Seebach Exhibit 7

I am the king of all packrats.

So, I've been going through my old computer stuff. (Suffice it to say that the pile's noticably bigger than it was last time.)

I found this.

Now, it's not just that it's an EGA card. It's that:

1. I have never in my life used an EGA card.
2. It is labeled "Bad", so it probably didn't even work.
3. The label is not in my handwriting.
4. Come to think of it, I never even owned a computer that could take an EGA card.
5. It hasn't been unpacked since I moved.

In short... Over ten years ago, for no reason anyone can suggest, I acquired an EGA card, which card was already known to be bad, from persons unknown, and dutifully packed it and brought it with me, despite the fact that I did not at that time own any computer in which an EGA card could be used, nor did I have any expectation of owning any such computer in the future. (My first PC-compatibles were PCI machines. I never owned a bridgeboard for my Amigas, and I assure you it never worked in a Sun either.)

I have absolutely NO idea why this card was in my personal collection. I can't explain it, I can't justify it.

All I can do is show it to the nice folks from Computer Heaven when they come to take my junk away.

New house!

We bought a house! We are moving to Northfield, MN, a small town where they have an annual celebration of the last recorded homicide, a tad over a hundred years ago.

This is, of course, related to the huge quantity of computer stuff I'm getting rid of.

King of the hill

I'm donating my old computer stuff that I never use to Computer Heaven, a local computer-recycling place.

Here's the whole stack, plus my macbook (which I am not giving them):

Some statistics might be in order.

To be picky, this isn't really everything -- it's just all I could move in my spare time over a couple of days. I have about 4 more rackmount machines to bring up once my offsite hosting is up and running, and of course, that would leave the Mac no longer quite on top.

Still, it's humbling.

Support the troops!

So, I've been talking of late to a friend who is in the military, and talking about things like Afghanistan (did you know that the US is involved in military action over there?) and Iraq (you probably heard about that one).

Between this, and the latest run of sound bites, and so on, I have come to a conclusion.

It is no longer possible to support both the troops and the President. The President does not seem to understand that, in a traditional relationship between superiors and troops, the leadership are supposed to care about the troops, not merely view them as pawns to be manipulated. A man who is "playing for" political support for a given position is not a man who is remembering that, in theory, he owes the troops loyalty as much as they owe him loyalty.

Support the troops. This means, I think, calling for some kind of basic hint of accountability of our government. Is what they are protecting even really liberty? Are warrentless wiretapping operations, prisoners held for years without charges, and people tortured to death what our troops signed up to promote and defend? I don't think so. If we're going to call on people to defend our Constitution, it behooves us to take it seriously back at home. What point is there in going out to get shot at in defense of essential liberties, only to come home and find out that they've been discontinued because there's a concern that they might be a little risky?

I used to think it was clear that the Bush administration had no plan of what to do after they defeated Saddam Hussein's armies. I am starting to worry that, in fact, this may have been their plan. There are simply too many people at the institutions and churches that Mr. Bush listens to who are end-times prophecy nuts for me to feel confident that he isn't trying to accomplish something based on the deluded fantasies of 19th-century writers who tried to make the Revelation of St. John the Divine into a plan for ending the world on their own terms. As Hanlon's Razor puts it, never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity... But I think this cannot be adequately explained by stupidity.

The most powerful military in the world is in the hands of a man who hires people to tell him that it's okay to torture prisoners in case they might be terrorists. This is, on the whole, rather a bad thing.