"Nothing can go wrong on Rex Manning Day" - Empire Records

Today is my first official day on the morning shift. I used to work from 1630 - 0030 (4:30p - 12:30a for you non-military types), which I did for two months. Before that, it was 1330 - 2130, which I did for like four months. Now, I work 0500 - 1330. Let me tell you, it's tough. I woke up this morning at 4:15...The last time I was awake that early was when Meghan and I went on our cruise back in December (2:30 AM).

There's a stress test going on at my site today for the lead baseline, and thankfully, system initialization went very smoothly, for the most part. That started around 0600, and was finally finished around 0730. Today is also new password day for all the classified systems, so we've had every Tom, Dick, and Harry down here in my office to get their new password (I'm one of the classified password admins). This has also gone pretty smoothly, but of course, with everything, there are hitches.

Besides that, I ended up having trouble with my SUN workstation today, while I was trying to give people passwords, so I had to troubleshoot that and change my .cshrc file before I could do anything. Of course, one of the problems I was having was with vi, and it was caused by my .cshrc file, so I couldn't change it. The only thing I could do was ftp another .cshrc file from another system and use that. Again, thank God I was able to get that working, or I'd be up shit's creek...

Anyway, yesterday was the real opening day for Major League Baseball. After working overnight on Sunday night (2000 SUN - 0900 MON), I grabbed some sleep and got up at about 1:30 PM to catch the New York Mets game against the Washington Nationals. I know, I know, baseball is boring, right? Well, I'll watch a three hour game for the three or four truly good plays. Yesterday, the Mets new 2nd basemen, Anderson Hernandez made a great play, running to his glove side, almost all the way behind second base, then jumping and making a spinning throw to first to throw out the baserunner. Awesome play. In the 7th inning, Jose Reyes threw out Alfonso Soriano at the plate, and in the top of the 9th, Carlos Beltran threw out Jose Vidro at second to end the game. Mets 3, Nationals 2.

On to some other news, this time not about me.

Tom DeLay has announced that he will resign from the House of Representatives, and obviously, will not be running for re-election. On one hand, I'm upset by this, as I really liked DeLay, and I think it's going to hurt Republicans in the House and Senate, come election time. The dems will be able to say "oh, look at these Republicans, rank with corruption...hell, their leader resigned amidst scandal". On the other hand, I think that this is just what the Republicans need, a good kick in the ass. For the past few years, they've become the new tax and spend politicians, just without the taxes. President Bush hasn't vetoed a single spending bill that's come across his desk, and the Republicans and Democrats alike just keep spending and spending and spending.

Some of the spending can truthfully be attributed to 9/11, and the cleanup and security increases that followed. Much of it, though, is nothing more than pork-barrel legislation at its worst. When will the conservatives in Congress stand up and say "ENOUGH!"? Our debt is huge, and our dollar is still falling. Inflation fears are worsening, as the fed just raised short term interest rates to 4.75%. I paid $2.41 for gas yesterday. When are we going to open up ANWAR? When are we going to tell Saudi Arabia, et al what we're going to pay for gas, take it or leave it. I'm definitely not going over to the dark side, but I becoming more and more disgusted with the Republicans...so called "Conservatives". While they might be conservative in their personal lives, they certainly aren't when it comes to expanding the federal government and spending taxpayer money. What happened to good old fiscal conservatives? Did they disappear? Am I the only one that prays that the federal government shrinks by 50%, that a flat tax is implemented across the board (no more free ride for the lower 80% of taxpayers).

Eh...It'll never happen.

"Fallen, fallen, is Babylon the great. It has become a dwelling place of demons." Revelation 18.