Scrambling for Black

A lot of people have noted how the president seems much more interested in cooperation now that he can't count on a solid majority in the Congress. His assumptions haven't changed -- he still acts as if he alone possesses the one clear vision, and disagreement might as well be a check sent directly to bin Laden & Co -- but now he makes at least a passing nod in the direction of cooperation as a good thing. I heard someone say the other day that you couldn't possibly want the president's plans to fail, could you? when in fact yes, you most certainly could want them to fail. You'd like to see him have to admit abject failure, were it not that failure costs the lives of our children. Not just for that reason, it would probably be more accurate to say that you'd love him to succeed, but you don't think he will, and you aren't willing to give him the slack he wants -- the time that he says he needs for them to come to fruition --just so you can later say 'I told you so' when they don't. Organizational leaders get a lot of slack when their tenure starts -- the classic honeymoon -- and if they can get some quick victories, they can get more later. But the further into their tenure they get, the harder it is to keep the magic going, and if you've lost it early, then the harder it is just to get back to zero, let alone over and into the black. Which is where the president is now - scrambling for black. So far, it isn't looking good.

Blacks the color of pleasure at our home, at the moment, though, because my wife got her new work laptop -- a jet black Dell Latitude 620. It's quite nice, and its a tad bigger -- more of a letter box screen than the squarish one on my work laptop or our home one. It boots quickly, and it connected almost immediately to our home network -- which was worth looking at, as it seems that when I got the new laptop, I'd never configured the network to accept it -- I just disabled wireless access checking. My bad. Now its back on, and the network knows both my MAC access and hers. Technological coziness. And I found a new command: GETMAC.EXE . Quite slick.