I was reading this article about these four 9/11 widows. It merits a quote:
"I couldn’t stop watching the President sitting there, listening to second graders, while my husband was burning in a building," she said.
The mere suggestion that something untoward was going on in our government in regard to these attacks gets me riled. Looking at these ladies' short timeline of events makes me queasy.
Also, I heard on KYW this morning that this year's budget deficit will total $401 billion. And next year it'll go up to $480 billion. That's Billion. That's the largest money amount the deficit has ever been. When are you voters going to take your heads out of your asses and realize that Bush is running this country into the ground in the name of God and anti-terrorism? Get a freakin' clue!
Man, I hate using this site as an outlet for frustration in the government's administration.
Meanwhile, NASA takes and places blame for the Columbia shuttle explosions. More blame on the government for not providing enough funding to make things safe. And NASA has the gall to suggest that now is the time for an open discussion on the serious topic of space funding. Uh, hello?!
We're fighting a billion dollar per day "war on terrorism" in Iraq right now... We don't have the money to be flinging a few people into space every few months so you can do a of couple experiments. If we need any satellites put into orbit, we'll call you, and you can park one on top of a regular unmanned rocket. That's how we did it back in the old days, and that worked just fine. Stupid NASA scientists, you're not going to get funding this way.
We're closer to Mars than we've been in 60,000 years, and our scientists seem to have wasted all of this time using antiquated space shuttle tech (do they even run 8086s on there?) and building a scientific instead of explorative space station. I'm so disappointed in the space program now. And the space program was to me what the NFL was to many of you armchair coach types. It's really sad.
[This is a complete aside from the rest of this article, but the Mars stuff I found online is very, very neat. Although my telescope wasn't powerful enough to turn Mars into anything but a bright white disk, there are plenty of places online to find great Mars pictures. Here is some cool Mars info for the ultra-fanatical. But this is the coolest thing I've seen in amongst the Mars frenzy, and it's not a picture of Mars, but a picture from Mars. Similar but not the same is this photo.]
School is back in session, and I'm taking 2 classes at WCU. I've got Discrete Math on Tuesday and Thursday from 5:45 -7:00, and Computer Programming on Tuesday from 7:15-10:00. It's going to be a tight squeeze with the parking problems this year. But get a load of this...
I was looking online for a list of books that I should get for my classes. Apparently, there is no way to enable this, and I find the uncooperation of the system with the internet a bit farcical. Dynamic Student Services is an off-campus used bookseller. They filed suit in 1997 against West Chester University and Millersville University because the state schools would not provide lists of books and student enrollment necessary for them to determine demand for the books.
The problem is that neither school collects this information. Each school has a separate entity (Student Services Inc.) that handles this. The teachers elect to provide SSI with a list of books for their classes on their own. The school has nothing to do with the book selection or selling, other than allowing SSI to take up the book store premesis. Although SSI now provides the list to Dynamic, neither (as far as I can find online) place offers a list of books online.
As a result, I can't get my book list online and have to stand in the huge line at the store at lunch to pay their ungodly high prices. My used books were $77 and $60. Outrageous.
Anyway, that's the goings on. I'm going to try to find something more interesting to say for my next post, but don't count on it.
