Category: observations

Designs on the White House:

Changing one’s mind in light of new information is the very definition of learning. And that is something our current president seems incapable of understanding.

This was in the comments by one of the winning designers, regarding Kerry’s “flip flops” on issues. As the saying goes, if you can’t change your mind, are you sure you have one?

Now go buy a shirt.

A warm personal note from Nancy Pelosi:

You have brought us to the verge of victory in so many ways:

YOU have spoken out against the radical policies of the Administration and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

YOU have spoken out against the War in Iraq.

YOU have stood up to call for affordable health care.

YOU have worked to elect new Democratic Members of Congress in heavily Republican districts in Kentucky and South Dakota.

And YOU have re-ignited the Democratic Party.

https://www.democraticaction.org/getinvolved/donations/q2end
Now we must work together to cross the finish line — to elect Members of Congress who represent Americans, not corporate special interests or extreme right-wing ideology. I ask you today to continue your help and support of Democratic House Candidates. $100 today, small to some, and everything to others, will make the difference.

We must have the funds to provide resources to our candidates. We must have YOU. With your continued voice, we can move forward our Campaign for a New Majority – a Majority of progressive representation of all Americans. Contribute to our cause today.

Can I support the change I want to see by supporting a candidate instead of a party? Do parties matter to me anymore? To anyone?

I think they help some voters, as they can vote according to who they identify with, but I’m not so sure most people know who they like or what they believe in. It’s not at all clear to me that the working man, in his W-emblazoned pickup truck, is well-served by the GOP: I see them as firm believers in life as a zero-sum game, where corporations and capital can only win if workers lose.

Whether you believe in science and evolution or faith and creation by a supreme being, it’s a pretty poor way to live if the only way you can have to ensure someone else is a have-not.

My first trip to Powell’s City of Books. I can see this becoming a *dangerous* habit.

The Spirit Level/Seamus Heaney

Sometimes a Great Notion/Ken Kesey

Electric Light/Seamus Heaney

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890-1914

The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

And this doesn’t include any other book that other family members got nor a trip to Borders that we made . . . .

Cheney Dismisses Critic With Obscenity (washingtonpost.com):

There is no rule against obscene language by a vice president on the Senate floor. The senators were present for a group picture and not in session, so Rule 19 of the Senate rules — which prohibits vulgar statements “unbecoming a senator” — does not apply, according to a Senate official. Even if the Senate were in session, the vice president, though constitutionally the president of the Senate, is an executive branch official and therefore free to use whatever language he likes.

No one denies the VP the freedom of his rich vocabulary but there’s a time and place for everything and what might be permissible in a barnyard might not be so on the Senate floor.

But doesn’t this just dovetail nicely with excellent judgment we’ve seen so far?

Ever find yourself stumbling over old posts and thinking to yourself, “that looks like a dog’s breakfast” but not having any easy way to fix it? If you have ever tried to edit content more than a couple of hundred posts back in MovableType, you know what I mean. something like ecto would be great but I’m not sure you want to load 2000 entries into it.

But if you use WordPress, every post has a little “edit this” link. So you can just fix it right then while it’s on your mind.

I’m liking that a lot: there’s a lot of crummy looking stuff from the early days of this little experiment and I’m happy to clean it up as I find it.

CNN.com – E-mail providers: Unplug spam-sending PCs – Jun 22, 2004

Consumers who allow their infected computers to send out millions of “spam” messages could be unplugged from the Internet under a proposal released Tuesday by six large e-mail providers.

That seems a bit draconian, especially since it will affect so many users (all those Windows users).

Looks like Comcast has a better idea: they can manage their network, if not the nodes on it, after all.

The biggest spammer on the Net? Comcast? – News – ZDNet

Comcast’s high-speed Internet subscribers have long been rumored to be an unusually persistent source of junk e-mail.

Now someone from Comcast is confirming it. “We’re the biggest spammer on the Internet,” network engineer Sean Lutner said at a meeting of an antispam working group in Washington, D.C., last week.

