I could spend a lot of this blog talking about how incredibly insane it is for our government to be spending another $700B bailing out the greedy, the stupid, and the clueless. I could rail equally against both sides of the aisle for acting as if this wasn’t the exact outcome predicted by the last several years of credit overextensions, lack of oversight, and blind investor greed. Anyone who thinks that somehow either the Dems or the GOP have the answer to this problem, after the blithering idiocy and pandering of the last several days, needs to have their head removed, scrubbed with a Brillo, and reattached right side up. But no, I’d rather spend this blog talking about how I avoided thinking about this stuff too hard for the last few days.
Saturday we had a lovely Software Freedom Day 2008 celebration in beautiful downtown Fredericksburg, complete with balloons, freebies, and of course lots of free software for everyone. We had many, many people stop by — I was shocked at the turnout for a small town. Many of the attendees wanted to talk about their horrible experiences with specific proprietary software companies, which made it very difficult to keep the conversation positive, but we did our best. We gave out copies of the Open Disc, minus the USA-illegal bits, and lots of Ubuntu and Fedora discs (the latter preferred by most of the attendees). A respectable number of attendees followed up with memberships to our LUG and its mailing list.
Sunday I went to the National Rehabilitation Hospital to visit my friend, ace guitarist Arch Alcantara. A few weeks ago, Arch had a subarachnoid hemmorhage — a ruptured aneurysm in his brain. He survived not only the event, the subsequent cracking of his head when he fell over on his face, the coiling surgery to make the bleeding clot, and the risk of vasospasm the week afterward, but also the medical staff who weren’t used to someone with such an advanced case of biting sarcasm in the ICU, nor his tendency to burst into song. (There’s something to be said for a guy who sings “Head Like a Hole” the day after being extubated.)
Arch looked, as I told him, pretty fantastic for a guy whose head basically exploded three weeks ago. My friend Rich and I hung out for about an hour or so with him and Christina, basically just being happy that Arch was doing so well. We went out with him to the garden and sat for a bit to just soak up some fresh air, and commiserated on the hospital’s showing of 27 Dresses and the unlikelihood that it would be followed up by a Tarantino double feature. Arch has weeks of physical therapy in front of him, but I’m sure he’ll be able to conquer that with only occasional added grumpiness. On the way home, I appreciated relative good health and hoped that, in the same shoes, people would visit me to bring good cheer. A well spent day away from the computer, all told.