Sudan
Here is what  I bet is going on in Sudan. You have nomads and you have farmers. The nomads want to roam around living off the land and having a few laughs. The farmers want to fence off all the land and water, thus keeping the nomads from their rounds. I imagine this has been going for quite some time. I bet it has been going since before people called themselves Christin or Muslim. I bet stuff like this has been going on for thousands of years.

More on Boots
They are cool. They weigh about 35 pounds a piece. They are black, steel toe biker kind of boots. I complained about the new boots hurting my feet until they get broken in. A female friend of mine asked me why I don't have more "practical" shoes. It took me a minute, but I thought "A woman giving me advice about buying practical shoes that don't hurt my feet?" Give me a break. I can't remember the last time I noticed a woman waring shoes that didn't look like they were taken from a torture chamber. Anyway, my old steel toe work boots should feel like moccasins tomorrow.

Lamp
Buffy season 5 episode 2 has a lamp in the first screen that I have on my shelf. The lamp on the series is in a character's room named Dawn. The girl who gave me the lamp is named Dawn. Mildly interesting.

Sunday
Lunch
I went out with some friends to lunch. Normally, this would be a complete Sunday.
Benefit concert
Tom and Jen asked me over to a benefit concert at a local bar, Big John's Ice House (down the page a bit). it was hot. The food looked good, but I was stuffed from lunch. It was pretty cool.
Open Mic Night
We went to a bar over on Highway 6. They have an open mic from 6 to whenever. It was pretty cool. There was a twelve year old kid who did a great job playing some classical keyboard.  Jen Kicked ass. I like her new stuff.

The Wheel of Time.
My buddy had the following to say about The Wheel of Time series.
--- Email from 2004-07-21 ---
I think that people that want the story to end get a little grumpy.  It seems that at book 9, where I'm at, that the final fight between Rand and the Dark One is no closer to happening than in Book 3.  There is a certain amount of "lets get on with it" that sets in around book 6 -- but if you make it through that and just accept that the story will never, ever end until the author dies (and then, of course, it will be incomplete) I think Book 9 is just as good, if not better, than book 3.  Book ranks from myself:

 Book 4 - Cool middle part, Perrin becomes cool
 Book 7 - Cool ending, Nynaeve becomes cool
 Book 5 - Mat becomes cool
 Book 8 - Rand becomes cool
 Book 6 - Egwene becomes cool
 Book 9 - Elayne becomes cool -- haven't finished reading it yet
 Book 3 - The Stone is taken, cool-ass sword
 Book 2 - Padin Fain is tres-creepy
 Book 1 - Gearing up the world -- slowest of all books

From Amazon, I think the books are ranked as so:

 Book 4
 Book 3
 Book 2
 Book 5
 Book 1
 All the rest

In all the reviews of Book 1, several people didn't like Jorden's style and bitched about it mightily.  Those that liked it kept reading, so the first book weeded out a lot of grumps.  People that were looking for the series to be a new "Lord of the Rings" started to get pretty tired of the meandering story line around book 5, and the numbers of people put off by the length grow with each book released.  So the last books are panned by a large segment of the reviewers.  There has only been one story arc that I thought went on too long (and did it go on and on).  But other than that, as long as you accept that the story will not end, the later books just get better.
--- End email ---

Irony
How frigging ironic is this. I heard a lyric in a song saying "there are no cows in Texas .. if I don't love you." Suddenly, I had to know how many cows there are in Texas. I clicked over to Google and did a search for -"cows in Texas" many- and got the following answer, 13,900,000. The funny thing is, it is a bitch session from some nut job wining about Semantic Web searches, or, the lack there of. Seems to me the current system doesn't suck too bad. That is a big buzz these days. People say "Why can't I just get the answer I'm looking for instead of a web page that may or may not contain related information?" Well, because the web is a gigantic database contained on a billion servers all over the world, being maintained by nearly half as many people. It would take a single database at one point almost as big and complex to contain that data. I know all about complicated databases, I'm reading the Wheel of Time series. Trust me, MS is trying to provide this very service. One of the VPs at MS said he wanted people to experience the entire Internet without leaving MS sites. That doesn't make any sense to me, but he seemed please with himself after saying it. I don't know if you may remember the AOL experience from the early nineties. AOL tried to provide the "Internet" before there was an Internet. They stuck everything including the kitchen sink on their service. They ended up with a slow kick-you-off service that made promises and then dashed dreams. I fear that no matter who tries to take control of the world, some one will provided niche services better and be pushed out of the system by the conglomerates.
There is a term for one company trying to provide every service and sell you everything you will ever need without leaving their site. This term is sand-boxing. It is a kin to putting a child in a play-pen so mom can sip her margarita and play bridge without you wandering off a cliff. It is also a great way for MS or AOL or whomever to make sure you only get options they want you to see.
OK, it is not very ironic. It just pisses me off.