Month: August 2007

links for 2007-08-26

sunset silhouettes

A little mini-break last week, a couple of days driving around the Olympic National Park. We tried to do too much, but we got enough of a taste to want to go back. Saw many seals and black-tail deer, much more than I would have imagined.

As one would expect, the unstructured/unscheduled moments like this are the ones that resonate. Taken from Ediz Hook, Port Angeles Harbor.

bleg: marking all netnewswire items read, programmatically

Last time I looked, I didn’t see a lot of AppleScript support for this, (of course, I now realize it’s because I am using the Lite version) but ideally, I would like to mark all items as read periodically, so I can start with a clean slate and avoid stale information, but also to see which feeds I really care about.

I realize this is just a keystroke and a click away, but it would useful if I could manage more of this information without having to remember to do it.

restoring dignity to the White House

How the grown-ups talk:

The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill had a good piece the other day about the president’s VFW speech, and included an anecdote in passing that caught my eye.

The speech was aimed primarily at what White House officials privately describe as the “defeatocrats”, the Democratic Congressmen trying to push Mr Bush into an early withdrawal.

In private, presidential aides walk around the White House referring to “defeatocrats”? Seriously?

West Wing conversations now resemble Free Republic threads? I vaguely recall a time in which the political establishment perceived Bush’s election as the return of the “grown ups.” It’s rather amusing, in retrospect.

Yeah, this is the Daddy Party, assuming your Daddy was a dry drunk frat-boy who never really grew up and who surrounds himself with the same crowd he ran with as a boy.

Pathetic.

we have always been at war. full stop.

SNAFU:

As we round the corner (towards the light!), and head towards the beginning of the 6th year of the great and glorious war in Iraq, it’s probably a good idea to remind ourselves that for students entering college this Fall, the war begin in Spring of their 8th grade year. For those entering their freshmen year next year, the war will have been going on since they were in 7th grade.

For a growing chunk of the population, war has been a normal state of affairs during their formative years.

I have a nephew starting college this fall, and his two sisters will start next year. The war will last until 2009 or later. And this isn’t like Vietnam (1964-1975) how, again?

links for 2007-08-25

is this true?

Trust:

Do you know what never ceases to amaze me? Baggage claim. All of those bags sitting there! And you can just take one! And nobody checks which one you take! Or if you take the right number! Or if you were even on a flight!

I don’t know about other big airports, but I flew and and out of Atlanta many times over the 14+ years I lived there, and even before 9/11 changed everything, I had to demonstrate that the bags I was leaving with were mine before I could exit baggage claim.

links for 2007-08-22