View From the Bushes

Every morning at 8:10 am I have a meeting. The point of the meeting is to review all the old technical requests and assign all the new ones. For a variety of reasons not worth going into (though most involve sloth), I don't get assigned to many requests, in fact it's quite common for me to not have any. Since my vision of Hell is being trapped in a meeting with nothing to do, I've been trying to come up with things to pass my time while in this daily meeting. In the past I've tried reading, brainstorming on upcoming tasks and doodling, but this morning it occured to me that I could use that time to come up with a topic for my blog every day. My first topic: coming up with a topic. Would that make this an example of a meta-topic or a recursive topic?

This whole idea of coming up with the VFB topic during my morning meeting occured late enough in the meeting that it's really as far as I got. Sorry... Perhaps on Monday I'll have some earth-shattering insight into a topic. Of course, come Wednesday I'll have left for GenCon and even though I'll have a laptop with me, I doubt that I'll be able to post anything until after I return.

The other day I was talking to my wife about the situation in Iraq and I mentioned that I just didn't understand Muqtada al-Sadr. He seems to be fomenting unrest without any clear goal. The only thing I could imagine was that this was a long shot bid for control of the entire country, but it seems that if one were going to try something like that that, you would wait for the Americans to leave, but then again maybe not. As I was browsing through Slate today I came across an article addressing that very question. I would certainly recommend reading it. There's quite a bit of historical background which really illuminates the whole history of the region.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross