July 2004 Archives
Reuters: Economy Good Despite Slowing Growth, Deficit -- Bush
I guess my only question is who buys lines like this? The economy is strong, growing, good, getting better, healthy, et cetera. I know the economy is a very complex beast, but can it's state of being change so dramatically according to which crowd Bush is talking to that day? Yes, I understand that he is likely talking about different segments of the economy based on the crowd, but he speaks and gets quoted on generalities, which on their face seem false.
Is it strong enough? Is it growing enough? Is it healthy enough? Many people who know a lot more about the economy than Bush and I put together say no, it is none of those things right now.
Don't you just love the liberal pessimism that just oozes from my fingertips?
Ryan and I decided to hit the links after work this afternoon. While digging for tees I found a scorecard from the last time I played at Sunset Hills (aka Pitch 'n Putt -- a par 3, 9-hole course). I shot a 36, and this was at least 6 years ago.
Here is what we shot today.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pat | 3 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 4 |
| Ryan | 4 | 3 | 6 | 7 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 6 |
Apple is reading a vicious attack on it's own foot. Now I'm a big Apple fan, but when I see:
Apple said in a statement it is "stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod," adding "We are investigating the (legal) implications."
I shake my head and heave a big sigh. If they bring a DMCA-style suit, never-mind the misuse of the word 'hacker', I may decide to sell my stock. As I only have 40 shares my votes count, but not as much as the people with more stock who likely care about short-term profits over bad copyright legal tactics.
So lately I've been getting hit with what a bunch of liars the democrats are. First Obama was full of crap when he talked about the Democratic party and then John Edwards said they were going to get things done that nobody could get done. Well have I got something for you...
Right freakin' on. I'm sure Woody (not Arlo -- whoops) would approve, although I realize that hardly matters in a copyright suit.
Dumb stuff... Adopting Feedburner and Ping-O-Matic.
The Feedburner service seems like a nice abstraction from the format wars. It's all XML to me...
Ping-O-Matic offloads the pinging of all the various XML-RPC services out there into one service. Yay.
Bill "Big Dog" Clinton is tearin' it up at the Democratic National Convention tonight. Boo-yah! I swear I would vote for him a 3rd time if they would let me.
Oh, and you should really just watch it on C-SPAN and ignore the pathetic network "coverage." Or read it.
The next day: Billmon agrees.
Listening to [the] Clinton speech was like hearing Mozart play after an evening spent listening to Salieri's symphonies.
So, I spent a few precious childhood years in Modoc county and have never forgotten them, no matter how hard I tried. A good friend plans trips to Lava Beds National Monument and has been trying to get me to go for years. I always made a big production about how I would never go to that hellish place ever again. Never mind that LBNM isn't even in Modoc country. It's close enough for me. The landscape is the same. The weather is the same. The roads are the same. It's the same.
But what is this? A photo of me in LBNM? But Pat! You swore up and down that you would never go! Yeah. Well if you look closely in the photo you can see me pointing to where I left my honesty and integrity.
I sent the following e-mail to Dennis Kucinich
To the Honorable Dennis Kucinich,
Unlike many Democrats I was not calling on you, or any other candidate, to step down once Senator Kerry had locked it up. The primary season is when the message needs to get flushed out and you had a lot of good things to say. I didn't agree with everything you had to say, especially about the WTO and NAFTA, but I was glad you were saying them. Like you I believe that debate is healthy and I honestly believe that you have made our party stronger. I understand that the press didn't give you any attention after Kerry locked it up. But I payed attention and a lot of people I know payed attention.
Thank you,
Patrick Berry (D - CA2)
You might want to drop Dennis a line and say thanks as well.
Ren is posting again. That is all.
Man, talk about your classic golden calf.
Really, what can we look to in today's culture that's at once immediately accessible and also representative of the speed, dexterity, magic, annoyance and utter savage bliss that is modern life? Voilà: the iPod. What, you were gonna say "Nokia?" Or "Explorer?" Or "TiVo?" Please.
Screw it, iPods rule! Mark, if there is a Hell -- I'll see you there buddy!
It's out. It's big. You can buy it in dead tree format if you want.
You should see the press conference as well (still live on C-SPAN 3), which will like be archived at C-SPAN. Ryan put it best when he said that, "It's amazing how cool they can be when they arent concerned about attacking each other."
Indeed.
One of the big things that really tied us to our new home is the huge silver maple in the backyard. Recently we needed to have it trimmed so that giant limbs didn't come crashing down on our house or our neighbor's house. We've lost a lot of shade, but gained some piece of mind that our tree is healthy and will last longer because of what we had done.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
 |  |
 |  |
I urge you all1 to read Building a Bridge to the 19th Century over at the Whiskey Bar. It's a short historical perspective on socioeconomic policy, where we are, and where we are likely to be heading. No matter your economic philosophical leanings, you should at least give it a read, if for no other reason than to re-examine your leanings and see if you still find them valid.
1 ...and by 'all' I mean 'you.'
