Ranting to /dev/null

Another day...

So I spend about two and a half hours on the phone with tech support today. When I logged into Lotus Notes for the first time, I saw that my name was going to appear in ALL CAPS in all From: headers, and decided that looked unprofessional. So I went to the User ID properties and changed it. Which promptly corrupted my Lotus ID file, meaning that though I could log in, I couldn't actually do anything. Two hours later I could, and half an hour later it was decided that the error messages I was getting, though disturbing and annoying, wouldn't actually impede me from working that day. So my tech support guy left me to it, promising to work on the problem from his end, where it almost certainly was. Turns out he was right, and I should be okay tomorrow.

The upshot of all this is that because I wasn't actually doing anything most of the time, I did a good amount of surfing. I found a really cool site through Andrew Sullivan, that being Dissent Magazine. They've got a little piece called "A Friendly Drink In a Time Of War", by Paul Berman. It discusses fascism, and the contemporary left's complete inability to detect and oppose it. They've also got a rather chilling analysis of the activities of the Republican Party over the past decade or so. It's a bit paranoid, but still interesting.