Cranky-D

I doubt I mentioned it, but I’ve been doing a post-doc since October. It’s only half-time and doesn’t pay very much, but it beats being a complete deadbeat.

Right now I’m trying to write a report on the work I’ve done so far, both to get down in writing what I’ve done in Matlab and Perl and to get a head-start on the final report which will be due when the project ends. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to try to pull ideas out of my head and write them down when said ideas are researchy and not stream of conciousness blog posts. It’s very slow going.

The project will most likely end in June. Right now I’m trying to line up some contract work with the external sponsor of my post-doc so I can maintain my flexible schedule and do stuff I like and am good at. However, I really cannot afford to wait too long on that before trying something else. Since on one hand my PhD has priced me very high, and on the other hand I cannot claim years of experience with either Java or C#, I appear to be royally screwed.

I know C-plus-plus* quite well, and I know C even better. However, those aren’t the sexy languages everyone uses today. I can write code full of pointers with nary a memory leak or core dump, but no one cares about that any more. Even the fact that Java and C-plus-plus are very similar doesn’t help me one iota.

My solution? I will do temp work. I will work dirt cheap. I don’t have all that long now before I get too old for many places to hire me.

I’m also considering other possibilities. I have an idea for a book that might pan out. Also, I’m considering learning to do metal work. One does what one must, and perhaps the fact that I’m really good at something like programming won’t help me that much.

The degree wasn’t a waste of time at all. I’m glad I got it. However, it sure isn’t the ticket to a really good job I thought it would be.

*I cannot type it with the two “plus” symbols… when I do it won’t post properly. I’m too lazy to try to figure out why, but my guess is that it’s a bug in wordpress 1.5.

This morning I found a few emails in the in-box. The first was noting a test comment to another old post. When that succeeded, a few more comments to be approved showed up. I immediately closed comments on that post and deleted what was alread there.

I have it in my queue to update to a new version of wordpress, and I hope that solves the problem. However, every time they change it the old templates won’t work, and I get tired of messing with them. Plus, the only way to be sure is to test it out on a local version of apache and only deploy when it that works.

At least, that’s the way a geek would do it, and I must maintain my geek pedigree.

Yet another post at Protein Wisdom by your’s truly. It’s about booze, a subject near and dear to my heart.

I just glanced at the idiot box, which is on CNN, and I’ll be damned if Al Gore isn’t preaching his global warming crap to the masses. Hallelujah. Can I get an amen?

Amen!

Why does anyone listen to this man?

By the way, did you know he did not win an oscar™ for that movie? All he did was narrate it.

Anyway, it’s hard to dispute that the earth is getting warmer. Did you know that Mars is getting warmer too? As well as other planets? What could be causing that? Hmmm. Tough to figure that out, isn’t it?

Oh, wait, I know. It’s the Sun!! Who would’ve thunk that the sun goes through cycles in which it runs a bit hotter as well as a bit cooler? And for some bizarre reason, the earth’s temperatures seem to fluctuate in a direct proportion with the amount of solar radiation that the sun emits. It’s an amazing fact, I know, and yet our measurements seem to bear that fact out.

The earth has been both warmer and cooler than it is now in the last 500 years, and I doubt anyone could argue (though they might) that humans had anything to do with that. And yet, many otherwise intelligent people (giving some the benefit of the doubt) are running around and whining as if the world were coming to an end.

It isn’t.

The climate change alarmists are focusing on how much carbon dioxide we’re emitting, all the while ignoring a few facts. One of them is that mankinds contribution to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is negligible compared to other sources such as volcanos. The other is that water vapor is a much more prevalent and effective “greenhouse gas” that CO2. But G-d forbid they’d let the facts interfere with their religion.

And mankind-induced climate change is a religion. I think it has one major foundation. That foundation is that the earth is somehow a fixed system that never changes, except when mankind does something to change it. The worries about species dying off (I don’t want them to die either, really, if we can reasonably do something about it) has help fuel the fire, and bad climate models and just plain bad science driven by a religious fervor that is pro-Gaia and anti-human have resulted in us getting to the point where even the president (no conservative he) is acknowledging climate change as a man-made problem.

Yikes!

The entire thing is political. It’s all about left-liberals feeling good about themselves purchasing carbon offsets which do absolutely nothing and trying to restrict what the U.S. does industrially while China dumps CO2 like nobody’s business and talking down to people who want to actually see some decent science first before strangling our economy for a result that most likely means absolutely nothing. The only way to actually reduce CO2 is to permanently sequester it somehow. Those trees will give up all the CO2 when they die and rot.

If people really cared, they would instead try to figure out ways for humans to weather (pun not intended) the climate changes and help us to adapt as much as possible. They would also be clamoring for nuclear power, the only viable way to generate electricity that doesn’t cause an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. If you’re going to blame CO2, shouldn’t you be willing to really do something about it?

Ultimately, it’s about power. The left-liberals see this as another chance to gain power and advance their transnational progressive politics by having their agenda dominate the national narrative. Too many people are going along with it. It’s dangerous and unproductive and distracts us from what’s really important. They’ll “save” the earth, having no real effect, while allowing the true threat to grow without bounds due to their demonstrated desire for inaction.

If you don’t know what the true threat to mankind is, I cannot help you.

I was getting spammed out the wazoo for the last few weeks. Somehow, someone latched on to one old post and every comment spammer started hitting it. At first, I set my linky threshold lower so that any comment with more than one link got sent to moderation. That kept them from showing up, but didn’t stop the pain. Finally, today I realized that closing comments to that entry might help. I did, and now blissful silence.

Except for someone who sent me an email asking if I want to pay them to get my site to show up at the top in search engines.

Me. A computer science geek. It is to laugh.

All you have to do is embed some text that cannot be seen, or just add a few posts that hit the g**gle “high points” and BAM! you’ll have traffic.

That’s all I need. A reason to raise my bandwidth limit.

I guess if I had ads it might make a difference. But since no one reads this site but me, why would I bother?

I think I’ll go read a site that has some actual content. Toodles!

These guys are attempting to revive the western in space series “Firefly.” Since it is my favorite show, I hope they succeed. If you’re a fan, click on over and take the survey. They are trying to find out if there are enough people out there who are interested. You don’t need to enter your name or any personal information. I certainly didn’t.

My innate cynicism casts doubt on their chances, especially after the movie “Serenity” didn’t do as well as was hoped, but I wouldn’t mind being wrong.

I did renew my URL and everything, but I haven’t been inspired at all. However, the spambots are great at finding old posts to “comment” on, so I have changed my comment policy. The only comments that are automatically accepted must have one or fewer hyperlinks in them. Otherwise they go straight to moderation.

I have some ideas for content. I think it may be time to fire up the neurons again and return to creating whatever it is I create here.

Update: Got an email from someone sniffing for a place to spam me, so I closed comments. I’m sure that upsets no one.