It's clear from the chatter amongst the geekarati that I'm going to need to give subversion a serious test drive. It's clear that bumpy times are a comin' for a lot of developers who depend on revision control. To say that CVS is entrenched is an understatement on the same level as saying that "sendmail is used by a few people here and there." SourceForge and GNU Savannah both use cvs. It's fairly simply to get a repository going and do simple revision control.
At least it's smart and has a cvs conversion utility.
The Quick Links section on the Vertical Hold front page is now powered by del.icio.us and the Net::Delicious perl module.
If you haven't checked del.icio.us out yet, you really should. Even though there are any number of bookmark syncing utilities, I don't want to sync them, I want to access one set of bookmarks. Also del.icio.us gives me incredible flexibility on how to organize them in a drop-dead simple interface. The bookmarklets make it a snap to use from just about anywhere I browse. The fact that it exposes a public API pushes it over the top.
But enough about me... You can also subscribe to other people's bookmarks. I admit that it can be a bit creepy. People bookmark more than they can chew, especially once you get the hang of the system. Take Warren Ellis for example. Actually, don't. Take Rafe Colburn for example. Rafe bookmarks at lot more than he writes. So it's almost, but not quite, like reading his unwritten weblog.
Speaking of weblogs, of course it's all available via RSS.
Texas Senator John Cornyn gives this brilliant gem:
Jon tries to sum it all up:
But can't really buy it himself:
Yahoo! News Photos - link will rot in a few weeks.
Please point to the pessimistic person in this screen shot.
This entire post is by beej.
Q Scott, was the President at all surprised about Mrs. Cheney's remarks about the constitutional amendment on gay marriage? Or do you believe that she is staking out some sort of different view than the one that the President and the Vice President have advocated?
MR. McCLELLAN: I don't think -- you should look at what she said, I mean, you can see what she said for yourself -- and there's a transcript available. But the President has made it very clear that he believes it's important to protect the sanctity of marriage. And activist judges and some local officials have sought to redefine marriage without the voice of the people being heard. And the President believes that the constitutional process is the only alternative that we have available.
The constitutional process allows for the people's voice to be heard. And the constitutional process gives states the final say in this matter.
Whatwhat?! You heard the man! The states have the final say! Yay! 10th Amendment to the rescue!
Q But the constitutional process, if there was a constitutional amendment, that would be national -- that would create a national sort of system or rule. So is that different than allowing states to determine the issue for themselves?
Oh! Make him think, why doncha!
MR. McCLELLAN: It's actually a process that goes through the states, as you are aware. So the states would have the final say in this matter. And it would allow the people's voice to be heard in this important debate. This is one of our enduring institutions. The sanctity of marriage is an enduring institution in this country. And the President believes very strongly that it should be protected. He also believes very strongly that the people's voice should be heard in this debate.
Oh, the states have the say in whether or not there is a constitutional amendment. In other words, the states can choose to give up their right to have a say in the matter. Which politicians are high enough to vote for this? Can I have a list of those politicians who strive to disempower their states in the face of the federal government? (It's a rhetorical question.) You're all fired!
Q So you think that Mrs. Cheney was saying the same thing?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, again, you can look at her comments for yourself. I noticed she did talk about the constitutional process in her remarks. But you can look at her remarks for yourself.
Q And you don't want to offer the White House's own interpretation of those remarks?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I just -- I just pointed out to you the President's views on this issue.
"If you like the veal, perhaps you'd prefer the chicken?"
- Big Lies by Joe Conason
- Naked in Baghdad by Anne Garrels (gift from local public radio pledge week)
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Oh and I just polished off Shadow of the Hegemon from Orson Scott Card. I finished it in less than a week, so I guess I liked it considering that it usually takes me months to finish a book.
I'm looking forward to The System of the World, the final novel in The Baroque Cycle due out in October, and Cory's latest book Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
I don't even know what to say about this but I thought it was funny.
Poor Juan, he has clearly had enough of these shenanigans. (This title inspired by Brad DeLong)
Bush must think we are a nation of retards if he believes we will buy this language of Saddam having the "capability" to produce weapons of mass destruction.
Actually, that's Jon Stewart's theory. Bush treats us like dummies because that's what we expect him to do. "Freedom tastes delicious. Now run along."
 |  |
 |  |
This seemed like a good post to mention that you shouldn't bother trying to inline these images, or any others under the patandkat.com domain, on your site. I have no problem with you grabbing any pictures you want and putting them on your site as per the terms of the Creative Commons license that they are published under. But now that this server is back on a DSL link, you can't use my bandwidth for your site. Sorry, but those are the breaks.
MoveOn's United, Not Divided letter writing campaign could use your help.
Ann Coulter then.
O'REILLY: The weapons of mass destruction fiasco when they couldn't find them.
COULTER: Wait. We have found weapons of mass destruction...
O'REILLY: No we didn't, not to any great extent.
COULTER: That is an important point. We have found weapons of mass destruction. That is something the media is repeatedly lying about. We have not found stockpiles. We found the plants for manufacturing, we found the experiments, we found the room for human experimentation labs. We found lots of weapons of mass destruction.
