COFFEE DETOX: DAY 3

I am now three days off coffee. My last cup was Friday morning. I slept like the dead last night and decided to forgo my usual Monday morning eye-opener. Instead I had two cups of an energy-oriented green tea – it’s definitely not the same, but it’s better than nothing.

Yesterday afternoon I began reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss and today I find myself unusually wary of my grammar and spelling. I’d hate to sacrifice style for structure, but I don’t know that I’d really feel comfortable making mistakes in such a public forum, even if no one is seeing them.

Well, I’ve had about enough of work this morning; I am off to lunch.

Workday

I was so flippin’ productive today I ought to pat myself on the back.

I wrote a killer LDAP query to implement a query-based distribution group for our Exchange clients, made some good solid security enhancements in some of our Group Policy objects, resolved an issue with one of our DHCP servers’ authentication, and made significant progress in the design of our new and enhanced network topology.

All of that is going on my resume.

Have a great weekend!

It’s Sort of Like Russia’s Mexican-American War…

Reading up on the history of the Mexican-American War, I am intrigued by some apparent parallels between the casus belli of that conflict and what seems to have preceded the current situation in the Republic of Georgia. I need to learn more about why there are Russian “separatists” in South Ossetia. How did they get there?

In the 1840s we were able to invade Mexico because they’d been encouraging settlers, most of whom were US citizens, to move to the Texan province. Those settlers declared and won their independence from Mexico, just as the South Ossetians claimed their independence from Georgia in recent years.

After reading an in-depth article in Sunday’s New York Times, I’m more convinced now that this really is waaaaaay inside Russia’s sphere of influence. Russia chose to engage in – in the eyes of the west – the most distasteful conflict possible without forcing her hand, thus creating a bulwark against further western intervention in what Russia views as its backyard. This invasion made too much sense to pass up.

GHOST RECON OTR

So what do you do when Russia decides to act out a Tom Clancy novel?

From Wikipedia:

Ghost Recon begins in 2008, with civil unrest in Russia. Ultra-nationalists have seized power in Moscow, with plans to rebuild the Iron Curtain. Their first step is clandestine support of rebel factions in Georgia and the Baltic States.

I’m still trying to get a handle on what’s going on. I heard about it on NPR this morning and hadn’t really put it all together until I saw the video on CNN of the Russian tanks cruising down a road in Georgia. And there was no caption on the screen that said, “FILE VIDEO.”