“In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” quipped the straight talking presidential hopeful John McCain referring to Russia’s recent aggressive move into Georgia. It sure sounded like stern talk coming from the guy who jokes about bombing Iran and suggests that we may be in Iraq for another hundred years but it was also pretty ridiculous given that the US is still occupying the two nations it invaded over 5 years ago. Of course we only “liberate” other nations in the 21st century (as Comedy Central pointed out). After 8 years of the current administration’s antics it’s really hard for us to take the high road on this one. I *want* to get up on my high horse about invading small economically important nations, but in the light of our own escapades I feel like maybe we owe them a pass on at least one

While many Americans still believe, against all the evidence to the contrary that the US move into Iraq was justified, I would wager that most Americans don’t have a clue why Russia felt it important to invade Georgia. Here’s what I think is going on: After the Soviet Union broke up, then president Clinton jumped on the opportunity to work with Georgia and to invest in that country to help make a pipeline possible from the oil rich Caspian Sea to the Black Sea (and thus, Europe) that would not pass through Russia. Russia (and Iran) would of course like to maintain as much of a strangle hold on the oil that reaches Europe from the east as possible, and this move into Georgia (which apparently has been planned for some time) is Russia’s way of saying to investors in the west that they had better rethink investment in this region. It puts the pipeline through Georgia in danger, and suggests that investors should take safer bets elsewhere (perhaps with Lukoil?)

You may have already seen this, but if not - Randy Pausch passed away yesterday so I thought it fitting to link to it today. Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch was diagnosed with terminal cancer and was given only a very short time to live. Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. It’s definitely worth a listen beyond the simple draw of morbid fascination.

My company hasn’t embraced Vista. We have been ordering Windows XP “downgrades” for months and staving off the inevitable as long as possible. Today I received in a machine that I needed to set up for engineering, and it came in with Visa Business. A mistake, but I figured as long as I had it here, I might as well mess around with it. So far I am not very impressed. There hasn’t been any crashing to speak of, so that much is good news, but annoyances abound, and many of the things I hated about XP are still there.
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The first open phone is already out (for developers) called the Neo Freerunner. By “open” I mean that the OS is fully documented, and customizable by those with the skills to modify it. It is using Openmoko which is the competing open mobile operating system (OS) to Google’s Android mobile OS (still no phones with that yet as far as I know). Both projects are leveraging the linux kernel which makes this exciting to me. You can use the new $400 device (which is currently sold out) on the AT&T network, but its mainly going to Universities for use in computer science classes right now.
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We were out at the LI Irish Fest which was held at the Abbess Farm in Calverton from about 2 until 11 on Saturday, and I had been having such a good time I had forgotten to take any pictures at all. All I have are some crappy shots from a cell phone, though I think Sport had a camera with him. There were 7 tents of various sizes, all very impressive. I quipped that we should find out how much it costs to have one of these put up, so we wouldn’t need to set up any tents at all when we camp; We could just partition the huge thing into rooms! In fact, the only thing that wasn’t impressive about the fest was the turn out. I don’t know if it was a lack of advertising or what, but there were some awesome bands playing to nearly empty tents which was a shame. The lack of crowds was very welcome to me personally, however - I just hope they broke even at least. Those tents were probably not cheap.
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