Timing Error

THIRD PARTY IDEAS?

Great symbols:

Silly idea.

APOLOGIES TO AMBER LEE

I was perhaps a little to harsh, criticizing Obamagirl in the post below. It's obvious she's a smart, driven individual with a phenomenal set of ideas about campaigning. Besides, in finding things to like about Amber Lee, I won't come off like this curmudgeon:

So, what is great about Amber Lee?

1. She supports the military.

2. She 'toons well:

3. She associates eclectically:

 

In fact, if someone were to hold a gun to my head and told me I had to pick a flickr babe to have relations with outside marriage, then my top three would be:

1. Obamagirl.

2, Candice Michele (flickr link NSFW)

3. Elizabeth Kucinich (subject to availability)

So, again, Ms. Ettinger: my apologies.

(I really should be writing my paper)

THE POWER OF ICONOGRAPHY

It shapes the narrative in odd ways. Senator Obama's Icon-fu is pretty powerful; I have not seen something like it in quite awhile:

Obama's Icon-fu can lead to embarrassing displays of affection:

Lee predicted Obama would be elected in November.

"When that happens, it will change everything. ... You'll have to measure time by `Before Obama' and `After Obama,'" Lee said during the panel. "It's an exciting time to be alive now."

Obama's Icon-fu can stop you from asking pertinent questions, like is ObamaGirl even literate?

Or more importantly, do you even care?

Obama's Icon-fu is a strange and powerful technique let loose upon the world. It will work some strange magic.

S. MANASAPIEN AND OTHER THOUGHTS

1. Cool (tongue in cheek) history of the Stickman at the Uncyclopedia:

The Stick men were first depicted hunting a buffalo. These drawings are believed to be done by a human, suggesting that humans and stick men worked together in a community, with Sticks doing the actual work and humans sitting around drawing amateur pictures. Stick men obviously played an important role in human life, and eventually grew beyond the needs of the humans and left the planet.

I love stickmen, thanks, in part, to the awesome XKCD.

2. WITFITB*: A word used to describe my frustration in switching versions between Office 2007 (WIN) and Office 2008 (MAC).

3. I concur: send the space station to Mars. It's high time we put the smackdown on the Martians (and no, my hostility towards Martians will not be moderated by the fact they do not exist)

3. Tasks remaining: Homework Assignment 7 Assignment 8, Test #1, Test #3, Article Review II, Essay II and a paper on Ecological Economics (it's not easy being green)

*Where In The Fu@@ Is That Button?

LA SERENISSIMA(S)

Venice looms large in my mind (along with paper, pens, erotic arts and electronics...go figure) and the popular imagination.

I love images of Venice, real and imagined, from around the world. Here's a roundup:

1. The original

2.Little Venice, Mykonos

(Scott Photos)

3.  Venice in London

4. Venice in Benin

5. Eco-Venice

6. Venice Cali

(updated to remove photo at owner's request)

7. More as I find them...

(OK...back to book learning.)

ENJOY YOUR 4TH OF JULY

I did.

It passed quietly, for which I am grateful.

NADER'S RACISM...

Or more appropriately, Nader's 'soft racism of low expectations':

Nader: Obama trying to 'talk white'

I have a dream, that one day my stupidity and ignorance will be blamed on the content of my character, and not the color of my skin.

(Yeah, I've dealt with this shi@ my entire life and I am pretty sick of it.)

THE MOST BLOOD THIRSTY SUPREME COURT IN HISTORY?

Yesterday the Supreme Court (US Branch) ruled that the execution of people who rape children was unconstitutional.

Today, they reaffirmed the individual right to bear arms.

Tomorrow, I expect Ruth Bader Ginsburg to yell from the courthouse steps, "What? I got to draw you a frickin' line!!!"

Or something like that.

ROUGHING IT

One of my terminal goals is to take my wife on safari to Africa. In the interim, I could do with something like this for the back yard:

PICTURE

Received this picture by the email; if anyone knows who took it, I'll be glad to credit it.

