If you've never read xkcd, you should. It's frequently very amusing, especially for geeks. Part of the funny is always the image tag, I guess it is - the text that pops up when you rest your mouse on the picture.
So Todd, go take a look at the text for this one.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Sunday, July 22, 2007
What an AWESOME little application
Any of y'all out there heard of "Monolingual"? Because my friend Patrick is the shiznit, it was already on my computer - I clicked on it a few minutes ago to see what the heck it was.
It deletes all the language files for programs that you don't need. (I really am not going to used simplified chinese, no matter what the program, thanks)
I HAVE ALREADY REGAINED MORE THAN A GIG OF HARD DRIVE SPACE AND IT'S STILL RUNNING.
Sweet. If I tried to do this by hand, I'd be here until Christmas. I should find whoever wrote this little gem and send them cookies. (And Patrick, too, for putting it on my computer. Thanks, Patrick!!)
It deletes all the language files for programs that you don't need. (I really am not going to used simplified chinese, no matter what the program, thanks)
I HAVE ALREADY REGAINED MORE THAN A GIG OF HARD DRIVE SPACE AND IT'S STILL RUNNING.
Sweet. If I tried to do this by hand, I'd be here until Christmas. I should find whoever wrote this little gem and send them cookies. (And Patrick, too, for putting it on my computer. Thanks, Patrick!!)
Friday, July 20, 2007
I'm back!
Through the efforts of my husband and our friend Patrick, I am computered once again. The kids spilled a coke on my laptop, and I'd pretty much resigned myself to not being online a whole lot for 6 or more months - we can't exactly afford a laptop right now. However, because my babu is an amazing sweetheart, he arranged to trade work for a laptop for me! I am now the proud owner of a 1.5GHz PowerPC G4! With the light-up keyboard, oooooooo. Sure as heck faster then my old iBook... with a bigger screen... and a hard drive twice as large... yes, I'm aware I'm both spoiled rotten and lucky as hell. In husbands, I mean. Among other things.
I'm awake at 7 something this morning because M was sleeping with me and she wet the bed. Nothing like waking up in a pee puddle that's not your own. *sigh* I'm hoping she doesn't have the same trouble with bedwetting that I had as a kid - we'll see.
It's been a rough month. Great Aunt Mary died - she was our favorite. We took a whirlwind trip up to Tennessee to check on Mamaw & Papaw (her younger brother), to make sure they were doing okay - Aunt Mary's son was returning from Iraq to take care of things and he's always been a little nutty anyway, so we wanted to be on hand just in case. They were doing fine - aside from Mamaw having congestive heart failure, a leaky valve, and a hole in her heart, of course. It was frightening to see how weak she is. During this time Mamaw's brother in California had a stroke, and is not doing well - I've not heard any more about him yet.
Before we left to go up there, an old family friend of 15 or so years, Tom, had taken ill and they'd discovered tumors in his liver. He & his wife went up to Boston & stayed with his brother while being seen in a hospital that specialized in difficult cancer cases. It turns out that it was originally colon cancer, and because he didn't go to doctors and had never had a colonoscopy, it hadn't been caught until it had metastasized and taken over 90% of his liver... he died yesterday morning. Another 3 days and it would have been his 66th birthday. I still can't wrap my head around it... every time I think of his wife I get weepy; she was my 2nd grade teacher and we've been friends with her pretty much since then. They were such a pair - thinking of one without the other is like peanut butter without jelly or something. It's just off. It occasionally leads me to think about what would happen if something suddenly happened to J - which of course makes me fall apart totally. He's promised, by the way, to always get colonoscopies -- LET THIS BE A LESSON TO ALL OF YOU. The prep for a colonoscopy is shitty - pun intended - but the test itself is not a big deal. You're either sedated or knocked out; it's just pooping all day the day before that's not much fun. However, I think dying in four weeks is much worse, don't you?
