The Book of Ashes

The US goes to war with IRAQ 8:51AM

I love programming. It provides a creative buzz unrivaled when you actually get something working thats good. Its a feeling of satisfaction that makes all those hundreds of lines of code worth while. The next wave of satisfaction will come when someone pays me for my creativity.

So we have 48 hours (more like 36 now) till war is upon us (albeit hopefully pretty remotely for us). As Reggie says Bush's speech is a bit like a political partys promises when trying to get into power. They never live up to most of them. The thing you have to see though is that once they have decided to go for war then their speeches have to be made to sound like everything they are doing is for the better of everyone. Hence they know and we know that people will die meaninglessly but they have to sound like they're trying real hard not to do that. I wouldn't want to be Bush right now. Making a speech like that is like building a huge thin pinacle then climbing to the top and telling everyone you're up there. If anything goes wrong with the pinacle you've built then you're going to fall a long way without much chance of getting back up again. He knows he had to do this but he also knows it most likely will turn out bad for him. How desperate is Sadam Hussain? Does he care about his own people? If he wanted to he could seriously undermine the US's credibility. All he has to do is hit his own cities in civilian areas with his own bombs but make it look like US ones. Make the casuality count huge and not retaliate except for protecting himself. Then the US would look stupid for going aginst the UN and starting a war that just killed innocents. I'm sure he's looking out for #1 and few others but what he wants to do here is make the US look stupid and he could. I think rather tho he is crazier than that and has some retaliation planned... such as bombs in the US in strategic places, maybe biological warefare or even a nuke hidden away somewhere? What if he took out a major US city? What hell would there be to pay then? This could get messy. Lets just hope its another misile war with only small civilian casualties on either side and no cities getting taken out. Ramble ramble ramble... time to invest in the stock market? Time to change your US dollars to NZ dollars and make some money? How much is the US diverting into war efforts? How much do these 3000 bombs they're planning to drop on the first day cost? I could have my own theme park for that and what is it achieving? Destruction, nothing constructive. Anyway back to the programming I love so much..

It never rains it pours... 11:25AM

Nobodies going to war in your name Tom. Don't worry I think anyone who wants you is free to have you. Nobody will stop them :P

So it seems it never rains but it pours. I watch the news (for the first time in yonks) and I get the whole war thing, the neumonia scare and the fast forwarding of the non-smoking pubs legislation and its about time too I think (coming from an anti-smoker from way back). Well I have heaps to say about all these things as they are kind of interesting but instead I'll talk about that saying I used back there. The fact that it never rains but it pours. The phenomenum of events all occuring at once. Really this saying isn't true at all. It rains all the time. You just don't notice rain. The human mind is built up to make associations, to notice differences, oddities, coincidences (like when you say, hey wow his names ASHLEY too, its like we're meant to be friends. But why?). If it rains and its not related to anything else then you ignore it as a once off. If it rains 7 days in a row then you remember it stating how it never rains but it pours. If it rains twice as heavy, same thing. If it doesn't rain at all then you use another saying instead.

So I can't help myself. It seems we have three (or more) unconfirmed cases of this unknown ""virus"" in an Auckland hospital. All these guys had been in Hong Kong within the last 10 days and were experiencing neumonia like symptoms. It worries me that one of their friends, in close contact was called into the hospital because he wasn't feeling too well (probably just a little scared). What if its an air borne virus, or highly contagious? What if its already spreading through Auckland as we speak, infecting Aucklanders this very night? Well that isn't such an issue but what if it were to spread from Auckland? What if it mutates into a super bug that is immune to alcohol poisioning (a near constant condition within my blood stream). What if it grows so powerful that even the super enhanced immune system of an Otago student can't fight it off? What if what you're reading right now is written by a dross computer program, churned out using scripts and algorithms based on content gathered from recent news sites? What if the devil really is in leage (love) with Saddam Hussein like in South Park and its going to take a really fat kid with a bad arse mouth and some technology gone terribly wrong to defeat him