Many Changes Instantly

That's apparently the running gag expansion of "what MCI stands for." We've been shuffled from classroom to classroom, then had that schedule changed on us. Moved out of the classroom with the computers in it, we're now having to skip around in the book to cover lessons that don't require computer interface. We had been supposed to spend this afternoon "monitoring"—that is, listening over the shoulder of customer support reps to get a good idea of how to do things—but now it's looking like that might no happen after all until tomorrow, as apparently the room we're now in isn't needed for those things after all. Sheeeesh. (The funny thing is, as our instructor told us yesterday, that sometimes they're not entirely clear it's a joke...he once heard a phone rep get asked by a customer what MCI stood for and reply, "Many Changes Instantly.")

Class is going decently enough...a little noisy, a little raucas, a little sleepy as half the class seem to have body clocks on a downswing (and the way they can't ever seem to get the thermostat set right doesn't help things either). I have to say that having access to the Internet to my home Linux box on breaks is definitely helpful to my sanity. It's amazing how much you never realize how much you miss that until it's suddenly available again.

Literary passage

I've been reading people's journals and posts to various places. It's kind of funny...although I'm somewhat more in favor of the Iraq invasion than not, both sides of the political war debate are now starting to annoy me.

I read, recently, a passage in a science-fiction/action novel that sort of resonated in the light of recent events. I suppose you could interpret it in either a pro-war or anti-war state of mind, but either way, I think it's an interesting passage.

The book it's from is the 26th book in the Survivalist series by Jerry Ahern—an interestingly atypical post-holocaust series that blended action-adventure and science-fiction in equal portions. In this series, which became alternate-history long before the author finished it, mankind was all but destroyed by an accidental nuclear war in the early 1980s, and struggled back to repopulating and repairing the earth over the next few hundred years. Ahern was never afraid to let his politics come through in his writing, as it did in this passage. (I've pared a few paragraphs out of the middle to hit the essential points.)

( Click here to read. )