O'REILLY: But not enough to justify what [Secretary of State Colin] Powell said at the U.N.
COULTER: He's the only one, by the way, it's enough to justify what Cheney, Rumsfeld, and President Bush said. The one guy in this administration who made the case that turns out to have been not completely correct, I don't think it was a lie, lie, Bush lied...
O'REILLY: No, but he took what the CIA gave him and he took it to the U.N. and it didn't work out.
COULTER: It's one guy and I note the one that the liberals like the most.
President Bush today.
"Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq," Bush said after inspecting a display of nuclear weapons parts and equipment, including assembled gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment, from Libya. (emphasis mine)
Athenae filling in for Atrios is doing a lovely job.
The entire right wing of the Republican party has done absolutely nothing with all the power they have except push the stupidest, meanest parts of their platform. In their public utterances they've done nothing but pule and whine and bitch that Howard Dean was angry, Michael Moore was fat, and Whoopi Goldberg said they sucked. They've hated on gays and they've complained about the Supreme Court and they've moaned about the media that cheerleaded them into Iraq being "too liberal."
Imagine the Democrats with undisputed control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Imagine what could have been done with that power. We could have said we were going to Mars, and actually done it. We could have said we were going to cure cancer, and gone at it with all our power and might. We could have said we were going to eliminate the crushing poverty that makes street gangs a scourge in our cities that terrorists can only dream of. We could have lifted this country up in a way that would have inspired the world. We're capable of that.
Instead, we've picked on the small stuff, on the stuff that doesn't matter, and we've called it values. Values isn't a set of groups against which it's okay to discriminate, or a set of bills designed to send a message. Values are what define us, what we hold dear. And if the Johns can get their message about what Americans hold dear out to the public, if they can say, "We are bigger than this, we are better than this, and we can give you something to believe in and work for," well, they could go to Washington and take it all.
Republicans have used their four years in control of government to show us that the best thing they know how to do is put a loudspeaker up to their own inadequacies. What will we do when our time comes?
This even gave a certified cynic like myself a moment to pause and consider the positive.
See more in Panoramas.
Bush Camp Says Democrat Kerry Out of Mainstream
The ad, to run in 18 battleground states and national cable stations, said Kerry has missed over two-thirds of all Senate votes while campaigning.
Bush was on "vacation" for over 40% of the days between his inauguration and September 11. Oops.
Gmail has been hitting some rough patches lately. No wonder I haven't had any more invites show up when I sign in. It's a good thing that people are keeping in mind that this is still a closed beta and not a service that is in "production" status just yet.
Just sayin'...
So I'm having some issues with Apache 2.0.x that I didn't see with 1.3.x. Mainly with regard to running php files without php extensions. In 1.3 we were using the DefaultType directive to tell apache what to use to server up the file. It seems as though DefaultType has gotten "smarter" somehow and is doing more to determine what kind of file it's trying to server up. For example:
File 'r' will be served up without being parsed by php:
<?php
?>
<html>
<?php
echo "foo";
?>
</html>
While file 'r2' will be parsed by php:
<?php
?>
<?php
echo "foo";
?>
So it appears that Apache 2 is looking more closely at the file than I would really like it to. How do I fix this?
Wow. According to my archives, which are never wrong, I've been using Movable Type for years now. I guess time flies when you're having fun.
A very non-predictable Morford this time. Mark takes Moore and the movie to task for some things, but comes to the conclusion that it's a good movie because of how it affects people.
Look. You can disagree with Moore's opinions and his often patronizing conclusions all you want. But you can't, after all, refute his facts. Moore's movie has done more than merely free up the pundits and the disgruntled military generals to speak out, or make timid reporters actually dig for truth again. He has done more than help put surprising words of dissent and criticism back into the mouths of congressmen and the major media.
He has, in short, made Middle America think again. He has cracked the GOP's frozen ideological sea, showed us all one thing that we have so desperately forgotten. That America does not, after all, have to be this way, and that its citizens do, in fact, have a choice.
Let America be America.
The latest Chicago Tribune poll on how people feel about restrictions on the media during wartime. Some comforting results, some not so much.
I knew it! Oh, and via Mr. DeLong we find that he is delusional as well. Great...
While driving down HWY 505 to San Francisco yesterday I saw this cool use of dust on the back of a truck:
Safety tip: taking photos while driving 75 mph is not recommended.
The server to hosts patandkat.com had to move from it's undisclosed location in San Francisco to an undisclosed location. Since the machine was going to be down and DNS would take a while to update, it was decided that an upgrade of the operating system would be performed. How does one upgrade from RedHat 7.3+errata to Fedora Core 2? Why it's quite easy.
- Back up /etc and /var to /home, since /home is on a different drive.
- Do a clean install of Fedora Core 2.
- Slowly copy stuff you need from /etc and /var.
- Fix broken stuff.
Simple as pie. The only catch is that last step...
Our server will be moving tomorrow. Downtime to last probably until sometime Saturday, at which time it will be back online and probably b0rked all to hell.
That is all.
Update July 3, 2004: The downtime was short and mostly uneventful. Yay.
