Month: October 2005

Imagine, sung by George W. Bush | Ourmedia:

I heard this on the radio the other day: the subversive nature of it made me smile, even in traffic.

Rebecca Blood said it, not me, but I agree 100%. News is news, whether it’s a human tragedy or something more like a Greek tragedy, complete with hubris, arrogance, and greed.

Reporters: Lost in the ‘Fog’?:

[I]n the Lake George stories, details, background and context were as natural as using a headline and a lead paragraph, yet the breaking Frist story was written as if the events occurred in ghostly isolation, disconnected from others like them, from society, and from humanity in general.
One story, Lake George, has a certain neutrality about it. It’s real news (it’s not political scandal). So reporters and editors fearlessly get it all for us. They do not just report the events, they pull all the relevant facts (laws, history, similar events, speculations, social impact) out of the thousands of bits of information floating around– out of the fog.
The other story is also news. In terms of what will or will not happen to us in the future, it is significantly more important. All the bits and pieces that I’ve tossed in here can be found, without too much effort. Yet, they’re not there. They’re still lost in the fog.
If I said that that it is because it involves a very powerful man backed by a very powerful political party with lots of supporters who attack the press when they feel their leaders are attacked, most reporters and editors would say no, they would never make a decision to report based on fear or favor. Yet virtually everyone handled the story the same way.
Just as reporting all the details about the Lake George incident seems natural, it seems just as natural that the intersection between Frist’s money and politics, the other insider trading in the administration, the corrupt and criminal practices that are the basis of Frist’s fortune went unremarked. Under-reporting in such circumstances has become institutionalized. That’s why the fog remains.

We — democracy — deserve better than this.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

My iBook was returned this morning, before lunch, with a new disk drive and a new logic board. Unbeknownst to me, the logic board replacement program included this machine, so it’s looking like a newer 2 year old iBook than I was expecting.

I haven’t installed or restored anything to it, as I try to work out my next move. Given the entropy around here and the gradual or not-so-gradual decay of all the systems here, replacing the newest system seems not to be such a good idea. Instead, I think I will replace the aging G3/G4 with a mini, selling it off to help defray the purchase.

I have my eye on a larger/faster disk for the iBook that will keep it running well a bit longer. So that’s all right.

The next thing to be upgraded/replaced is the 2000 vintage iMac. And a refurbished G5 can be had for less than $900. Refurbed minis are nicely priced, too.

My iBook disk died today, but since I bought AppleCare the too-small, too-slow disk will be replaced at no charge. Can you say “mixed blessing?” I knew you could.

And I have an up-to-date, almost-complete backup. I say almost complete, since I left some things out of the list of files to backup (like my tasks database). But what I did backup is current as of last night.

It could be so much worse . . . .
Continue reading “notes to self: buy AppleCare, setup reliable backups”

The Sanctity of Marriage Handbook – Bryan Harris – Penguin Group (USA):

In November 2004, the right wing won elections across the country by spinning a vote for the right as a vote for family values. And yet these same politicians judge others by a standard that they themselves cannot uphold.

Composed of short profiles of some of the right wing’s most vocal “defenders” of marriage, The Sanctity of Marriage Handbook takes a satirical look at these leaders to see how well they live up to the sacred ideal they profess to be defending against “defilers” of marriage, such as gay couples hoping to marry. Seldom has hypocrisy been so funny. Bryan Harris profiles some of our moral forerunners as they lead by example. Just a few include:

– Newt Gingrich: served his wife with divorce papers while she was incapacitated by cancer and receiving treatment in a hospital room. He is currently enjoying the sanctity of his third marriage.
– Representative Bob Barr, author of the Defense of Marriage Act: before the age of fifty, Representative Barr had three marriages under his belt. The old Beltway joke goes, “Exactly which marriage is Bob Barr defending?”
– Rush Limbaugh: between Rush and his current wife, Marta, there are six marriages and four divorces. Rush is currently in the process of divorcing Marta.
– Senator Dan Burton: Republican senator who called Clinton a “scumbag” and who runs his campaigns on family values. Burton fathered a son out of wedlock.

This book needs to be thrust into the hands of everyone who voted “red” because they thought it was a vote for “family values,” and it is required reading for those blue blue-staters who might want to feel a little sanctimonious themselves.

Ah, Newt, elder statesmen and moral paragon. How sweet it is to remember that the current crop of corrupt demagogues are the direct result of his stewardship. His first wife was his former high school teacher: creepy.
Continue reading “hypocrisy alert”

So a little more work with this. I found that SSH Tunnel Manager seems to stop working if the system goes to sleep (possibly something to do with the network socket being closed). Giving up on that, I started looking around for some of these “script to application” utilities I have been hearing about. ScriptGUI seems to work just fine: you take the text of a script, drop it into the editor window, save it and you end up with a double-clickable app. Uses a little more disk space 😉

white:~/Desktop paul$ du -sk Secure\ Tunnel.app tunnel.sh
296 Secure Tunnel.app
4 tunnel.sh

This is the command line I ended up with. NB: your.internet.gateway is placeholder text and logging into it may require authentication each time. Read on for more.

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/ssh -N -v -p 22 -C -c 3des your.internet.gateway -L 8080/your.internet.gateway/3128 2>&1 > /dev/null &

The tunnel does shut down when the system goes to sleep/the network socket closes, but this makes it easy to rebuild it. SSH Tunnel Manager seemed to get hung up with that.
Continue reading “secure/paranoid wireless, continued”

After a few too many attempts and a lot of Googling, I finally figured out how to make a reliable ssh tunnel for my wireless network.

I got it to work on the command line (ssh red -L 8080:red:3128) and then decided to turn it over to SSH Tunnel Manager. It turned my simple command to something a bit more precise (/usr/bin/ssh -N -v -p 22 -C -c 3des paul@red -L 8080/red/3128)
So far, so good. If I can stand the speed loss, it should be useful.
Continue reading “secure/paranoid wireless networking”