Of late, Ron Paul has been gathering a good deal of support from trendy netizens, based in large part upon his firmly anti Iraq war stance. As refreshing as it may be to see the power of the Internet propelling a distinctly non-mainstream political candidate, this is one bandwagon I will not even approach. Although Paul's stance on individual liberties appears sound, and if consistant would be compelling enough to tempt me to ignore his questionable economic positions and reprehensible party affiliation, it suffers from what appears to me to be an fundamental inconsistency.

The problem is Paul's position on abortion rights. As detailed in The American Prospect, Paul resoundingly rejects a womans right to choose. You can attempt to frame this in any number of ways, but ultimately whether you use "state's rights", or "rights of the unborn", or any other disingenuous framework you wish, you end up restricting the rights of someone who is unquestionably a person. To me, such inconsistencies render Paul fundamentally suspect. After all, if you can justify letting anyone abridging one set of rights for any reason, what stops you from justifying any other popular abridgement of liberty?

So, my Thinkpad T42 started having serious video issues a few weeks before I flew back to Jersey. Some cursory research pointed at motherboard issues. Fortunately, my machine is under warranty for a while yet, so I filed a service request with IBM. This worked quite well, with a turnaround time of 11 days, including two major holidays and weekends.

Needless to say, I was pretty happy to have my beloved Thinkpad back this afternoon. Until I booted it... and got display failures again. This appears to be more definitively a backlight issue, which does mean I can use the machine with an external monitor, as opposed to the lockups it experienced before. Still, IBM's tech people really should have caught the issue, since it was covered in my initial issue report. Estimated return time for this repair? Wednesday.

Overall, I could not be happier with IBM tech support, turnaround time is really good, they ask no questions about things like missing hard drives, and the call center I've dealt with is in Atlanta. Still, the issues I'm having with this machine are... unsettling given it's only a couple of years old.

My Thinkpad has returned, this time in full working order. Plus, X.org appears to no longer crash sporadically on login with fglrx, an improvement I did not expect out of this particular repair.

Now, I must figure out how to encrypt my hard disk, in order to avoid it being violated by Border Patrol agents. From preliminary research, it does not appear that this can be accomplished in place, which will thus require a reinstall, or at least copying the partitions off the machine to someplace else. With Partimaged, this is a fairly viable approach, however it will require a reasonably local machine with 40-60GB of free space.

An alternative approach is simply to buy a second hard drive and caddy, and simply swap when making such trips, a viable option given that changing hard drives on a Thinkpad takes less then a minute. However, this does not appear to be a very long term solution, given that it seems to me that it is only a matter of time before such shenanigans appear at airports as well. Never the less, this does appear to be the interim solution of choice.

As of about a week ago, I am working for Kirix. Although doing this adds significantly to my already stupidly large workload, I still feel that it is worth the time. First of all, gaining real world work experience is absolutely critical to my long term success, and is something I have postponed for far too long.

Secondly, the work involved is really interesting, in line with my skillset, and flexible. While I cannot discuss what I'm doing in particular, Strata is a really amazing product. The best way to describe it is as a scriptable combination of Firefox and the MySQL Query Browser, but that really fails to do it justice. If you happen to need or want to do data analysis, you should download the beta and play with it.

Additionally, the particular project Alex Zelenskiy and I are working on is likely to be open sourced in the future, which makes me happy. Overall, I really couldn't ask for a better setup.