27 June 2002

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegience is unconstitutional, and that therefore children may not be compelled to recite it.

When I first heard this yesterday, I thought it was a joke. I mean, I've hated for years the fact that so much of our official governmental documentation - right down to our money - includes references to God. But I never thought an official government body might agree with me.

When I understood that it was real, my feelings were mixed. Yes, I think that the phrase is unconstitutional. On the other hand I think the solution is to reverse the 1954 law which put the phrase into the pledge in the first place. Just because I don't believe in God doesn't mean I can't be a patriot. I see nothing wrong with requiring schoolchildren to swear allegience to the country which is sheltering and educating them.

It's just that in a country founded in part in order to seek religious freedom, requiring them to acknowledge God - or any god - is wrong. I love my country, despite its many faults. But since junior high school, whenever I've recited the Pledge, I've left out those two words. It doesn't seem to affect the inherent promise, or my feelings, one whit. The words give me goosebumps.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands: one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The court's ruling won't stand. The entire Senate voted to take action against it.

I'm not really sure how I feel about that, either.

Okay, something a little lighter. How about this picture that Matt took of me yesterday? I'd gone upstairs to take a nap, and taken my computer with me to check my e-mail before I drifted off to sleep. This has happened before, and it always amuses Matt to find my computer in his place on the bed.

It took me over four hours, but I finally did it: I've got a virtual PC installed on my Mac, running Windows 98.

It took less than 15 minutes to install the virtual PC with a basic DOS operating system. Installing Win98 is what ate up all my time. See, the installation disc has some issues. I think they all boil down to the same thing: The install disk is bootable.

Here's the problem (and I seem to remember this same problem with real PCs, so it's not an issue with the virtual PC) - If the disc is in the drive as the PC boots, it will begin the setup program. Even if you're already technically partway into the setup program. So when the setup forces a reboot, you have to quickly eject the CD.

Except that the CD is required for the rest of the setup. So what I had to do was eject the CD as it shut down, and then very quickly put it back in. Only it wouldn't mount quite fast enough, and the setup never did find all the files it needed. Now, when I boot up the virtual PC, it complains that four of the files it needs are missing, and then when Windows starts, it tells me that it's missing a DLL.

The first time I installed Win98, something screwed up my DVD-ROM drive, and I thought that was the reason it was having trouble. So I rebooted to reset the drive (and rebooting the Unix-based OS X takes my system forever, especially if something isn't responding correctly) and then re-installed Win98.

The second time around, my DVD-ROM drive didn't get fouled, but it still warns me about missing files on boot-up.

I'm not too worried about it. The missing DLL is used for network services, which I don't care about - I'll use the Mac for networking. And the other files don't seem to matter much, either.

The whole reason I installed Virtual PC was so I could run CC2, and - after a certain amount of fiddling to get it to recognize that the CD was in the drive - CC2 installed and ran perfectly well. (Well, the whole thing is a little on the slow side, but there's not much to be done about that, and the missing files almost certainly aren't the issue there. I may try increasing the virtual PC's memory allowance.)

But in any case, the missing files don't seem to affect things, except as an annoyance when I first start up the virtual PC.

So now I can dork with my maps without having to go up to the computer room!

I'm such a geek.

--Liz