• He thought, I thought

    We had a young person in court a while back that didn’t treat the judge with much deference. In itself, that’s not saying much, but what really irked the judge was this: the person in front of him didn’t meet his expectations. The Judge expected more from a person in the military.

    As far as the judge was concerned, he earned the right to be judgmental, and not just because he’s a judge… he’s a retired military man himself (30 years in the Marines).

    I didn’t bother me much (the behavior), but not just because most folks are operating at less than 100 percent in court. The first thing that came to my mind was: “I wonder if this person has earned the right to be belligerent.” I know, there are probably lots of folks who are sent overseas and don’t come back assholes. But, if we look for them, we see articles like this a little too often: (Newsvine/AP)

    While many Vietnam veterans began showing manifestations of stress disorders roughly 10 years after returning from the front, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have shown the signs much earlier.

    That could also be because stress disorders are much better understood now than they were a generation ago, advocates say.

    “There’s something about going back, and a third and a fourth time, that really aggravates that level of stress,” said Michael Blecker, executive director of Swords to Plowshares,” a San Francisco homeless-vet outreach program.

    “And being in a situation where you have these IEDs, everywhere’s a combat zone. There’s no really safe zone there. I think that all is just a stew for post-traumatic stress disorder.”

    A part of me wonders if this person could detect something like pity in me, and it made the situation worse.

  • I want to make it fly

    There was a moment this evening when I wanted to get down on my hands and knees and beg. I was ready to pay any penalty to get out of our current contract. I was ready to see if I could find any takers on eBay for my mint TAM. I was ready to do anything my wife wanted, for the opportunity to replace my Palm TX with an iPhone. Sure, the iPhone would replace my cell phone and iPod too, but they didn’t cost me three hours of my life this evening (and that’s not counting the wear and tear).

    You see, my Palm is my life at work; and because it’s so important to me, I sync it regularly with my Mac. In fact, it just so happens I was doing it again this evening.

    I normally know my way around a computer, but somehow I managed to delete my work calendar – and not just on my Palm, but on the iMac, my .Mac account, and on the PowerBook (all of which sync together through the magic of .Mac).

    Only today it was black magic.

    If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering how I’m so sure it’s the Palm’s fault. Couldn’t have just as easily been the Mac, .Mac, or (gasp) the user?

    The thing is, I’m partly to blame. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s true. I’ve been using The Missing Sync, from Mark/Space, but it’s been giving me lots of trouble lately. So, I decided to switch back to the Palm Hotsync manager. I should have backed up my Address Book and iCal databases, but I didn’t. I should have stopped when OS X sync services warned me that 250 contacts on my computer were about to be altered. I should have grown a little weary when it said more than 10% of my tasks were going to be affected. In my defense, that’s partly why I was getting rid of The Missing Sync. It was constantly giving me these warnings, even when very little had changed. I’d done a couple test syncs, to see if I could determine what it was doing, but I couldn’t. So it’s ironic that I was switching away from one application, so I wouldn’t have to worry about the computer crying wolf one too many times, then I disregard the warning the first time I use the new (older) software. I got fudged over real good friends.

    I could blame my TX. I could blame Mark/Space. I could blame the Palm Software. I could blame .Mac.

    But all of this is why I was SO ready to switch to the iPhone this evening: seamless integration. With my Palm, I think there may have been too many chiefs in the kitchen, if you know what I mean. In that sense, I was ready to chuck the hard to use beasty. Every time I plug in my iPod, I think it should be that easy for my Palm. The iPod syncs with my calendars and contacts (albeit one way, since you can’t make notes on my iPod). It also pulls in relatively large audio files, and at a fraction of the time or effort it takes with my Palm (just to synchronize a few tasks and calendar items).

    Now I’ve got to recreate 6 months of appointments… somehow. Tomorrow is going to be a lot of fun.

  • A failed attempt at Jobsian reality distortion

    With all the attention focused on the start of primary season, George has had a chance to lay low for a while. It was kind of nice to forget about him for a while. Well, maybe repress is a better word.

    Then I read one sentence in an article about his Middle East trip, and years of political angst dropped right back in my lap.

    Reality bites Bush’s Mideast peace plan – McClatchy :

    Bush wrapped up his eight-day Middle East mission on Wednesday with a stop in Egypt, where he told President Hosni Mubarak that he’d invest serious political capital in trying to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this year.

    I’m sorry, have I been in a coma the last few years? I thought the ledger on George’s political capital bore a striking resemblance to the Federal budget (the one where spending exceeds revenue). Tell me the foreign policy disasters of the aughts never happened. Tell me people don’t snicker whenever Bush starts to say the word “political” (thinking he might go ahead and say the “c” word too).

    By the way, it’s awfully nice of George to stop by in year eight. (Well, within a week of year eight anyway). Does anyone else think this was anything but a fishing trip, hoping to land a legacy? You know, a good one.