Month: June 2007

• You know who hated chickenhawks? Edmund Burke
  not surprised.
  (tags: politics history writing)

down_the_road

Originally uploaded by Luke H.

I spent some time on the road today — 170 miles in a yellow school bus — I would rather have been behind the wheel of a responsive little sportscar.

What a great, evocative image.

• Steven Gilliard Jr., 42, Dies; Founder of Liberal Political Blog – New York Times
  The NYTimes notice of Steve Gilliard’s passing. He’ll be missed.
  (tags: journalism internet politics writing values)
• Diplomacy, a one-act play
  but the Cold War is over. RIght?
  (tags: worstpresidentever war politics)
• some assembly required
  “they would each be making an appointment with Mr. Heavy Rope and Mr. Stout Overhead Beam, and their last act on earth would be to pin a note to their shirt that simply states: “I’m sorry. I was wrong.”
  (tags: war worstpresidentever politics values)

My stock with the younger set rose just a bit today, as I presented them with an iPod mini of their very own. (I’m working on getting a second one together — sshhhh).

I had two almost working ones, a blue and silver. The blue was really messed up, but in an obvious way: the clickwheel connector had been ripped out from both the main board and the clickwheel itself. What the…? Other than that, it worked fine. The silver one had much more subtle problems: the Molex connector from the board to the microdrive was somehow not working. Once I decided to try that — I was running out of obvious and user-serviceable parts to play with — it worked. A trivial thing, over all, but very satisfying.

Add in two sets of over the ear headphones from American Science and Surplus ($2/each) and that’s a coupla happy campers. One has a 2 hour bus ride tomorrow, each way, so perhaps this got done in the nick of time.

And on the food experiment front, kombucha tea has taken hold of me. I make a batch every few days and am really enjoying the stuff. I found it for sale in my local co-op and found it tasted a lot like mine (I had never had it before making it myself). Mine was too strong, so I have scaled back the tea ingredients and it’s still plenty flavorful.

And the mother is now a healthy looking chunk of magic: about 1/2 and inch thick and a beautiful color and texture.

Cheaper and better for me than soda and more refreshing as well. Now what to do with the ever-increasing amount of starter/scoby, aka mother?

Spam Again:

Remember that weird spam we were recurrently getting in our index.php file? I spent several days looking for the source of it, to no avail. Turns out that our host, DreamHost, had been hacked and several thousand account passwords obtained. These were used — in our case I guess more than once, but details are still extremely hard to find — to access the index files of many sites. DreamHost have apparently sent out a letter to affected customers, but we were affected and haven’t heard a word, and as yet there’s nothing on their website, either. Here’s another person who was affected. All very frustrating. We’ve changed our shell passwords and all that, so I suppose we’ll just wait for some details and an explanation from DreamHost.

Yikes.