Many have asked why I'm not going to DEFCON this year. In a word: Contractors. Don't let them in your house, because they'll never ever really leave. I *could* go to Vegash and leave Mrs. K and Special K (our GSD, not her real name) alone for a few days with the contractors. I think that would probably use up a lot of, er...points. But to me, leaving your home with contractors inside is a bit like walking away from a Microsoft Windows machine while it's rebooting after applying updates: You're just asking for trouble.

Two things that make me cray-cray: 1) people who confuse kindness and mercy with weakness; 2) people who confuse values and beliefs with strongly-held (and usually very tenuous) personal convictions about nearly everything under the Sun. Someone close to me once said the secret to happiness is to lower your expectations, or to limit the number of things you feel really strongly about. I don't completely subscribe to this point of view. To me happiness has more to do with severely limiting the number of things I consider myself an expert on, and even then trying really damn hard to pretend I don't know anything about those subjects all day long.