In the middle of all this, the little boy turned three. We're having his party on Saturday - drop by Winthrop around noon for cake! I'm making a peaches & cream cake, and you know it's gonna be delicious.
I think that's all the news for July. Bill, I've not had time to read, so I'm way behind. I'm hoping to finish it in the next week before the copy of Harry Potter that a friend bought for me shows up in the mail. (Did I say I was spoiled? Wheeee!)
I'm awake at 7 something this morning because M was sleeping with me and she wet the bed. Nothing like waking up in a pee puddle that's not your own. *sigh* I'm hoping she doesn't have the same trouble with bedwetting that I had as a kid - we'll see.
It's been a rough month. Great Aunt Mary died - she was our favorite. We took a whirlwind trip up to Tennessee to check on Mamaw & Papaw (her younger brother), to make sure they were doing okay - Aunt Mary's son was returning from Iraq to take care of things and he's always been a little nutty anyway, so we wanted to be on hand just in case. They were doing fine - aside from Mamaw having congestive heart failure, a leaky valve, and a hole in her heart, of course. It was frightening to see how weak she is. During this time Mamaw's brother in California had a stroke, and is not doing well - I've not heard any more about him yet.
Before we left to go up there, an old family friend of 15 or so years, Tom, had taken ill and they'd discovered tumors in his liver. He & his wife went up to Boston & stayed with his brother while being seen in a hospital that specialized in difficult cancer cases. It turns out that it was originally colon cancer, and because he didn't go to doctors and had never had a colonoscopy, it hadn't been caught until it had metastasized and taken over 90% of his liver... he died yesterday morning. Another 3 days and it would have been his 66th birthday. I still can't wrap my head around it... every time I think of his wife I get weepy; she was my 2nd grade teacher and we've been friends with her pretty much since then. They were such a pair - thinking of one without the other is like peanut butter without jelly or something. It's just off. It occasionally leads me to think about what would happen if something suddenly happened to J - which of course makes me fall apart totally. He's promised, by the way, to always get colonoscopies -- LET THIS BE A LESSON TO ALL OF YOU. The prep for a colonoscopy is shitty - pun intended - but the test itself is not a big deal. You're either sedated or knocked out; it's just pooping all day the day before that's not much fun. However, I think dying in four weeks is much worse, don't you?
In the middle of all this, the little boy turned three. We're having his party on Saturday - drop by Winthrop around noon for cake! I'm making a peaches & cream cake, and you know it's gonna be delicious.
I think that's all the news for July. Bill, I've not had time to read, so I'm way behind. I'm hoping to finish it in the next week before the copy of Harry Potter that a friend bought for me shows up in the mail. (Did I say I was spoiled? Wheeee!)
Sunday, July 08, 2007
It's 11am and I'm going back to bed
It's days like this that the old idea of becoming a hermit-lady with a zillion cats starts sounding good.
Friday, July 06, 2007
I'm not sure what to do with this
Perhaps Bernard Goldberg put it best, while chatting on Fox News with Michelle Malkin:
“We go to the American people and we ask them if they can pick out Kansas on a map and they can’t. We ask them if they can pick out England on a map and they can’t. We ask them who the Vice-president is, they don’t have any idea. Who’s the Secretary of State? “I don’t know.” Then we go to them and ask them what they think of the Lewis Libby commutation? I don’t care what the American people have to say about these things.”
I'll admit I've railed against the general un-informedness of the American population before, and have made fun of idiots near and far. However, hearing someone say that because Americans are generally uninformed on some things that the government shouldn't listen to them - it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. There's a difference between general knowledge and ethics - even a person who can't quote Shakespeare can tell you if something is right or wrong.
That said, I agree with what someone in the comments said:
To Goldberg:
How about this, then — you can ignore the idiots, but if we pass the general knowledge section of the poll, you must follow our opinions. Fair enough?
