Well, the watchword of the day seems to be 'ow', as in "Ow, ow, ow, dammit!"
As part of my New Year's resolution to get in better shape I've started to work out twice a week, and discovered once again that my body isn't as young as I wish it was. It's been two days now, and most of the major muscle groups are firing off error messages as fast as they possibly can because they've put in a lot more duty time than they're accustomed to doing for a professional geek. I still can't walk without pain for long periods of time, and let me tell you, maneuvering in this state with a rather heavy backpack isn't so much fun, either. I'm starting to feel like an old man, and rather wish I'd thought to bring one of my walking sticks to help get around DC.
In hindsight, the sixteen-block hike yesterday morning to and from an office that I had an appointment at probably didn't help any. For the record, that's eight blocks each way - DC is not a small place, and not everything is within spitting distance. Unfortunately, it would have been just as much of a walk to get to the building that had a shuttle-bus to the office I was headed for, so it wound up being an either/or situation. Wikileaks - a website set up to facilitate the leaking of sensitive documents and the analysis therof for the assistance of whistleblowers.
It looks like all mail is fair game for surveillance now.. on 20 December 2006, George W. Bush signed a bill that changed postal regs in several ways, including making it legal to open and record the conents of any snail mail sent during 'times of emergency' (such as we've had in the US since 9/11) for any reason. This essentially guts the very same bill tht it was attached to - he may as well have not even signed the bill and gone ahead to do it, anyway. A spokescritter for the White House says that this does not give the President any more power, which is an outright lie. Making it legal to open and read anyone's mail is indeed a power grab (interestingly, the name of said spokescritter was not published).
I ask you - when is this going to end?!
Three days to finish updating Luel... I will never again wait this long between system updates...
I will also resolve the package dependency conflicts that prevent an emerge --update --deep --newuse world from running unattended.