[ . . . ]

IronPort Systems’ statistics for comcast.net show that while the company’s six official mail servers have a monthly outgoing e-mail index of 6.2, there are at least 44 Comcast subscribers with similar scores of 5.8 or higher. Overall, Comcast is the single biggest source of all types of e-mail, with a higher volume than the next two, Time Warner’s Road Runner and Yahoo, combined.
[ . . . ]
Based on my conversations last week, Comcast’s network engineers would like to be more aggressive. But the marketing department shot down a ban on port 25 because of its circa $58 million price tag–so high partially because some subscribers would have to be told how to reconfigure their mail programs to point at Comcast’s servers, and each phone call to the help desk costs $9.

Instead, Comcast’s engineers plan to try the innovative approach of identifying the zombie PCs and surreptitiously sending the subscriber’s cable modem a new configuration routine that prevents outbound connections on port 25. Zombie-infected users won’t even notice, the thinking goes, because most people use Comcast’s mail servers for outgoing e-mail. Anyone wrongfully blocked can call and complain.

Elegant and effective. Now if they can go back and figure out a way to do the same thing for nimda and similar crap . . . .

cloudy, chance of sun breaks: makes me glad I can’t afford the Bloomsday Centennial:

I’d love to be part of a civil disobedience campaign where the readings go as planned but everyone identifies himself as a character in the novel: let the Joyce family find themselves in court against Leopold Bloom, Stephen Daedalus, and the rest of the people in Joyce’s work.

I wonder if anyone took up this or any similar ideas? It’s silly, to say nothing of impractical, to prosecute for this. The original link was to Larry Lessig: I can’t recall if he explains the Euro copyright and how it permits this.

And a tip of the peaked cap to Google:

The meaning of iPod

“As anyone who has got one of these players will know, if you haven’t got the right music then you’d rather not listen to any music at all. So the iPod really changes the game because you can always guarantee that the thing you want to listen to is there. Apple was right to bet that this was something people were prepared to pay more money for.”

The article is premium content and I’m not a premium subscriber, but the print edition is quite clear: Apple’s strategy was designed to let you take all your music with you, rather than making your choose. Flash memory players won’t let you do that yet, and with 100,000 units of the ipod Mini pre-sold, even the smaller model — 25% smaller than the original model — is a winner. Couple that with Apple’s customary attention to stylistic detail and a pioneering interface, and nothing else comes close.

CNN.com – Report: Pentagon wasted $100M on unused airline tickets – Jun 8, 2004:

Defense Department spent an estimated $100 million for airline tickets that were not used over a six-year period and failed to seek refunds even though the tickets were reimbursable, congressional investigators say.

The department compounded the problem by reimbursing employee claims for tickets bought by the Pentagon, the investigators said.
[ . . . ]
A prior report, issued last November, found that the Pentagon bought 68,000 first-class or business-class airline seats for employees who should have flown coach.

68,000 seats would fill 123 Boeing 777-300s or 119 747-400s. Didn’t we already bail out the airlines in the wake of 9/11?

And this all occurs on the party of fiscal restraint’s watch?

I do some volunteer hours at the school my kids go to. Being “retired” I have the time and it beats working, no matter the lack of remuneration.

I get to know some of the kids. I can tell when they’re happy or sad, when they’re ready for the day and when they need a little help.

There’s one guy I have gotten to know lately; call him Dennis. Dennis is a big kindergartener, looks like a first or second-grader. He moved here from the East Coast during the school year, so there were some adjustments to make. He seemed like a nice kid, and I got to know him a little better as the school year went on.

This is my second year with my own kids in school: I had one enter kindergarten last year, and my youngest this year, so I’m drawing just two years experience. What I have learned is that the first 3-4 months are a struggle, up until January rolls around. Then things start to gel, and by April and May, things are humming. Kids who are up and ready to work, willing to challenge themselves, just a joy to be around.
Continue reading “childhood needn’t be this hard”