Word Power

I was reading one of my favorite sections in The Onion today and started off on an interesting journey. Seeing Dan’s success with “santorum“, he got a challenge to try and revive some words that have fallen out of common use, kakistocracy was one of them. I then had to go searching Google to make sure this was a real word. It is, and I stumbled upon something that’s almost funny in light of the current political atmosphere: The Clinton Kakistocracy.
I wish Dubya had only gotten a blowjob from an intern. Lets go down the checklist:

  • Using questionable military actions to distract from other shortcomings in the administration? CHECK
  • Claiming your advisors all back your actions when there is nothing close to a concensus? CHECK
  • Having a bunch of two faced partisans claim that partisan action, by the other side of course, is behind all of this? CHECK
  • “lemming-like recitation of ‘I believe the president'”? CHECK (Just watch two Sunday morning talking-head, gasbag shows and feel the talking points wearing at your soul).

And to top it all off:

“With evidence now gathered since the bombing, it is certain the attack was, at best, a poorly planned military exercise and at worst a multi-million dollar deadly diversion.”

Poor planning? Billions spent distracting us from the real target?
Heres to hoping I’m only drinking because of the game after the debate tommorrow.

Day Trip to the Illinois River

Alisha and I spent the day driving over to Havana. Driving into town on Rt 136, we saw 2 seperate signs for the “Historic Watertower”, so I had to stop and take a picture of it. Brick base with a metal tank on top.Historic Havana, IL watertower
After that, we crossed over the Illinois River and visited the Dickson Mounds Museum. Excellent place to visit, but not exactly what we set out for. We headed back over the river to the Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge., where we took some more pictures.

MBSA and MS04-025

When MBSA 1.2.1 tells you this about MS04-025, it’s probably safe to ignore.

A required registry key does not exist. It is necessary in order for this patch to be considered installed. [SOFTWAREMicrosoftInternet ExplorerActiveX Compatibility{3B7C8860-D78F-101B-B9B5-04021C009402}Compatibility Flags]

Check the file versions listed in the bulletin, but it’s probably wrong.

Oh, and this guy deserves a nice pat on the back for wonderful instructions on how to patch an Office 2003 administrative install share. Amazingly enough, patching the install share and then calling setup.exe REINSTALL=ALL /qb /L*v c:o2k3re.log actually works as advertised.

(And it looks like my stylesheet still needs some adjustments)

MS04-028 patches

I’m working on the last set of patches from Microsoft for the labs, and they are beginning to annoy me.

The one for IE6sp1 works just as advertised, with the standard unattended commandline:IE6.0sp1-KB833989-x86-ENU.exe /q:a /r:n.

The one for the DotNet Framework 1.1, isn’t quite so straight-forward. The command line options work as advertised. (I’m using NDP1.1sp1-KB867460-X86.exe /Q /L:c:dotnetsp1.txt). But after installing, the version numbers don’t match up with the version checking method listed in KB318785. %WINDOWS%System32URTTempmscoree.dll does NOT get updated, while the version in %WINDOWS%System32 does.

Arrgh. Now on to the Office 2003 patching, from an Admin install share. This should be fun. At least there are reccommended practices from Microsoft on this stuff.