annoyances

So what do you do when your menubar clock freezes?

This [ kill -15 185 ] seems a little harsh (185 was the pid of the SystemUIServer application that manages the menubar).

But nothing else I tried worked. I tried:

  • toggling the settings for the clock in the Date/Time PreferencePane
  • toggling the settings for the clock in the International PreferencePane
  • editing the plist file (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systemuiserver.plist)

Hmph. Then restarting the SystemUIServer wasn’t so simple. I would have thought it was a daemon process, and would restart itself. Nothing doing.

% /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/MacOS/SystemUIServer

Hmph, again.

If this comes to bite you, let me know if you find a different solution.

comment of the day

On Obsidian Wings: Everything They Touch Turns To Dross, this comment appeared:

I’ve believed since the mid 1990s that a virulent tax revolt (as in, no Republican government at any level is permitted to collect taxes) on a national scale, from the Left, would introduce a sexy new element into one of the radical Right’s long-juiced wet dreams.

Further, arming this citizen tax revolt with the guns and the lusty rhetoric about guns thrown around by the unAmerican cowardly Right like Viagra to their testosterone caucus would satisfy their other masturbatory fantasy.

Can you imagine Sean Hannity and Tom Delay and Dick Cheney and Wayne LaPierre (the dickless poodle of lock and load) and Grover Norquist and Erick Erickson and a cast of thousands huddled in the FOX studios letting the spittle fly at their last working microphone as the government they hate is destroyed by the very tools they lovingly and so determinedly demagogued for so long and by their most hated enemies.

It would be like being inside Robespierre’s head as he took that last look into the basket below.

I doubt they have enough working synapses to realize it’s the end of their movie.

links for 2007-04-28

sponsorships

So if I signed up to do Hike For Discovery, would you be interested in sponsoring me?

The trip that grabbed my interest was Kauai and the fundraising goal for that is $4950. But the others — Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountain National Park — are also pretty appealing and I expect a lot less expensive.

Since in the past 10 days, I have

  • donated 750 billion platelets
  • donated 1 pint of whole blood
  • and submitted a sample for an HLA screen

maybe a fundraiser for blood diseases is right for me.

Let me know if you think is a worthy cause or if you have any experience with it.

how’s your memory?

GUESS THE SENATOR WHO SAID…

“Mr. President, our mission in ________ is over. It is time to come home. Our mission in ________ was to feed a million starving _______ who needed to be fed. It was not an open-ended commitment. It was not a commission of nation building, not warlord hunting, or any of the other extraneous activities which we seem to have been engaged in.”

“If the President of the United States cannot say, “Here is what we are fighting for in ________, that more Americans may perish in service to the goals, and here is why it is worth that price,” then, Mr. President, we have no right — no right — to ask Americans to risk their lives in any further misadventures in ________.”

Continue reading “how’s your memory?”