Well folks, I completed the worst task of the year. I did my 2002 taxes. Why is that I lose all desire to live when I do my taxes? It doesn't matter what I made or whether or not I am filling out the taxes on paper, on a computer or via the Internet. Just the shear act of doing taxes seems to suck the life out of me.

I used the H&R Block program again this year. The program is straight forward and quick. It cost $30 to file the return. At least it didn't take too long. I hope to someday make enough money to pay an accountant to do this for me.

The other nasty news for the day...North Korea cites the invasion of Iraq as justification to beef up its nuclear arms development.

In theory, the invasion of Iraq is supposed to show that the UN will have the resolve to carry out its dictates.

Instead we have a UN in shambles while dictators are learning even worse brutality and worse convolutions of thought from the war.

Iraqis fire a missile at random into the heart of Kuwait City. It hits a civilian shopping mall at night. Fortunately, there are few casualties. Kuwait City was lucky. Saddam's forces kill refuges trying to escape Basra. Intentional killing of not only civilians, but his own people.

An explosion rocks hits a civilian area in Baghdad. The Muslim world ignites.

The US is naive if we believe that we can fight a war with no friendly or civilian casualties. There is not a quick and convenient path to regime change with a surigical application of cruise missiles. The US also probably has miscalculated the extent to which brain washed religious fanatics will find ways to filter information that reinforces their world view.

The followers of Sun Tzu would laugh at the US for believing that there are rules to war. The art of war would cast aside the notion that there are rules. The whole point of a war is that it is a time without rules...this is why revolutionaries tend to call for total war...total war means the suspension of all logic, just simple brutality. It is the chaos that sickened minds such as Nietzsche adore.

Perhaps having the world see the polluted reasoning in actions like this, people might some day start readdressing epistemology and openly acknowledge that wealth comes from a general acceptance of sound principals of reason.

The Arab world has great cause to be angry at today's events. Killing is horrible. Yet it is not a US v. Arab world problem. It is a matter of the perverters of reason against civilization that is the real problem. Such people exist everywhere. Perhaps the greatest examples were the international forces that helped Saddam get into power in the first place.

Perhaps I should expand on the bad clusters issue.

The appearance of bad clusters generally means the drive is about to fail. When a bad cluster appears, you need to immediately back up the data, then run scandisk...I like to back up the drive before running scandisk because there is a chance that the entire drive will fail during scandisk. Imagine for a moment there was a speck of dust of the drive. A disk intensive action like a scandisk could expand the problem or cause a catastrophic failure.

These bad clusters appeared in an area on the disk that had never been used. It is possible that what I am seeing is a software error and not a eminent hardware failure. It is also possible that there was a virus in the email that I was deleting when the bad cluster first showed its ugly head.

Since my budget is tight, I am willing to live on the edge for a bit...I will run scandisk once a day for the next several weeks. If another bad cluster appears, then I know the drive will die shortly. However, I have had drives in the past that had bad clusters that went several years without problems. I will never be able to trust the computer with data, but it will work as a web browser. After all...the incredibly important info in my blog is stored at blogger...not at home.

Back to the War

I saw a report on the war about the Fedayeen Saddam. This is a paramilitary group that is really designed to dig in during the war, and to terrorize the Iraq people. They will fight by hiding in civilian clothes. The Fedayeen pulls off stunts like fake surrenders (killing a few Americans and making it harder for Iraqis to surrender) or they might simply shoot Iraqi troops that surrender.

News reports suggest that there are about 20,000 members of the Fedayeen Saddam. As a paramilitary group, the problems of the Fedayeen goes way beyond the logistics of the war, and haunts the logistics of the peace. A paramilitary groups of 20,000 thugs is likely to simply sink into the populace and become an insideous organized crime.

My first reaction to reports on the Fedayeen Saddam is that the only way to win long term peace for Iraq would be to kill as many members of the Fedayeen as possible. The US would have to become like Saddam to win against Saddam. But can the US really win freedom for the Iraqis by killing a large number of Iraqis?

Of course, the existence of the Fedayeen is new to me. The US would have had this information prior to engaging in war. Which means that they knew in advance that they would need to take an extremely heavy handed approach to this group before the war began.

I will stick with my clusters, and hope that living peacefully might someday help peace prevail.

BTW, if you use scandisk to mark bad clusters, I find it best to run the program with the /NOSAVE option. In my case, the bad clusters are all in the area of the disk that has no files. The only file actually affected was the mysterious email with an attachment...which I had deleted.

IMHO Rather than trying to save the file that was infected, it is much better to restore or lose the affected file than having the program try to save the file. BTW, scandisk is still running....my poor little laptop. I hope it gets well soon.

Among the 300 spams I receive a day, I found one that suggested that the Iraqi war is an event leading to Armegeddon and the rapture. The spammer was some stupid wanna be prophet who has no qualms using some of the money he conned from others to spread the word.

This, of course, reminded me of a conversation I had with a born again fundamentalism. I asken him about the rapture. He said, and I quote:

"The rapture is a glorious event in which all the righteous ascend into heaven...bringing a paradise to earth."

I thought long and hard about this piece of profound wisdom, and I think he might be right. If all the righteous ascended into heaven, the earth would be a much nicer place. I hope they take their guns, mines, dialectics, monopolies, missionaries and other tools of oppression with them.

Weep aloud!!!

My hard disk has bad clusters!!!

I've spent all day trying to do scandisks, virus checks and defrags. Scandisk takes hours, hours and hours. For some odd reason, the DOS version doesn't seem to have the option to auto fix without prompting. That means I have to stay near my poor diseased 'puter.

The problem started yesterday when I deleted a mail message that had an attachment. I wonder if there is an email virus that causes errors that just looks like a failing hard disk? Or if it is a coincident. NOTE: I did not open the email, I just deleted it.

Other broken things on my computer: The touch pad mouse, the Network Interface Card, the down arrow.

I guess I will need a new computer soon...Now, I need a way to get cash...hmmm, if you need to shop, check out my sponsors. Pretty Please, sniff, sniff, sniff. Hopefully, when I am through with all the scandisks and defrags the computer will work. If I get more bad clusters after that, then I know the computer is bound for a complete failure soon.

Sniff, sniff.

Is it Saddam or is it Memorex?

All of us arm chair soldiers get to play the game of guessing which reels are Saddam, which are recordings, and which are body doubles.

See, my belief is that sometime in the 80s, Saddam was drugged by one of his doubles, and that the doubles have been ruling the country ever since. When the US troops finally get into Baghdad, they will find a rail thin emaciated Saddam locked in a dungeon, and we will learn that the country has been ruled by evil imposter clones for the last several decades.

As for the coffee pot, I called the Cuisinart consumer line. They will be sending a new carafe in the mail. Wow, that is nice of them. Glass shards and coffee don't mix well.

I joined and added several sites to Zeal.com - UNA Page. Now I get to patiently wait and see how many get accepted or rejected. I am looking for unau to show up on this page. This whole process of trying to get web sites noticed is a very long and unrewarding task.

On the all important coffee pot issue. After careful study of a dozen web sites, I went with Overstock. The pot arrived in one and a half days (probably because I live in the same city as the warehouse). But the carafe was broken!!!!! It had a big ole manufacturing flaw.

Dang. The coffee pot was a great deal...for those who are willing to live with a few shards of glass in their cup o joe.