No Dog in the Fight

No Dog in the Fight was Originally Posted on June 12, 2008 by lavarock

There are times when you think you know how you will function in a certain circumstance. Sometimes you are right and sometimes you are wrong.

Once when I was about 17 or so, a neighborhood bully decided to beat the ^%$^ out of me. I was very scared as he was quite a bit bigger than I was. he also arrived at my house with his posse (some kids in the neighborhood who were egging him on).

After much thought and worry I finally decided to let him beat me up and I would get over it. The fight started and in seconds I had the guy pinned on the ground. No one could have been more surprised than I. As I let him up, he swung at me again and I again had him on the ground squirming. Upon letting him up again, I told him quite honestly that if he wanted to claim credit for the fight it was OK with me. I still wanted not to have fought and had no reason to claim victory as I was away at school most of the year and expecting to move soon.

I saw the guy a few weeks later and was invited to his house for some reason. I went and we never discussed the fight.

Another time I was at a dave and Busters restaurant in Atlanta and while standing there with a coworker, a guy came running through the crowd and headed the long way around to the front door. A voice behind us hollered “stop him”!

I don’t know why, but I jumped over the rope (not very gracefully) and, taking the shortcut, mappeared at the front door just steps behind the guy. As I chased him through the parking lot, he turned to look at me and at that moment, I realized that I had no business being there and he *might* actually have a gun or could kill me. At that very instant, as the thoughts went through my mind, the security guard passed me and grabbed his arm. I then considered what an idiot I was.

I had no dog in either of those two fights, yet there I was.

Speaking of dogs, a friend had her small dog attacked by a large dog and we are waiting to see if the owner will pony up the vet bills.

In the above 3 stories, you can see that there is no certainty in the outcome. My first fight I would never have thought I would win. My running after someone just because someone asks? I never thought of myself as a crime fighter and still don’t. Also, whether someone will do the right thing like pay for a dog he helped get injured.

However, there IS one thing that I can guarantee, without a doubt, no matter what. There is one item in my email yesterday that caused me not one second of “maybe”. I decided on the spot, “Hell NO!”.

Over the years I have come to have a love / hate relationship withg Microsoft. The software is quite bad, horribly designed and even worse is the way it is written. After all these decades, they still cannot create a secure operating system and many viruses and bots take advantage of things like uninitialized buffers and bounds checking that never takes place. As often as they have fixed problems, more arise and allow people to break into your system.

Just a simple thing like their firewall not being enabled until AFTER the network came up. This would be similar to a bank putting all their cash on a table in the lobby and opening the door in front of a bunch of crooks. While the crooks run in and start grabbing the money, the security guard then, and only then, begins to load his weapon to stop them…

Why the abover Microsoft story? Well, Kaiser Permanente just said that they will be working with Microsoft to allow me to view my medical records online!

I don’t just say NO, I say HELL NO!

If anyone believes that Microsoft could possibly protect data, please think again.