Because I guarantee you, most of us liberals can indeed find Kansas, England, and even countries where they have mostly (gasp!) brown people(!) on a map. We can also name the VP and the Secretary of State, AND tell you what stupid, unethical, and/or illegal things they’ve done lately.
Politics lately makes me tired. I wonder if the Founding Fathers had days where they thought about telling everybody to f*$& off and finding their own island to move to...
Um.....
After last night's dreams, watching Steve from Blue's Clues with my children is somehow... wrong.
I think I'll go take a shower.
I think I'll go take a shower.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
About Scooter Libby
Two things:
Some very good answers for people who aren't clear on what happened:
and a great example of Bush's inconsistencies. Or hypocrisies. Or both.
Some very good answers for people who aren't clear on what happened:
Bogus Spin #1: Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald went after Libby even after learning that Richard Armitage had been Bob Novak's "primary source" for his column outing Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA employee.
Wrong. Armitage made his admission in early October 2003, nearly three months before Fitzgerald was appointed. So it should be clear that Fitzgerald wasn't appointed just to find out who leaked to Novak. In fact, this means that -- even with Armitage's confession in hand -- there was so much evidence of wrongdoing that a longtime GOP loyalist like John Ashcroft felt he had no choice but to recuse himself and allow the appointment of a special counsel.
Bogus Spin #2: Even so, Libby wasn't the only one who leaked about Plame.
Maybe not, but it turns out that every other Bush administration who leaked did so with information they got as a result of Libby's actions. Ari Fleischer testified during Scooter's trial that Libby told him over lunch about Plame working for the CIA, and Karl Rove reportedly told a similar story to the grand jury that indicted Libby. Meanwhile, Armitage and Bushite press flack Dan Bartlett both found out through a State Department memo that was produced in response to questions that Libby had asked a top department official about Wilson's trip to Niger. If Libby (and his boss, Dick Cheney) had been content to reply to Wilson's criticisms on their merits rather than by rattling cages in search of fodder for personal attacks, none of the other officials would ever have been able to leak about Plame.
Bogus Spin #3: The trial was just Libby's word against that of a bunch of reporters.
Although three reporters did testify, they were preceded on the stand by six different government officials who each testified to having conversations with Libby about Joe Wilson's wife before the date when Libby first claimed to have heard it from a reporter. It was these officials' testimony, more than that of the reporters, that convicted Libby.
Bogus Spin #4: Libby was convicted for having a faulty memory.
It's never mentioned in the mainstream media, but Scooter didn't just "forget" telling reporters about Joe Wilson's wife working for the CIA, and deny it when he really had told them.
No, Libby's "faulty memory" caused him not only to deny where he had learned about Plame -- a note produced in the trial showed Vice President Cheney had told him she worked in the Counterproliferation Department of the CIA (where the majority of employees are covert) -- but to invent stories saying he HAD leaked to reporters when he hadn't. He claimed to have been the first to tell Matt Cooper about Wilson's wife, thereby covering up the fact that Karl Rove had done so. And he shielded Fleischer by falsely claiming to have told the Post's Glenn Kessler as well, apparently trying to cover for the Post's October 12, 2003 report that a journalist for the Post (who turned out to be Walter Pincus) had been leaked to -- a news story that was found, with key passages underlined, in Libby's files.
Thus Libby was convicted not just of perjury but of intentionally lying in order to obstruct the investigation. And what George Bush did yesterday was intended to make sure he got away with it.
and a great example of Bush's inconsistencies. Or hypocrisies. Or both.
What's excessive? President Bush, who suddenly hates excessive punishments, once refused to commute the death sentence of a 33-year-old mentally retarded black man with an IQ of around 60 and the functional skills of a 7-year-old boy.
10 years ago last May, President Bush and Alberto Gonzales received a request for clemency on the day Terry Washington was to be executed for killing a college student in 1987. President Bush skimmed Gonzales' incomplete summary and denied clemency.
