They are replacing the water mains along North Pleasant Street in Amherst and, as a result, our water has been extremely variable. They are building a temporary line above ground and hooking everyone up to that -- at least I think that's what they're doing. In any case, our water is sometimes orange or brown or cloudy or heavy with sediment. Or just not there at all. In any event, Alisa has been reluctant to run laundry -- especially of 
whites. This morning, I was out of T-shirts so I put on a oxford-cloth shirt. I arranged to have lunch with Alisa today so that I have a cover story to tell everyone when they ask why I'm dressed so nicely today.
According to Al Gore looting is not just a problem in Iraq
The 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, George Akerlof, [...] told Der Spiegel, "This is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history...This is not normal government policy." In describing the impact of the Bush policies on America's future, Akerloff added, "What we have here is a form of looting."
Good ol' Al. I'm sorry he wasn't elected president, but he was way too smart for the American people. Americans don't like smart people.
I've finally gotten radmind beaten into submission for the fall. I should now be able to make updates beginning from a more-or-less solid foundation. When I first set up radmind in over spring break, I didn't really know what I was doing and I didn't know much about the underpinnings of MacOS X. I managed to get something that worked in time so that when the students came back from break, the machines were all shiny, new, and ready to work. But I found that I had made several critical mistakes while setting up the system, which became more severe as I tried to update and manage the install. Eventually, it got to the point where, although the machines I had were working and updating OK, I could no-longer update a machine that wasn't already in the system: if I tried to update a machine with a fresh install, it would fail and leave the machine in an unusable state. This summer I decided to start over and do it right.
When we replaced the machines in the BCRC, we nearly went with Linux. The BCRC has always been a Mac shop, but with Unix expertise. I've been using linux in lots of applications for years, but for my laptop or personal desktop, give me MacOS X any day -- I can just be more productive. Still, when I'm crawling around in the system I begin to feel like I'm getting covered all over with grease poking my grubby fingers in here and there, trying to figure out the underpinnings of MacOS X. On those days I longingly wish we'd gone with linux for the lab. The text file that sets the hostname is /etc/hostconfig. OK. But where's the script that runs to do the configuration? Why that's /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Kicker.bundle/Resources/set-hostname. Is this stuff documented anywhere? Google sure can't find it.
I had a terrifying moment this afternoon when I tried to dist out my new image to one of the lab machines and it worked fine until I tried to mount a disk image file. It did the little checksumming thing and then, wham, a kernel panic. It worked fine on the other three machines that have the new image. Could it be permissions? Nope -- happens with the privileged user too. Hmm. It shouldn't be anything in userland, but let's try replacing the Disk Utility. Nope that doesn't help. Hmm. Oh wait! There are these two files called "Extensions.kextcache" and "Extensions.mkext". That the negative transcript I'm using references. Maybe if I delete them, the system will rebuild them. Sure enough, they're old. Hmm. Yep! That does it!