Well, after a two week of hectic consulting, I am back on my own projects.  I am tempted to do a quick first cut of something I have been thinking about for a long time.  Afterall, there is nothing like a bad prototype to get your design juice flowing.

Meanwhile, I am happy with the war.  If Saddam was smart, he would have sent someone to China to bring back SARS virus.  Imagine the kind of havoc the SARS virus could have caused in midst of US armed forces.  Who needs suicide bombers and hijackers when all you need is a small army of frequent flyers with a really bad cold?

Bush declares Saddam is losing grip on power.  No kidding.  When the most powerful man in Iraq can't have a nice quiet dinner with his son without getting his ass as well as the entire block around him blown to bits, he is losing grip on life, let alone power.  Funniest moment I saw so far was the Republican Guard guy running along Tigris River in his underwear to get away from American tanks.  He was trying to be smart by taking off his uniform, but all the other Iraqis around him were wearing dark uniforms so he stood out like a sore thumb.  I wonder if he got away.  This war is turning out to be pretty hillarious.

For a while now, I have noticed that sometimes when I delete e-mail messages by clicking on the Delete toobar button, two messages get deleted.  This didn't happen often so I ignored it.  This morning (well, afternoon) I fired up Outlook and tried to delete an obvious spam message (something about increasing size) by clicking on it.  To my surprise, Outlook opened the message!  First, I suspected the message contained a hack that took advantage of some unknown vulnerability to auto-open the message on selection.  I tested clicking on a few other things like the window system menu.  Wow, the window closed on single click!  So its not a hack.

I googled searching for "IntelliMouse Double-Click" without much success.  Searching the newsgroups found the problem.  The problem was caused by a faulty microswitch.  Still, it was strange because IntelliMouse double-click problems were reported in 1999 to 2000, yet I bought my mouse late 2001 at Fry's.  More middlefinger salutes to both Microsoft (for not recalling the faulty mouse) and Fry's (for stocking faulty mouse).

I can't get a firm grasp on this Jihad thing.  First, there seems to be no restriction on who can call it.  If you are a Muslim, you can call for a Jihad.  Second, there seems to be no way to call off a Jihad.  Only when you have peace, Jihad ends.  Lastly, Jihad seems to be all about striving for peace with allowance for use of force against aggressors as a last resort.  Jihad reminds of how antibodies work except definition of harmful is rather loose.  I suppose if you are living in a sparsely populated harsh environments like Middle Eastern deserts, you need something like Jihad to gang up on anything that threatens their lives.

The strange thing is that, more I read about Jihad, more I am reminded of Bush.  While Saddam and other Muslims are calling for a Jihad, Bush is actually doing Jihad by using force to curb evil.  While he is not a Muslim and it is arguable whether or not there was no other workable alternative, Bush is on a Jihad against Saddam who was threatening peace in the region and at our gas stations.  Since Saddam has been a rather disappointing enemy of war, we'll soon have peace in the region and Bush's Jihad will end.  Jihad is Cool.

I was too busy wrestling with WTL yesterday to post anything.  WTL is Microsoft's unsupported C++ template library for Win32 UI.  Its just like ATL but seriously undocumented.  Strangely enough, WTL is popular.  Popular enough for Microsoft to keep updating it in step with ATL despite several efforts to drop it.  Anyway, I was busy yesterday trying to coerce a dialog to auto-layout on resize.  Usually, this is pretty simple stuff, but the dialog just happened to be a wizard which loads in several forms into same dialog.  I wasn't expecting this much trouble over resize, but I had to fight through it.

It was not unlike our war with Iraq which seems to be going well enough for an armor column to go for a joyride through Baghdad.  Who knows if anyone will ever notice, let alone use, that tiny sizebox on the bottom right and appreciate the gruntworks this highly paid consultant went through to get it working.  Sometimes I spend days fiddling with architectures and diagrams.  Other times, I am huddled in a corner like a clockmaker and grunts all day.  Yeah, its difficult to explain to my son what I do for a living.

SARS reminds me of the story about how a butterfly fluttering its wings in Peking could cause tornados in Kansas.  Just yesterday, a jet landed in San Jose with five passengers suffering from SARS like symtoms.  That's just 30 miles from where I live.  One of my clients whom I visit frequently is just five miles from the airport.  Stil, I am not worried.  What worries me is my trip to Toronto three weeks from now.  Out in the open, I have confidence in my ability to avoid SARS.  But on airplanes, I have to share the air with hundreds of people.  I wonder how effective those masks are.  If SARS can be transmitted by air, maybe I should wear one of those wholebody condom suits.

Why is it that China seems to be exporting new types of colds and flus every year?  Last year, it was a nose-and-throat-without-fever cold that lasted a full month of coughing and sneezing.  This year, it's SARS.  If things get any worse, I wouldn't mind seeing an Iron-Curtain raised around China if that will keep these killer colds at bay.  If Bush can start a war because he is impatient, shouldn't I be able to quarantine a few billions because I am paranoid?  Just kidding, folks.