versions of parrot, pugs and perl5, just to run the tests. I even tried using the v6-alpha compiler, but didn't have as much success. However, pugs is getting quite capable. I've built the version with perl5 support, so it's possible to load and use perl5 modules in perl6 code. I'm going to play around with this and try implementing a usable network server in perl6.

Using Ubuntu on a fast, modern system is a pleasure. It's cemented my resolve to switch to Ubuntu on the MacBook eventually, although I'm trying to give Mac OS X a chance. For the most part, Ubuntu makes it easy to do the stuff that's most important to me, but Mac OS X offers compelling features that I can't get from Ubuntu. Luckily I now have decent systems on which to run both, or will when the MacBook is fixed.

Just for fun I also created a templating module in perl5 (hasn't everyone?). It was fun to implement, I did some clever stuff with hierarchical data structures that I think fills a tiny niche for inline formatting of nested data. Hopefully I'll get to use it more often. It's assured that I'll be the only one.