Valentine’s Day is such a Hallmark holiday. (Of course, it’s also a cupids-flying-around-on-MetaFilter holiday.)

Dubya wants the investigation of the Marc Rich pardon to end, but it doesn’t seem to be doing that. It may just be my partisan way of thinking, but it seems to me that if the exact opposite situation were to have occurred eight years ago, and Clinton were to have come out asking for it to end, it would have. To me, this is just more proof of how little control Dubya has of his own party.

Tatu Ylonen (yes, that’s a real name) sent a cease-and-desist letter to the makers of OpenSSH today, demanding that they stop using the term “SSH” in their product. Interesting.

NBC just had their Valentine’s Day contest winner asking his girlfriend to marry him, and broadcast her reaction live. She said yes, but I can’t quite understand why — her boyfriend asked her to marry him live, on national TV, and allowed NBC cameras to be at their dinner table to record and broadcast her reply. I’ve always thought that they guys who propose via sports stadium JumboTron are asses; the NBC thing took that to a whole new level.

I tried to read the lecture given to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research by Clarence Thomas yesterday, but I couldn’t get through the pompous bullshit. He’s obliquely saying that he votes the way he does — nay, he voted the way he did in the election-related cases — because he didn’t want to take the easy way out and be wrong. Someone get the manure shovel; it’s getting deep in there.

I’ve now spent three days trying to compile a specific combination of Apache, PHP, Net-SNMP, and various and sundry image-producing tools on my Linux box, and the whole experience underscores how friggin’ difficult it is to install custom software on any Unix system. All I wanted was to install a cool tool that would let me watch my bandwidth use; it doesn’t look like it will happen in this lifetime.