Atomictumor

I like to think that I’m a thinking outside the paradigm person, but I also think that the rolling stone gathers no moss. The rest of this post will be equally non-sensible.

Years ago, back when we were living on $3000 a year and loving it, I thought of myself as as pretty enlightened person. By enlightened, I’m thinking along the lines of having a sort of inner spiritual peace, despite the fact that I adhere myself to no particular spiritual dogma. I had had a turbulent teenageness followed by immediate father and husbandhood, and once I had all that straighted out, I felt that I knew the secrets of the universe. Maybe it comes with being 22, I don’t know, but I had it all in the palm of my hand.

Increasingly so, I don’t feel quite that way anymore. I don’t feel bad, or unhappy, but I’m less sure about a great deal of things. I never saw things in black and white, but it seems that now its pretty much all grey. Sure, I get worked up enough about things to write about here, but the same time, I also see the other side:

• City council is desperate to try to fill up this ORNL industrial park and try to reinvent Oak Ridge as a good place for techological businesses to work, thus keeping the .gov entities in town happy, and making jobs.
• They also really feel bad about little Jimmy not riding the bus next year, but had to make some tough decisions.
• The telcos are really feeling the pinch by bandwidth slurping entities, like companies streaming video and music, and voice over IP lines. They got into the internet to serve up web pages, but aren’t prepared for the onslaught of content thats going through, and as such, probably are justified in charging additional money (OK, I made that up, I really don’t see how this line of thinking is justfied)
• We can’t withdraw troops from Iraq on any kind of timetable, because this will create a warlord state. The Iraqi army is a jug of beer and a woman away from fighting for whoever will pay them, and leaving now will create a bigger problem than the Hussein thing ever was
• We had to invade Iraq to install… wait, never mind.
• The government has an obligation to perform surveillance on citizens if it means that terror attacks can be prevented, as evidenced by the arrests in Miami and Toronto.
• File-sharing is creating a criminal mentality among the young, enabling them to believe that it’s OK to take things for free, garnering a lack of respect for hard work and stuff.
• Electronic voting machines are every bit as safe and secure as traditional ballot methods, truth is you never know if your vote is counted, so what good is a paper trail?

Maybe I’m not that bad off after all. I had to really work to come up with some of those. At the same time, subscribing and adhering to a set of principals just because they’re your principals seems to be dumb.

Whatever. Feel free to comment if you bothered to read this.

I’ll end with this thought, which has been flitting around my head for a while:

Cain got the short end of the stick.
He can’t live in paradise because his stupid mom ate an apple.
Hes a farmer, offers up some goodies, Gods all like “no fool, I want the mutton”. Abel probably mouthed off and called him a hippy vegetarian, and Cain smacked him one. Next thing he knows, hes burying the guy. He’s feeling guilty as hell, but still doesn’t want to get in trouble with big G when he shows up looking for Abel, so he’s all like “Am I my brothers keeper?”, but God finds him and dishes out some crazy “live off the land” kind of wrath.

Would living off the land really be that bad?

Okay - WTF?

Damned DVD-ROM
Locked up, can’t watch Home Movies
Need bigger hard drive

New Ford TV ad
With that one jackass singing
Oh, strike me down now

Yesterday outside
Sat on a dock with Pigpen
True sublime dad joys

Seems tho, that this site
Tends to favor Pigpen some
Cute gets the photo

MastaG this week
Learn’d to ride his bicycle!
Very proud of him.

Dog days of summer
Starting to get all up ons
Humid, hot, no good

Give me window tan
Live in air conditioning
Be antisocial

Time for some coffee
Then work on the computer
Damned DVD-ROM

In May of 2006, Atomictumor went down, along with the Rocky Top Brigade, Knoxjon, Knoxblogs, and a whole host of stuff that was hosted on a shared computer run by a big name hosting company.

At about 7 that morning, the sites went down. No access by FTP, browsing, homing pigeon, nothing. After a few days of uncertainty, it came out that in the fairly routine process of moving a hard drive from one computer to another, the hard drive lost a lot of information.

How much information? Well, the entire SQL database, containing all previous posts, comments, and forum entries. Some of the stored images. The Wordpress guts, requiring an uninstall. Basically, we were crippled. To make matters worse, I had no database backup (let that be a lesson).

A search on Google’s cache restored most of the old stuff, but some of our favorites were lost. GAC’s post on our trip to Kerbela Shriner Circus last year, which was our first Google ‘lucky’ post, sadly didn’t make it over.

I started putting the old stuff back into the SQL tables manually, but it wasn’t working out well, so instead I’m just linking to the static pages available.