Back from the dead
So yeah, it's been a veritable eternity since my last post. Many of you are no doubt waiting with baited breath to find out exactly what I've been up to. This post will likely disappoint you, consisting as it does of a series of unrelated rambling thoughts. Without further ado, then...
I'm currently at Michele's apartment, hunched over the keyboard looking forward to playing some Neverwinter Nights a bit later today. Michele is currently sick--three guesses from whom she contracted the flu?--so I'm mostly sneaking around trying not to wake her up from her nap out in the living room. Here's hoping she gets to feeling a bit better in time for Easter tomorrow. Now, on to the exciting stuff:
First, Linux. I'm writing this from a shiny fresh install of Red Hat Linux 9 (thanks to Brian for burning the CDs for me). So far, I really like it. I realized the other day that while my Linux knowledge is quite sparse, I guess I'm actually sort of a Red Hat veteran at this point--I started a few years back with 5.2, upgraded a year or so back to 7.3, and have just installed 9, which is a great improvement over past versions (at least from my dumb-end-user perspective).
The RH9 install went flawlessly. I am most pleased with the fact that for the first time ever, I managed to get the latest nvidia drivers installed without having to wade through gtk errors and dependency hell. This means I'll be breaking out my low-quantity but high-quality collection of Linux games, including HoMM3, the criminally-overlooked Heretic 2, UT2k3, and of course Neverwinter Nights.
The only thing I'm stuck on is mounting my dos partition in Linux. Anyone know how I can mount a dos partition (on a separate hard drive, hda) so I can access it from Linux (hdb)? The current response to mount /dos is can't find /dos in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab. Help a dumb luser!
The war. So we did it--Saddam's regime is gone, and the number of children being tortured in the world has been decreased by a small but meaningful amount. Politics of the war aside, the wargamer/historian inside me has found the strategy of the conflict to be of extreme interest. I've been trying to hunt down intelligent analyses of the strategies and tactics employed by both sides during the war, so if you've read any, pass 'em along. From what I've read from military historians (as opposed to the TV "experts" we all saw crawling out of the woodwork during the actual conflict) some historians are going so far as to tentatively compare the Coalition advance to some of Patton's lightning strategic maneuvers during the Second World War. Some of my own observations for you to take along with a healthy grain of salt:
- I wonder if the decapitation strike in the opening minutes of the war may go down in history as one of the great military successes in decades. Command and control are vital to the effectiveness of any armed force, and the lack of such from the beginning of the war might go a long way towards explaining Iraq's strategic blunders (as noted by the great military historian John Keegan, who books I highly recommend) during the war. Fascinating.
- What's up with the American tendency to panic at the slightest sign that things might not be proceeding precisely as we planned? The second-guessing, criticism, inane analysis,and doomsaying (can you tell I like John Keegan?) that occurred during the second week of the war--days before Saddam's regime crumbled--was stunning to observe. Many of these prophets of doom were relatively easily-dismissable in my mind: retired generals with axes to grind, politicians with political reasons to hope for the war's failure, or high-school-educated celebrities the respectability of whose political views are roughly on par with your average just-read-Marx-for-the-first-time freshman in a college Political Science 101 course. But it's hard for me to understand why everyone--everyone--started second-guessing the military plan the instant it encountered resistance (that's the last Keegan link, I promise).
I wonder if a large part of this can be explained as the cultural scarring of the Vietnam War--an irrational, not-so-secret fear that all American military conflicts are going to turn into a Vietnam-style disaster. While it's certainly reasonable to prepare for a worst-case scenario, I'm sure I'm not the only one who grew tired of hearing politicians, celebrities, and talking heads with no military-analysis credentials whatsoever making irrational (and demonstrably false) prophecies of doom about the war. We learned valuable military lessons from Vietnam, but I think it's time to stop comparing every American military venture to a decades-past conflict. How would these modern-day Jeremiahs have dealt with the Second World War, in which the Allies occasionally suffered crippling defeats that make Mogadishu look like a decisive victory?
- Whether you supported the war or not, it's hard to deny the professionalism and skill of the American/British military. On top of the normal stresses of miltary action, our soldiers were operating under an unprecedented and uniquely Western concern for civilian life. History will speak well of this injection of humanity into the pages of Western war strategy.
- I note that a fan-created scenario detailing the Iraq conflict is now available for my favorite computer wargame, The Operational Art of War. I'll have to check that out this weekend--it might be interesting to play the Iraqi side and see if it's possible to resist the Coalition forces more effectively than happened in the actual war.
Other stuff. Wedding planning has been coming along well lately, thanks mostly to Michele's hard work. I realized with a start the other day that it's been nearly a month since I've played a computer game or cracked open a good book; I'm trying to rectify that imbalance this weekend. And tomorrow, of course, is Easter--that most wonderful of holidays! Here's wishing you all a blessed holiday season.
Well, it looks like Michele is awake now, so I'm off to go see how she's feeling and maybe visit for a bit. We watched the second Harry Potter movie last night (I'd already seen it)--fun film, and since Michele knows more about the books than I do maybe she can fill in some of the details for me. Y'all have a great weekend!