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We’ve all seen them. They come in various shapes, sizes, and consistencies. Whether it is the dreadful underwear hidden beneath the deceptively cheerful Christmas wrapping, or the three-armed sweater knitted for you by your Aunt Marge. Perhaps it was the gift certificate to the ice cream parlor, when you are lactose intolerant. Or maybe the pseudo-matching bookends that even your grandfather wouldn’t use. You know what I’m talking about. Yes… yes, you all know. I’m talking about bad christmas gifts! The kind that make your Christmas spirit shrivel up inside of you like a dried up prune, while on the outside you must paint a happy face so that you don’t hurt any feelings. The kind of things that would eventually wind up in an Alanis Morrisette song.

Well, I got a whammy this year at my office Christmas luncheon. We played dirty santa, and apparently someone took the word “dirty” to it’s fullest. Cheered by the sights of others receiving gift cards to the likes of Best Buy or Starbucks, or receiving really cute Christmas dishes (some with candy and cookies on them!) Heck, even my own cheesy gift (one of the M&M’s candy jars) was stuffed to the brim with packs of M&M’s. And chocolate is, of course, always a worthwile gift. By the time the first item I had opened (a really cute Frosty the Snowman and gift card to Lowe’s) was stolen from me, most everything was either frozen, or not something I really wanted. So, I gathered up my wits and courage and braved the dwindling pile of gifts under the tree.

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All I want is a simple database management program.

All I need is to create tables, rows, and fields, insert or edit data, things that aren’t always convenient on the mysql command line. (editing of data in particular.) The only decent program I’ve found is phpMyAdmin, which of course requires a web server and php. I’ve tried every native DB management tool in portage, and several not in portage, to avoid these requirements. They all bite ass. Even MySQL’s own management tool is buggy and missing features. Is this really so difficult a request?!

Anyway - phpmyadmin decided to die yesterday, after I hadn’t used it for a month or so. The strange voodoo that commenced haunts me to this day.

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It’s official - we are losing the war on terrorism. Thanks to the Democrats, the Patriot Act is set to expire on 12/31. Our government is losing their eyes and ears on terrorism, and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it. It appears that they value hypothetical rights over security. I’ve read time and again arguments that the Patriot Act is “eroding our rights”. Oh, really? Which ones? Please point them out, thank you very much. That’s what I thought, the only times rights that are “eroded” are in hypothetical situations. The reality is now terrorists can freely move about the country and our law enforcement cannot reliably track them. That’s just fucking great. Thanks, Senate!

The Editing Room has released a new abridged script for Domino. Head on over and check out the improved, more hilarious story of how Domino Harvey became a bownty hunta.