MA DEUCE: A HISTORY

Nice piece on the ma deuce and it's replacement.

I'm sure whatever replaces the ma deuce will be shiny.

SCIENCE MADE STUPID

I actually thought some of this stuff was true: 

via Neatorama.

WALKABOUT: CASSINI IMAGES

Nice neighborhood. Gorgeous images from around Saturn, taken by the Cassini probe.

Robots get to have all the fun.

CHOICES

(Purposefully obscure): In the course of my duties, I investigated a man for wrong doing. I came to the conclusion that he did do what he was accused of and recommended further action.

Today, that man killed himself.

My initial reaction was that I pulled the trigger. It took me awhile to get past that thought. But I no more pulled the trigger than I encouraged him to commit the acts of which he stood accused. Right now, sitting here at my keyboard, I am more concerned for his direct victims, and what they must be going through. I know we will take care of them; it is what we do, and why I enjoy the job I do.

He made his choices and in doing so he created victims. Today, he made his final, bad, choice.

Free will is a bitch.

DELAYED GRATIFICATION: APPLE

Snap: the $199-$299 iPhone. With MS Office/iWorks support. Sweet; I'm glad I waited. 

TOUGH LOVE FOR THE AIR FORCE

SECDEF Gates finally does something no enemy of the US ever accomplished: he decapitated the USAF fighter mafia:

In bypassing the Air Force's "fighter mafia" in filling the chief of staff's position, Gates appears to be sending a message to the service that it needs to prioritize missions that support the current ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as transport flights, in-air refueling and overhead surveillance, according to Pentagon officials.

My hat is off to you, SECDEF Gates. Well done.

If you're in the fighter mafia (blood free wars or your money back!!) don't worry: with the earth's population of robots at four million and growing, your replacements will be along directly.

CALEEFORNIA GOT'S THE INTERNETS

Instapundit receives:

They have no internet feed or cable. Sounds like phones are not 100% . They are finding without the big I network info is not at their fingertips. Its a fragility in the system.

Go west, young man, go west.

HISTORY: ON THE EDGE OF RIPENESS

I generally don't read instant history books; sensational tomes about current events written by or about people I don't care enough about. 

The decision on the part of the Hegemon to invade Iraq is, ahem, contentious. It will be less so, as time goes by, and scholars emerge from behind the barricades to do an accurate post mortem.

Until then, I think I'll buy Feith's "War and Decision".

The Website, with links, .pdfs and inline citations is a pretty awesome resource in of itself.

When you have a limited amount of book dollars, you decide wisely on what you buy...

FROM BIMBO ERUPTIONS...

...to Preacher Eruptions. Truly we have gone full circle.

I caught snippets of Reverend Pfleger's performance at trinity Church. One thought came to mind: shouldn't he be in blackface and wearing white gloves? Minstrel show for the masses.

Supposedly, there's a tape out there of Mrs. Michelle Obama turning in a similar performance at Trinity Church. I haven't seen anything pop up on 4Chan yet.

Here's some cheap theology: my dad taught me that blessings come from God. Extending the logic a bit, it seems to me that once you let a man intercede between you and God, you deflect your blessings. Now, that intercession can take one of two ways: either you elevate a "Dear Leader" to a position of worship, or you throw in some "Ole White Debbil" into some position of fear. Either way, you are basically telling god that you view him as something less than awesome.

Your choice.

Since Trinity is viewed, in some quarters, as the One True Black Church (tm), perhaps it's fair to lay the absolute decline of Black America at the feet of their type thinking (waiting on your "forty acres and a mule" versus buying the damn "forty acres and a mule"). You now, when I add up the net value add of One True Black Churches like Trinity, I come up with the following list:

1.

Look in the mirror, folks, and find your "debbil".

And that's all I have to say about that.

TYRA AND I

Growing up, I had this torrid thing for Tyra Banks (NYTIMES Story here). Our relationship culminated in my securing one of those life size Liquor store cut outs of her and giving it pride of place in my bachelor pad.

Last time I saw the cut out, my wife was packing it for a move. 

