Category: del.icio.us

victory from the jaws of defeat, or TiVo annoyances overcome by iTunes

I instructed my TiVo to record the All-Star game the other night. Judge of my annoyance when I found out it recorded nothing, nada, not a second.

Turns out if the antenna (we don’t have cable) is disconnected and reconnected, the TiVo loses its mind and can’t find any channels anymore. Rather than explain that somehow, either in its conversations with the Mothership or as a console message, it blithely accepts new instructions and just drops them on the floor.

Excellent.

But as it turns out, the game was available from iTunes for $1.99, commercial-free. So I was able to redeem myself in the eyes of my young baseball fan.

Anyone else have this problem?

At some point I have to figure out how to integrate TiVo and the iTunes media: I think a network card for the TiVo is all the stands in my way.

someone hasn’t been paying attention

Rain Dance:

it could get to the point here in America, not far down the line, when a desperate public will beg some political leader to push them around, to tell them what to do, to direct their behavior in some purposeful way to save their asses.

Not far down the line? How about the midterms elections of 2002 and the general election in 2004? And to use the phrase “corn pone American fascist” in the next sentence without a hint of awareness is a bit much.

Kunstler’s jeremiads get tedious sometimes. Worse than a self-styled prophet is one who thinks no one is listening and shouts all the louder.

summer projects

In the interest of making the summer useful, a couple of things are under way around here.

Since three of us who live here are big fans of the graphic novel form (actually all of us have read and enjoyed them but only three of us seek them out), I kicked off the idea of making one of our own. I doubt much will come of it but some sketches and some story ideas are all I really want. Trouble is, when you read monstrously good works like Castle Waiting or Bone it’s a lot of work to even contemplate. Inspiring, yes, but daunting at the same time. So I am just trying to get characters drawn and plot/story ideas. At present, everything looks to be, um, heavily influenced by the works cited above. Ahem.

I may have finally settled on a way to convert a stack of cigar boxes I picked up a while back into small portable guitar amplifiers. I’m very slow at figuring these things out, but I learned that a long time ago so I’m no longer disappointed. Now to find a good place to get electronic parts that isn’t Radio Shack®. I’ll probably use the Little Gem design from Runoff Groove. Hmm, looks like there is a new variant on this, called the Ruby. And it seems to be more extensible as well. Decisions, decisions.

And my status as America’s Worst Gardener (word to the wise: do your gardening in a public garden, not at your own house, if you’re not all the proficient) is solid. Short season gardening is hard to get used to. I really need a calendar/timeline of what needs to be done when in the early going, or I stay behind for the whole season.

And there’s summer baseball and summer swim league and boating and fruit picking . . . .

So what are you doing this summer?

The Authoritarians

The Authoritarians:

Let me ask you, as we’re passing the time here, how many ordinary people do you think an evil authority would have to order to kill you before he found someone who would, unjustly, out of sheer obedience, just because the authority said to? What sort of person is most likely to follow such an order? What kind of official is most likely to give that order, if it suited his purposes?

The book is free, unless you want a bound copy.

<sigh> why do I think I’ll read this and realize I already know how it goes? I’ve read Milgram and I’ve followed the news of the past 5 years. I’m complete aware that there are millions of people who, willingly if not cheerfully, would kill someone if they were told to do so and the act were contrived to look important. Even if it’s 1 in 100, that’s 3 million people — the population of Kansas or Arkansas.

Disgraced and dishonored, yes. Uncomfortable, not so much.

The Phil Nugent Experience: Gabba Gabba:

But whatever happens, how will Libby be disgraced? Is Oliver North disgraced? Elliot Abrams? Richard Perle? I’d kill to be disgraced at their income level. The whole idea that they could be disgraced is based on an earlier time, in a world where morality trumped partisan politics. As long as he lives, Libby will never have to face another human being who disapproves of what he’s done; he lives at a level where people can cherry-pick their friends and connections, and the terrible future he faces will consist of a forced march through think tanks, well-paid speaking engagements, and maybe his own TV or radio show, all of them carefully arranged so that he’ll be playing to audiences who’ll think he’s the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. Now that his time performing for juries is behind him, he’s probably laid eyes on the last person he’ll ever meet who even has the equipment to understand by what standard he could have done something wrong, himself included. His natural habitat is the company of people who will tell you that while they respect the justice system and the jury’s decision and rakka-rakka-rakka, he committed “no underlying crime,” by which they mean that because he’s a Republican, in their eyes he cannot be a criminal.

Yes, for the hand-wringing about how tragic it is for such a dedicated public servant to have his reputation tarnished, it won’t make a whole lot of difference. His $250K fine will be paid from his $5MM defense trust, and he’ll start working for AEI or some other wingnut welfare establishment as soon as he feels like it. I suspect he won’t be able to write a book, at least not one that has a shred of real information in it, but he’ll be secure all the same. As Phil says, if that’s disgrace, I’ll take some.

can’t add a thing

just a note::

There’s a queasy appropriateness about the fact that the Libby pardon came down on Bring ’em on day.

Soldiers can be maimed or die and their families decimated for Bush’s bravado, but Scooter Libby can’t be asked to go to jail for destroying an intelligence network because it might upset Mary Matalin’s kids?

Even if you voted for these people, you didn’t vote for this. Please remember it a year from now.

But the nub of it is this:

Bush: Screw The Law:

UPDATE: Emptywheel makes an important point (emphasis added):
“He commuted Libby’s sentence, guaranteeing not only that Libby wouldn’t talk, but retaining Libby’s right to invoke the Fifth.”

So there it is: he’s free to do anything but rat out the people who set him up. Remember LBJ’s old axiom: I never trust a man unless I’ve got his pecker in my pocket.