Month: November 2007

blegs

An imap client that isn’t awful?

Google imap support is a wonderful thing: Mail.app, not so much. I should and will try Thunderbird again. GNUMail crashed on contact with the server. No MSFT products need apply. So what’s left?

Mailplane is OK, but I want to make sure it’s the best thing I can find. The wizards of GOOG are making some Big Changes in the weeks ahead to their web mail interface and I’m not sure how that will affect Mailplane.

How to upgrade an ancient LinkSys AP?

The ca. 2001 AP I picked up could be updated if there wasn’t a browser/server mismatch. tftp, maybe?

quote of the day

On the subject of school vouchers — or more broadly, the public/private divide:

We’re dealing with people for whom, unlike most other words — grapefruit, mountain, Tuesday — there is no entity to which the locution ‘public’ corresponds. It is, like ‘thnork’ or ‘promble’, something you can utter, but which does not signify anything. [From School vouchers fail another accountability test – The Carpetbagger Report]

As with any other conservatarian scheme, the goal is to privatize the benefits — the higher-performing students and the money their parents can afford to pay — and keep the risks — kids from low-income families, with the attendant poor nutrition/health issues, as well as kids with learning disabilities or special needs — in the public sector. Equality for me but not for thee . . . .

links for 2007-11-02

someone has a time management/priorities problem

and bloggers are accused of logorrhea?

[Former Sec’y of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said. The memos are not classified but are marked “for official use only.” [From From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld . . . – washingtonpost.com]

The amount of time spent on these little droppings, to say nothing of the interruptions to possible Real Work he might have been doing, must have been a large part of his day, even if he dictated them. On a 10 hour workday, 20 means generating one every 30 minutes: 60 means doing it every 10. And a shorter workday or time spent in circumstances that prohibit generating them means a tighter interval.

But read deeper into it and you realize that, rather than trying to remake the military or win a war, he’s obsessed with burnishing his reputation with words, not deeds. Rather than do the job and let the facts stand on their own, he’s constantly responding to OpEds. He complains about being “on defense” when any axiom addict would say that “the best defense is a good offense.”

Pathetic. The whole crowd of them seem more concerned with how history will see them than with what they can accomplish today. How have today’s meetings and phone calls and emails and speeches advanced the national agenda?

Carpetbagger has more.