You know, one day I'll have to ask my wife what she did with it.

BUT WATCH IT DEGENERATE INTO A MOVEMENT...

Libertarianism:

“We are in the beginning of a libertarian moment,” said Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason, the libertarian monthly.

We could do well with less talk of a Libertarian Party and more talk of libertarianism to the Parties.

IF ELECTED, I WILL NOT RUN

The closest I ever got to Congress was when my wife and I did a once around the Mall. Had I known then what I know now, I would have insisted on a side trip to the Library of Congress:

SARKOSIS? TRY BREATH SPRAY.

Article in the NYTIMES on a French obsession with President Sarkozy.

 “…He represents the individualism of the society to the extreme, that it’s the individual who counts, not the society.” 

As always, the root ‘sickness’ is individualism. Funny how that works.

GOOD AND BETTER: .PDF MANAGEMENT

About a month ago, Boing Boing posted on a neat ebook reader: voluminous. Screenshot:

Good, but I didn't find it worth the money. Now, adobe's digital edition is free and great for content .pdf content management (no, this is not a crappy "pay per post"). I actually like the feel and readability a lot better. Your choice.

SOIXANTE-HUITARDS

Excellent reflection on the Class of 68, over at City Journal. Like everything, some good and some bad came out of the sixties.

The "bad" is merely reinforced by the unwillingness to recognize it as "bad".

LEARNING UNIX

Oddest line so far (link to .pdf):

An editor is a program that allows you to create and edit text files. You would normally use an editor to enter
the code for a program. Because of capitalism, you shouldn’t be surprised that there are more than one editors
out there.

Odd.

RETRO II: REBRANDING

Fascinating article on the attempt to resurrect 'dead' brands:

Exploiting the equity of dead or dying brands — sometimes called ghost brands, orphan brands or zombie brands — is a topic many consumer-products firms, large and small, have wrestled with for years.

I like that; attack of the killer zombie brands.

EYECANDY ERRATA

Mars Visualized:

Si Clark

Perspectives

Links grifted from Attu's World.

THAT'S A DEALBREAKER, OBAMA...

Come on, haven't we been hamsters on a treadmill for long enough:

If elected President, Senator Barack Obama plans to delay Project Constellation for at least five years, putting the saved money into a new $10-billion-a-year education program that would, in essence, nationalize early-education for children under five years old to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten and beyond.

EXHALE SLOWLY

My ISP is a monopoly provider (but pretty good for all that). Internet reestablished.

LIFT AND SHIFT

My vacations at an end; I'm back on the wide open road. Blogging will resume when I find some of teh internets.

Relax and look around while I'm traveling.

LITTLE NUGGETS

I've probably downloaded 150 books for the Sony ereader. I mean, where else am I going to pick up gems like this, The Monitor and the Merimac:

This is the first-hand story of what was done and seen and felt on each side in the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac. The actual experiences on both vessels are pictured, in one case by the commander of the Monitor, then a lieutenant, and the next in rank, Lieutenant Greene, and in the other by Chief-Engineer Ramsay of the Merrimac. Clearly such a record of personal experiences has a place by itself in the literature of the subject.

Sweet.

WELL, THAT EXPLAINS IT: APPLE POWER CORDS

So, a couple of days ago, we went to our local Apple Store to replace the powercord for my wife's macbook. The brick was overheating, and starting to burn through the cord. So, I cut it up and threw it away.

Well, the guys at Apple were more than willing to replace the cord. Wow, I thought, these guys are great. Problem? I had thrown the cord away. But, man, I thought is was neat they'd replace the cord. My faith in Humanity renewed.

Oh well. We bought the new powercord and moved out.

I didn't think anymore about it until I read this in Gizmodo:

The class action lawsuit brought against Apple for PowerBook and iBook power bricks with the potential to spark has been settled. If the final approval for the settlement goes through, Apple will pay $25 to $79 to customers who "bought an adapter made by Apple or another company to replace a failed one."

