Chuck Norris has two speeds: Walk, and Kill.
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NOTE: I'm still noticing that I have some readers out there pulling my blog via my newsfeed (see the three buttons in the sidebar on the left...Feedburner, Yahoo, and MSN, to let you actually pull the feeds into a reader, My Yahoo, or My MSN, respectively). I'm thrilled to see this happening, but I don't know who any of you could possibly be. If you like what you're reading, throw in some comments or drop me a line sometime. I'll try to make myself a little more accessible.
Thanks for tolerating that little aside...now on to the more serious work of actually posting something interesting.
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Is anyone else as sick as I am about this weekend's hunting accident involving Vice President Cheney? The way the media and the bloggers are going after this, you'd think he'd been having a row with someone who is a "loose end" regarding the Bush Administration's obvious plans for world domination, and so to silence him, Mr. Cheney had intentionally aimed and fired at the guy. I don't understand how we've somehow gotten to the point where someone can make an honest mistake, and we can't give them the benefit of the doubt. There have been times in my life where I've felt like I always get the maximum punishment when I make a mistake. When I get pulled over, I always get a ticket, never a warning, even for the most trivial things (like expired tags, for example...but that's a story for another post). If I say the wrong thing, it's never forgotten and forever used against me. So I can really feel for Mr. Cheney here. Sure, he's in a very high-profile position, which might explain why the details of the incident were so long in coming. I'm sure the President knew the vultures would dive on this like a dead coyote, and he was right. Give the man a chance, though. To borrow from Sigmund Freud, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar;" sometimes a hunting accident is just that, a hunting accident. I'm sure Mr. Cheney feels bad enough about what happened; perhaps it's best to leave it at that and not pile on.
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For some reason, I'm missing Oklahoma a little worse than usual today. I don't think this was inspired by today's weather (that storm I mentioned yesterday came in last night, with a vengeance...we got 4-6 inches in most parts of the metro). There are simply times where my thoughts naturally drift to my home. It can be very distracting, and today's weather can have an amplifying effect. But I've had it happen just as much on nice days, good days here, as on days like this. It could be sunny and 85, and I could still have thoughts like, "Man, I wish I were out tearing tail across Lake Keystone on a Waverunner right now." Today, it was "Man, I'd love to be home, having lunch with my family and talking OU football" and "I wonder when I'll get back home to see Grandma and Grandpa again." I think things are intensifying also because my grandparents are starting to get up there; I've lost two grandfathers (one biological, the other a step I've known as "Grandpa Lee" since I was about three) in the last few years, and the remaining grandparents might make it another 5-10 if I'm very fortunate. That's the hardest part of living here. I can't give my kids the same kind of close-family experience I had growing up, and I can't give my relatives back home the same kind of closeness to their cousins/grandchildren/nieces/nephews that they always had with me and the others of my generation of the clan. Sometimes, it just sneaks up on me.
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I was telling Heidi today how much it amazes me how other folks who work in information security like I do, can take so much extra time and do creative things to keep the saw sharp. I'll be honest, I'd love to do the same things. I'd love to build a nice low-end computer lab in my basement and run some really cool apps, maybe a honeypot or two, maybe do a little on-my-own forensics exercises, maybe some wargames with other folks I know from my career. I'd love to be able to read more books, play more with the systems, get more in-depth, really knock this stuff out. I've been able to leave behind my old dreams: umpiring, linguistics, teaching at OU; I'm in this career now, this is what I love, this is what I want to do. I want to maximize it, get better at it, become a real expert and really blow everyone away, like these other people I see every day. Given my other responsibilities, I doubt I'll be able to do much extra stuff, and I'm fine with that. It's just hard sometimes because the drive, the competitiveness I've always had is still there, pushing me to get better.
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A humorous aside, something I'd never noticed before. I just ran a quick spellcheck, and as it hit the NOTE: section at the top of the post, Blogger's built-in spellchecker objected to the words "blog" and "bloggers" for some strange reason. This IS Blogger, one of the most popular blogging sites on the 'Net, isn't it? You'd think their spellchecker would recognize and accept words like "blog" and "blogger". And we wonder why technology doesn't always seem to work as it's supposed to...
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Sigh.....it's about time for me to head home, as the snow has really started to pick up and now I'm getting concerned about getting stuck in Boulder. So that means my post is done for the day.
Thanks for reading along.
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