Terry Washington was dead before the sun went down.
Regarding the record 152 executions during his two terms as governor, Bush "wrote" in his autobiography, A Charge To Keep, "I don't believe my role is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own."
A good quote
Robert Kennedy once said,
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation ... It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man [or woman] stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, [s/]he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation ... It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man [or woman] stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, [s/]he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Monday, July 02, 2007
Can't find my journal, so this goes here
Sorry, I know a person's dreams aren't interesting to anybody but themselves. Feel free to skip this; it's just me recording it so later when the psychiatrists try to figure out where I went wrong they'll have clues.
I think ingesting moldy flour helped - I don't remember dreaming this much in forever.
First dream, was visiting Bill & his wife in Seattle. Except his wife was Erin, my friend Matthew's wife. (Probably because I've never met Bill's real wife.) He was running a D&D game for us. During the conversation he told us about her new hobby - buying distressed houses and turning then around. One of the things she was doing was creating murals on the walls, at which point I exclaimed something like "Oh, I HOPE you've got pictures!" I then go to use the restroom (which ends up being a potty chair in the middle of the living room floor where their 2 nephews & niece are playing that they're babysitting) and as I'm sitting there everybody's walking toward the front door with car keys - evidently they're going to SHOW me her latest house; very cool. Oddly, mom is there, and keeps saying things like "you don't have to go NOW..." and "are you sure you feel up to it?"
So the end of that dream wakes me up to go pee. (If I'm peeing in a dream, it's a pretty good bet I have to go, isn't that standard?)
Back to sleep - next dream is that I've moved onto a new street with a bunch of really nice duplexes/quattroplexes/condos up and down it. I'm in my place, and I get online and look at Erinn's webpage, to see how she's doing. She's got a lot of pictures and video of the kids & us from when we all lived together (of course, these videos make it look like we lived together this year, as both the kids are relatively old) and I decide to walk down the street and ask her for copies of these (and anything else she's got, as these are pretty good). So I drop in to her place - I don't remember knocking or anything, just walking in. Strangely enough, I don't remember any more of our interaction, other than she was perhaps slightly nervously bubbly and I was quiet but not angry or unhappy - we didn't make up; we just sort of glossed over everything.
Next dream I'm driving into the parking lot of my new apartment (same one? Maybe; it's somewhere further north than I am now) and as mom behind me somewhere yells "be careful!" or something, I distractedly drive right into the 8ft deep or so hole that's there with the construction going on around us. My neighbors good-naturedly drag me & my station wagon out, and I say "You know, it seems I want your company so badly - how about we start a breakfast club rather than me falling into this hole?" (I've evidently done this before.) Several people express interest, and mom & I head up to the apartment. Mom expresses some doubt about a breakfast club, and talks about how it's not polite to make people host get-togethers at their places and making people feel obligated, blah blah blah. I tell her I'm not going to make anybody do anything; I'd just like to invite my neighbors over more! Then I guess there's a knock at the door, and mom goes into her room. Either the kids are already in bed or mom takes over putting them to bed while I answer the door. It's my old neighbor Chris (that I used to have a crush on in high school) and a friend of his, and I invite them in and we sit around and catch up on each others' lives - somehow Chris has gotten hold of a paper I've published that is somewhat objectivist in nature and he tells me I've done a good job. Things get a little flirty, but it's all very quiet and understated - and I'm just being a tease, I'm not really interested. Oddly enough, it seems that Justin hasn't moved with us yet - there's some feeling that he'll be moving up soon, and then I'm planning on letting him stay home with the kids for a while, to give him a break, since I have a good job. Then we head out to join up with Nathan (an ex-fling) and one of his friends, and they're in the front seat driving. Chris can't stand him. We're all talking about all kinds of things - everything from life back in Tallahassee, the hell that was high school, to philosophy, politics, etc. We then pull into a parking space in front of a row of swank townhouses, and Chris makes some comment like "what the hell, do you expect us to walk home?!" Either I or Nathan says no, it's not his car, it's mine, doofus. So Nathan & his buddy get out, and I get in the driver's seat and the rest of us leave.