Probably explains why we had to replace a battery and powercord for the macbook in under two years.

Mac, watch your suppliers.

UPDATE: And stop trying to kill my wife, Mr. Jobs ;) I showed her this article, and she reminded me that her ibook battery also blew up on her. So, hmmmm, Mr. Jobs, this makes two attempts. Cut it out; if not, we'll switch to Lenovo/Ubunutu.

UPDATE II: Hello, fellow macsurfers. You guys are certainly flooding the zone. Welcome.

REPORTS FROM THE CONSUMERIST JUNGLE

My wife and I worked a deal: she gets TomTom and I get the Sony PRS eBook.

1. TomTom One: I like. When I grew up, finding directions meant having my dad drive around until we ran out of gas. TomTom is a marked improvement; it got us from the store to home (and even dealt with the detours I took on the way). I can see this coming in handy for new addresses, vacations and cross country travel.

2. Sony PRS 505: First up, why not the kindle? Well, the Sony was, well, like there. It looks alot better in person than it does on the web. For kindle, it seems like the big seller was internet; I don't hang around enough free or wireless internet to make it worth it.

On the PRS, the .pdf reader was a big sell point for me; but at best, the .pdf function is sketchy. Doctorow's Little Brother was undreadable on .pdf; using the proprietary .lrf, Little Brother is gorgeous (and I understand a little bit more about Doctorow's thinking, just reading the intro).

I tend to save web pages as .pdfs instead of bookmarking them; you know how web sites disappear. But the other half of my collection consists of obscure scholarly articles.

Work arounds:

1. First, there's manybooks (thanks Futurismic), which supports the .lrf just fine. And there are many other sites out there (for mac, use libriate to convert .txt. files from project gutenberg to .lrf).

2. $$$ deskUNPDF. A bit pricey for mac ware, so I'll wait before buying. But the trial run worked out nicely.

So this is an experiment. If you see a relatively brand new sony ebook reader on eBay, then the experiment failed. But, at this time, I'm loving the thing.

Onto freading the future.

UPDATE:

1. Kindle killer?
2. The Sony is for righties. I'm left handed and generally I'd make some annoying comment about keeping the left-man down; but I can read/write/draw at the same time with this puppy.
3. A nice wiki.

BLOG FRUSTRATION

I can not get my links to display. Should be the easiest thing in blogging, but for me? No joy. I've removed typelists; published and republished and changed templates.

This sucks.

SWEDING?

See, this is what happens when you miss a movie. From always watching, who collects the ten best, this description:

In Michel Gondry's newest film, Be Kind Rewind, Jack Black and Mos Def invent the process of "sweding," in which they take classic films and remake them into short films using videotape, a virtually nonexistent budget, amateur actors, and insane amounts of creativity.

I like the Armageddon remix.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1321361479/bctid1407924283

IRON SKY: THE FLICKR

Nice: the Iron Sky movieflickr stream.

CASH, CREDIT AND CARRY

I am notoriously inattentive to money; explains all the wealth building I've done. That said, I am credit card phobic, owing mainly to a misspent youth.

I prefer to pay cash; but my wife negotiated the deal for her new Hummer, destroyer of worlds.

Now I find out that no credit history is almost as bad as a lousy credit history; the last car we bought we paid cash. And now we pay the price, I guess.

Funny how that works.

SPEED RACER MAKES MY EYES HURT

At least, the previews did. I planned on giving the movie a pass, but Annalee at io9 says:

I saw Speed Racer last night, and though I can't tell you much about it yet (full review on Thursday!), I can say this: It might actually be better than director/producer pair the Wachowskis previous effort, The Matrix.

Looking forward to her review.

IRON SKY: OH MY

Yeah, I cannot wait for the movie Iron Sky to be made. NAZIs in space:

From the makers of Star Trek: In the Pirkinning.

Thanks Boing Boing for sending me into geek overload.

(Interesting point: my wife's maternal grandfather was a Nazi. He was more or less executed in 1945. Long story; but interesting how the worm turns.)

