I heard on the radio this morning how Bush planned to attack Iraq right from the start. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill went on 60 Minutes and made the claim that Iraq was the topic of Bush’s first National Security Council meeting.

Doing a search on news.google.com, I see hardly any play of this story on any major U.S. news sites. What’s up with that? Where is the outrage?

I keep seeing more and more evidence that the attack on Iraq was contrived. I’ve already seen evidence that the WTC attacks were staged, ludicrous as it may sound to some. Someone should be held accountable for misleading the country.

There are questions that need to be asked about the so-called threats our country has allegedly been facing. Its a shame our press is too pathetic to ask them.

On our walk Sunday at Lake Johnson park, I passed a familiar face. Gordon Young, guru developer from my HAHT Software days, was walking with his wife at the same time. Turns out he’s the cofounder of a new start-up, Serenus, and liking it, apparently.

It was also nice getting the scoop on the old HAHTsters I used to work with. For instance, Alex Herring is developing games now, with Tim Sampair on his team. John Creamer is writing short stories at his crib downtown. We also talked about the need to revive “beer nights.”

It was nice to see him again, after what is fast approaching ten years away from HAHT. Where does the time go?

If you’ve got the scoop on other HAHT (or Q+E) people, drop a line below.

We’re getting some light snow this morning and Hallie is going nuts. She wants to go outside so badly. She keeps repeating “snow! Out! Side! Cold! Wet!”

I wish I could stay home and play with her but duty calls. Work gets in the way of everything.

For a challenge, take a look at my weather graphs and see if you can tell what time it started snowing.

Just got back from hearing an outstanding presentation on voice over IP, provided by Jon Carnes at the TriLUG meeting. Jon was preaching the religion of VoIP, and the congregation was in rapt attention. I’ve never been to a Linux user group meeting that attracted as much attention as Jon’s. It just reinforces my decision to jump into this technology.

I’ll put together an Asterisk class for next month and show people some REALLY cool stuff. Who knows? I might get some consulting work out of it.

Not ten minutes after I wrote about tripped breakers, the inevitable happened. Four space heaters and a dozen PCs and monitors tripped a 60 amp breaker.

On the plus side, we figured out that the air conditioning is ALSO on, so we’re getting closer to getting things above freezing.

It’s low-60’s in the office again. This time I brought in my space heater. Kelly laughed at me when I left this morning, but I’m sure glad I brought it! Now let’s see if this ancient building’s wiring can handle the extra load of a half-dozen space heaters.

Reminds me of the time I was IT Guy at Accipiter. We were in a building even more ancient than this one: one that seemed to have only one circuit for half of it. It was poorly insulated, too, so every time it got cold, people would crank up their space heaters. That of course would trip a breaker and send a dozen PCs screaming to their deaths.

I told management that we should invest in some extra circuits, but got shot down every time. Drove me nuts. Seems the cost of a few hours of an electrician’s work outweighed the cost of a whole company losing whatever they were working on at any instant.

Ah, good times.

Ok, this is ridiculous. This morning’s office temperature is 59 degrees.

I read a press release today where the CEO was talking about taking his company “to the next level.” I think the phrase is easily in the Top Ten Most Overused Phrases list.

There is no such thing as the “next level.” It implies some sort of finite boundary between where something is and where something could be. Truth is, there is no magic word which can teleport something to “the next level.” People, companies, and things get to this so-called next level through one thing and one thing only: work. They WORK to get there.

Those silly words serve to distract the focus from the work that is needed to actually get some place. It reinforces that ficticious, invisible barrier blocking a goal.

I’d love to see it disappear entirely from business vernacular (and take “touch base” with it).