Year: 2004

Follow-up to my Vietnam post:

See this year-by-year breakdown of Vietnam war casualties from the National Archive.

See this month-by-month breakdown of Iraq casualties.

As of 1964, eight (!) years after President Eisenhover first sent "military advisors" to Vietnam, there were 401 total American casualties (add the numbers up). In 1965, we added an additional 1,863 casualties, an incredible jump (1964 saw 206 casualties). As of today, a little more than one year after the beginning of combat in Iraq, there are 654 total US casualties.

What this means is, some time in early 1965, the US reached the point it is at today in Iraq, casualty-wise. In Vietnam, it took eight years and 54,751 American lives before the US pulled out of Saigon. Where will Iraq be in eight years — 2012? How many lives are we going to lose this time? Will one of them be mine?

Tell me again why Iraq isn't like Vietnam?

THIRTEEN WAYS TO RAISE A NONREADER: From Horn Book Magazine(PDF). (via)

1. Never read where your children can see you.

2. Put a TV or computer in every room. Don't neglect the bedrooms and the kitchen.

3. Correct your child every time she mispronounces a word.

4. Schedule activities every day after school so your child will never be bored.

5. Once your child can read independently, throw out the picture books. They're for babies.

6. Don't play board games together. Too dull.

7. Give little rewards for reading. Stickers and plastic toys are nice. Money is even better.

8. Don't expect your child to enjoy reading. Kids' books are for teaching vocabulary, proper study habits, and good morals.

9. Buy only 40-watt bulbs for your lamps.

10. Under no circumstances read your child the same book over and over. She heard it once, she should remember it.

11. Never allow your child to listen to books on tape; that's cheating.

12. Make sure your kid reads only books that are "challenging." Easy books are a complete waste of time. That goes double for comic books and Mad magazine.

13. Absolutely, positively no reading in bed.

——————————————————————————
(sarcasm)Man, sure wish my parents had followed those rules(/sarcasm)

This is a new experience. I'm waiting for a ./configure-script-from-the-black-lagoon to finish (Subversion, in case you're interested). This wouldn't have been such a big deal if I were installing Subversion on my main system, since there are well-established binary packages for me to install. Instead, I am installing it on my grandfather's DEC Alpha box, which I want to use as a development server. There are no binary packages for the Alpha architecture, so I'm compiling it from source (more's the pity). It's a nice idea in theory, but trying to make Apache Portable Runtime or whatever (APR) understand that BerkeleyDB is installed in /usr/local/BerkeleyDB4.2 has been a Pain In The Arse. I'm now running ./configure for the fifth (sixth?) time, and the APR configure script is not short. Add to that the fact that I'm running Debian stable on the Alpha, since there's no Debian unstable for Alpha 🙁 and I'm purposely keeping it as minimalistic as possible.

Let's just say I don't have much to distract me. This blog post is being made from Lynx of all things, which really brings back memories from the good old days of connecting to the Internet using a text-mode account from NetINS, Procomm Plus, and a 9600 baud modem. DOS RULEZ!

w00t! YAY! Finally figured out the correct incanta^H^H^Hcommand-line option to pass to ./configure. It's –with-berkeley-db=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.2/include:/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.2/lib in case anyone else has the same problem. Now to run the whole configure once more with the correct option and head the heck to bed. I've got to get up at 5 tomorrow morning because I have a music contest. Bus leaves at 6:20… urgh. I'm simply not a morning person. Thankfully all my performances are late enough that I'll be awake (hopefully). I'm doing a solo — the aria "Si trai ceppi" from Handel's opera Berenice. It's a good time. I work tomorrow, too, so it may end up being an 18 hour day. I'm tough, I can handle it. 🙂 No way in heck I'm looking forward to working again on Sunday, though.

Anyhow, I may yet learn to update this blog regularly. So much has happened in the interim (Des Moines Register Academic All-State, MIT financial aid mixup, UDel trip, and so on). Aha, there's the ./configure script, finally finished. I'm sleeping — more (maybe) later.