UPDATE: Okay, that's cool. I was looking at the trailer in you tube full screen mode. I've never noticed that little doogle in the bottom left corner; lets you view related videos spatially.

A THOUSAND OTHER WORDS

This toon links to this post on Ironman. Trust me.

Note to self: when drawing, leave some edge space. Nice exercise that also gets me back to working with a scanner; which, as you can see, I'm way out of practice with (I can't even find the b/w setting).

AT A BARE MINIMUM, USE SOME PROTECTION

I'm not going to link to this site out there; this is not that kind of blog.

But ladies, if you real need to put your intimate and private photos on the web, if some one really needs to see your naughty bits, then at a bare minimum put a dang password protection on your photobucket account. Or, if you want to send some photos to "Tyler" to express your desire to carnally relate to him, then remember at some point you and"Tyler" may break up; at that point, he's going to upload those photos to the nearest server. You are going to wind up and amateur p0rn star without even the benefit of pay.

Better yet, here's a simple rule of thumb: if you digitize anything, assume it will get out into the public.

(it's amazing what google image search will turn up)

BEST.ELECTION.EVAH

Obama's taking on serious water. As predicted.

The Republican primaries were fun; Senator McCain's return from the dead was surprising enough. But then all the action went to the Democratic Party. That, in my lifetime, I might see a brokered Convention is pretty amazing (either on the Convention floor or prior as the super delegates decide).

Senator Clinton looked like a goner; I'll say one thing for her, she is a fighter. Definite plus. In addition, she's recieving help from some surprising quarters. Senator Clinton is on the verge of defeating an entrenched narrative that was already conducting her wake.

As for Senator Obama? Well, he could have been a contender. Anecdotally, I was surprised at the number and types of people I met who said they would support him. Perhaps, because with Senator Obama, there was no "there, there". Like a shmoo, he could be anything you want: Senator Obama is the Congressman Ron Paul of the Democratic Party. I've heard the subtext that Senator Obama's troubles are related to race. They are: specifically Rev Wright's subtle racism (imagine Pat Buchanan speaking at the National Press Club protected by some of David Duke's heavies).

Rev Jeremiah "Man of God" Wright was the blow that killed Senator Obama's chances. The upcoming Bill Ayers Show is simply nail meet coffin.

Two ways ahead:

1. The super delegates select Senator Clinton (electability) and we get the standard slugfest between Republican and Democratic candidates who are not that significantly different.

2. The super delegates select Senator Obama. Several reasons. Too many people in the Democratic Party have supported Senator Obama; they stand to pay a high political price if La Clinton Nostra regains ultimate real power. Senator Obama retains the muddle headed youth vote (raise the voting age to 45!!). And Senator Obama's inevitable massacre by Senator McCain in the general election will make a compelling narrative for 2012.

I see the super delegates going with option two.

As for the "unfairness' of the super delegate selecting the candidate, well "them the rules". Rules do not have to make sense, they only have to be open and transparent. I suspect the Democratic Party will move to a more winner take all model in the future; leadership by consensus is messy.

UPDATE: Added a link for my boy Jerry.

IN PRAISE OF DALE'S

Dale's: best seasoning, bar none.

But the internet cost was damn pricey. Finally found a $2.28 source. Trying a new recipe; figuring out how to make a martini my wife will actually drink. Day for new things.

IF ONE CAR IS A HUMMER

Then our other car needs to be this:

(Actually, I'm still partial to the mini crossman)

BACK FROM THE MOUNTAINS

Relaxing in the lowlands. Vacations are nice.

MR TWO BY FOUR: IS THERE NOTHING YOU CAN'T DO?

Cool photo:

Via DRB, the best eyecandy on the web.

OH YEAH: WE MADE IT

Little A-Frame in the mountains. (I want an A-Frame; Mother says I may have one for one thousand dollars and a little elbow grease).

SOME MARTIAN SLUM?

(digging through my camera, and that's what it looked like to me)

OVER THE ROAD

Heading for the hills. Supposed to have teh inernet, but if not, ok.