Divide by Null - undefined

Most Americans want 40 mpg legislation. Sure it's a noble statement, but hardly realistic at the moment.

Right now, very very few cars are above 40 mpg. I took a quick peek at the Toyota website and only the Camry Hybrid and Prius are above 40. The Prius is well above and the Camry is only just at 40; its highway mpg is actually 38, even. Basically, we'll be stuck driving one of those two cars out of their 7 total cars and no trucks, vans, or SUVs.

There was earlier a legislation to give compensation for drivers who bought a hybrid vehicle. The Highlander hybrid (an SUV) actually has worse mpg than the corolla. People got compensation for getting a vehicle with lower fuel efficiency.

Many people own SUVs also. So there's a bit of hypocrisy with people wanting cheaper gas, but not willing to give up their gas guzzlers.

Prop 87 was also defeated in the election earlier this month. It would tax the oil companies and use the money to find alternative energy sources. The oil companies spent a lot on advertising to convince people that it would only raise gas prices. Part of the legislation is that gas companies are banned from increasing gas prices as a direct result from this. They'll probably find some way to raise it anyway, but now they also have to pay for the advertising money.

People vote for their pocketbook in the immediate future, not thinking about the greater effect or the feasibility. So we want to make a standard that only 5% of our vehicles currently pass to make things more efficient, but we won't try to look for alternative energy sources because it might make us pay a bit more until we do find it?

So we want the challenge of making cars more efficient rather than the fuel less expensive. And 40 mpg is ridiculously high with the cars currently available. It takes trucks and large vehicles pretty much off the road.

A town in Nevada bans the flying of foreign flags unless an American flag is shown above it.

And yet we can legally burn American flags?

I'm all for patriotism, but I think this is a little far. I mean, how is it destructive that some foreign flag is displayed as opposed to our banner? It's just helping the people connect with their culture. And anyway, the first amendment protects this sort of symbolic speech. It's not harming anyone.

Why did this law even get passed? If anyone takes it to the Supreme Court, it's going to get completely trampled. I mean, the flag burning amendment still has yet to make it past both houses (and I doubt it would get the required number of states if it did pass the Senate). Some sort of law like this would either be passed just so it could set a precedent in the Supreme Court or because the legislators aren't that up-to-date on our Constitution.

This law was made to fight the Mexican flags that have been popping up around town. Well, there's a difference between Mexico and immigration. Sure, a lot of illegal immigrants come from Mexico, but not all Mexican immigrants are illegal. I'm against illegal immigration, but not immigrants.

You're a grand old flag, but you're not the only one in the world.

So let's start with the background information. I decided I wanted to restart my computer. I thought I might as well do some windows update right before, because that way I can save myself some restarts. It goes through that and in the process, the computer crashes. There's the irony: the computer crashed while performing an update. This is probably the part that is the direct cause of the end.

I restarted and it crashed once more, after another hour or so. However, this time, it wouldn't start back up. I used the XP CD to boot windows back up, and to my surprise, it said that the C drive was unable to be found, invalid, gone.

Yeah. No. Ugh.

To put it simply, all of my data, aside from anything stored online or on my flash drive is (apparently) gone. Tomorrow, I'm going to dedicate quite a bit of time to determine if the data can be salvaged. I'm not going down without a fight.

In conclusion, I'm really annoyed. Angry. Unhappy to a high degree. Srsly.

I'm now relegated to my laptop and I think I'm going to start to spend more time examining Linux. I need to learn how to get that working.

I think I've reached the point in my programming career (at least with PHP) that I can start working off the scripts of other people instead of doing it by myself to learn. For example, this blog. So now I know I can make a blog. Gimme wordpress now. XML-RPC has been ugh to implement, but I've been getting it started. I've just been too lazy to work the extraction of links in my posts. In addition, it's annoying to test it out and debug.

That's just one example, of course.

There comes a point where doing it all alone is too much. Why not take advantage of these scripts? I'll still be able to modify to my own needs, but the grunt work will be finished.

Plus, these regular expressions are annoying me. I don't really see any reason why some of them aren't working. I even tested it on RegExLib and it gets the data just fine. PHP is buggy, eh?

So I think I'll stop trying to make things from scratch if possible. I'm too lazy to implement some things sometimes, and it's not too bad to modify nice code.

This is something of a two weeks' notice. A notice of my disdain.

One of the rules in band is that any schedule conflict that would require a missed practice must be notified before hand with two weeks of padding.

But this rule is one-sided, it seems.

Numerous time throughout the season, we have been confronted with added practices, new schedules events, more things to do. A week before, ten days, five, even three. We were "notified" of this practice extension on Friday, three days before this practice on Monday.

"Notified". It was a Friday when he spread this information. A B day. Around 1/3 of the students, then, got this information. I don't recall hearing about it at the pictures on Friday or even the competition on Saturday. So not only is this sudden, but it was poorly disseminated.

Finally, there are now rumours that this is a marching rehearsal, contrary to the Monday norms of music. I, at least, would not be prepared for this if it was. Jeans, loose casual shoes, all that. Even if it's just music, this shows how a lack of information will lead to panic.

So, while we are required to give two weeks of notice, the reverse is not necessarily true.

Sure, chain of command has its place, but that doesn't completely dismiss the hypocrisy.