Old home week inside the skull tonight. Maybe I can get another half hour of sleep.
I think ingesting moldy flour helped - I don't remember dreaming this much in forever.
First dream, was visiting Bill & his wife in Seattle. Except his wife was Erin, my friend Matthew's wife. (Probably because I've never met Bill's real wife.) He was running a D&D game for us. During the conversation he told us about her new hobby - buying distressed houses and turning then around. One of the things she was doing was creating murals on the walls, at which point I exclaimed something like "Oh, I HOPE you've got pictures!" I then go to use the restroom (which ends up being a potty chair in the middle of the living room floor where their 2 nephews & niece are playing that they're babysitting) and as I'm sitting there everybody's walking toward the front door with car keys - evidently they're going to SHOW me her latest house; very cool. Oddly, mom is there, and keeps saying things like "you don't have to go NOW..." and "are you sure you feel up to it?"
So the end of that dream wakes me up to go pee. (If I'm peeing in a dream, it's a pretty good bet I have to go, isn't that standard?)
Back to sleep - next dream is that I've moved onto a new street with a bunch of really nice duplexes/quattroplexes/condos up and down it. I'm in my place, and I get online and look at Erinn's webpage, to see how she's doing. She's got a lot of pictures and video of the kids & us from when we all lived together (of course, these videos make it look like we lived together this year, as both the kids are relatively old) and I decide to walk down the street and ask her for copies of these (and anything else she's got, as these are pretty good). So I drop in to her place - I don't remember knocking or anything, just walking in. Strangely enough, I don't remember any more of our interaction, other than she was perhaps slightly nervously bubbly and I was quiet but not angry or unhappy - we didn't make up; we just sort of glossed over everything.
Next dream I'm driving into the parking lot of my new apartment (same one? Maybe; it's somewhere further north than I am now) and as mom behind me somewhere yells "be careful!" or something, I distractedly drive right into the 8ft deep or so hole that's there with the construction going on around us. My neighbors good-naturedly drag me & my station wagon out, and I say "You know, it seems I want your company so badly - how about we start a breakfast club rather than me falling into this hole?" (I've evidently done this before.) Several people express interest, and mom & I head up to the apartment. Mom expresses some doubt about a breakfast club, and talks about how it's not polite to make people host get-togethers at their places and making people feel obligated, blah blah blah. I tell her I'm not going to make anybody do anything; I'd just like to invite my neighbors over more! Then I guess there's a knock at the door, and mom goes into her room. Either the kids are already in bed or mom takes over putting them to bed while I answer the door. It's my old neighbor Chris (that I used to have a crush on in high school) and a friend of his, and I invite them in and we sit around and catch up on each others' lives - somehow Chris has gotten hold of a paper I've published that is somewhat objectivist in nature and he tells me I've done a good job. Things get a little flirty, but it's all very quiet and understated - and I'm just being a tease, I'm not really interested. Oddly enough, it seems that Justin hasn't moved with us yet - there's some feeling that he'll be moving up soon, and then I'm planning on letting him stay home with the kids for a while, to give him a break, since I have a good job. Then we head out to join up with Nathan (an ex-fling) and one of his friends, and they're in the front seat driving. Chris can't stand him. We're all talking about all kinds of things - everything from life back in Tallahassee, the hell that was high school, to philosophy, politics, etc. We then pull into a parking space in front of a row of swank townhouses, and Chris makes some comment like "what the hell, do you expect us to walk home?!" Either I or Nathan says no, it's not his car, it's mine, doofus. So Nathan & his buddy get out, and I get in the driver's seat and the rest of us leave.
Old home week inside the skull tonight. Maybe I can get another half hour of sleep.
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