Well, it's been a month since I started this nonsense and this will be my fourth entry. Not too bad. At least it's a fair sight better than my previous blogging attempts.
In professional news, the halls of the Indiana Government Center were quivering this morning with a palpable fear of Mitch the Knife. Dozens of people have been laid off at the Department of Motor Vehicles, Department of Commerce and the Office of Information Technology (formerly the Division of Information Technology). Among those chopped at DoIT are high-ranking technology specialist who have worked with us at DWD for months on various projects. We're now told that further contact with DoIT should be coordinated through their Help Desk, an all-but-useless collection of Tier 1 ticket-takers.
As a Libertarian, I am of course in favor of reducing the size and cost of government. However, Governor Daniels has ignored the third piece of that puzzle. The ultimate goal of any proponent of small government should be to not only make it smaller and cheaper, but to make it more efficient. A small, cheap government doesn't do its citizens any good if it can't perform its function efficiently. I fear that My Their Man Mitch is going to attempt to make as much change and save as much money as possible in his first 100 days in office, precisely because "change" is what he campaigned on. If only someone would explain to him that change for the sake of change is never a good thing. More importantly, if only he cared.
Personally, things are going great. Jessi and I celebrated our first Valentine's Day together a week ago today, and it was delightful. My wonderful woman gave me three DVDs that I'd long wanted - Airheads (an immensely fun, if remarkably silly movie), Young Frankenstein (arguably Brooks' best film and one of my all-time favorite comedies) and Rob Roy (my VHS copy of this film badly needed replacing - it's one of my favorite films and I watch it several times a year). She also got me a very large cache of dark chocolate, one of the few sweets that I indulge in (I love the stuff). I got her a very simple silver bracelet from the Scottish Lion Import Shop.
Last week saw the delivery and installation of a MSI NX6600GT-VTD128 (a GeForce 6600GT card), the replacement card for my venerable MSI G4Ti4200-TD (a GeForce 4 Ti4200 card). While it isn't making a huge difference in my computing experience, it as enabled me to push up resolutions and eye candy a bit in such games as Doom 3 and Far Cry.
I also purchased a pair of out-of-production Creative SBS250 speakers. They're quite simple, but they do the trick and they're pretty much what I was looking for (high quality but basic two-channel speakers with a headphone jack). Next up is a new monitor, probably the Samsung 910T. I've been lusting over it forever, I might as well just go ahead and get it.
In any case, that's what's going on in Samland. Just enough to make life interesting without making it too hard. That's pretty much the way I like it.
-Sam
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