George at Brewed Fresh Daily turned me on to this post from Bill Callahan about a Cleveland School Board meeting.  I have to wonder, what the hell people are thinking.  Not just the school board, but the public in general is screwed in the head.  School funding should be one of the highest priorities for any community.  Most people in Ohio think it rates somewhere next to Russian Roulette on their list of “important things to do.”  Russian Roulette is exactly what they are playing.  Every year the schools don't get enough money to provide a quality education is just like putting another bullet in the gun and spinning the cylinder.  The schools decay; the quality teachers head for greener pastures; security at the schools decreases; and the students get the shaft.  THESE ARE OUR OWN CHILDREN WE'RE SCREWING OVER!  I just don't get it.  The ramifications of not educating our children are enormous.  Let's think about this in the most simplistic terms.  Better education = better paying jobs.  Better paying jobs = better quality of life.  Better paying jobs = better tax base.  Better paying jobs = more discretionary income.  More discretionary income = more jobs.  More jobs = better tax base.  And that's just the local perspective.  I won't get started on the global implications.  Can't people see we're cutting off our collective nose to spite our face?

Cheers,
m²

Good question.  I originally found the word while researching a name for a company my friend Alex and I were going to set up.  We were going to create a web site that would scan a computer for vulnerabilities and help the user to fix the problems.  We wanted a name that would have meaning to our core business.  We started off with easy to remember English words, but we found the domain names had already been registered.  We decided to change languages, so I went looking for a word in the language I was currently learning, Gaelic.  I found anacail.  In Gaelic it means defend or shield.  Perfect!  That's what we were trying to help users do to their computers.  We went with it.

So we worked.  Alex is a gifted graphic designer and site designer and he jumped right in creating the site.  I'm more of a systems guy, so I started to work on hooking Nessus into the site.  Creating an API for Alex to control Nessus from web pages, and modifying the Nessus reports to look good on our site.  Then reality interfered.  I got too busy working for the Leviathan of Redmond and Alex got swamped at his day job at Workflow.com.  The whole dot-bomb implosion put a damper on our grandiose plans as well.

So this is what's left - a domain name and a bunch of unused code to do something too many other companies are doing a piss-poor job of.  It reminds me of an Affordable Floors song called All the things I meant to be.

With the turn of the new year, I'm looking forward to better days.  May they be better for all of us.

Cheers,
m²