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teh kittehs

Political Brutality

There’s been much said about John McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin, with how that complicates attack strong advertisements from the Democrats, as nobody wants to be mean to a girl, do they?

Let’s begin with how people were mean to Hillary Clinton. Perhaps because she’s already been in politics in one way or another for decades now, or perhaps because she looks like a potato right before it’s aged enough to be called “leaky”, but people didn’t pull their punches with her. I appreciate that.

Why be nice to Sarah?

John McCain is old. He has cancer, and is rapidly nearing the national average health expectancy of 77 years. If he serves an 8 year term, it is expected for him to die of old age while in office. This means that we must pay more attention to his running mate, as there is a greater-than-average chance she will be in office.

So, why be nice to Sarah?

The President of the United States of America is commander-in-chief of the military. This involves launching nuclear missiles. The president appoints Federal judges for life. He is the ultimate and direct boss of over “four million employees”. Lastly, and most importantly, the president is responsible for signing bills into law or otherwise vetoing them. In the post-Great Depression era of regular daily interaction between the citizenry and the Federal Government, this is important. The basic job of being the president of The Single Remaining Superpower in the world is one of the most demanding jobs in the world.

Why should we be nice to Sarah?

We shouldn’t.

Nor should we be nice to the candidates themselves.

They should be stressed. They should be treated as harshly by the media as possible. Fox, don’t keep Bill O’Reilly attacking liberals- have him go and dog everyone. Weaknesses are found best through testing to failure. Let’s have folks pressed until they show their bad side to us, before the elections. Let’s do our best to crush them, before the demands of office do it while they’re at the helm.

In other words, I want pudding, damnit.

Raisin Bran

I’ve just tried Raisin Bran for the first time this morning.

And it’s the single most terrible-tasting cereal I’ve ever had the displeasure to experience.

Correction: Now that the bran flakes have soaked in the milk a bit more, I can’t say it’s completely terrible. The milk washes out most of the flavor of the bran, leaving it as “Raisin & Textured Milk Cereal”

Opera vs Firefox, Round NaN

I’ve always enjoyed the UI of Opera’s desktop browser. Computers should work how I expect them to, and not vice versa, and Opera tends to operate just how I think a web browser should. Firefox has been catching up pretty decently as of late, and after trying Google Chrome, I think that’s a good contender, but switching back to Opera always feels like coming back home, no matter how long I’ve been astray.

And now I’m on Opera 9.52. What sent me back to Firefox nearly every time is broken AJAX webapps, like Google Reader. Currently, the only broken site is my employer’s Zimbra AJAX client, which doesn’t phase me too much, as I prefer offline clients for that anyhow.

One of the Shiny! New! features in Opera is “Speed Dial”, where you can have 9 favorites that it loads thumbnails of, where you can go and quick pick one. I can’t possibly do justice to describe it, so look here, and the picture of the browser is shown with Speed Dial, and one can find a description of it down on the page.

I don’t mind the lack of an ad-blocker, and as far as the rest of the functionality, with Firefox, it’s “hunt-down-the extension, and make sure it works with this version”. With Opera, it’s all built-in. Huzzah.

More Awesome than you can stick a shake at…

Yay robots!

For those of us who don’t read Chip’s blog, I’ve moved in with him into a house in Champaign. We’ve dubbed it AwesomeBase Alpha (his family’s place out in Gifford is known as AwesomeBase Beta, apparently). We’ve gotten roughly $2,000-$3,000 in more-or-less free stuff to furnish the place with, and it’s just about as big as my old place… only to be shared by two relatively quiet guys, instead of 5 guys and their parties.

What’s also nice is that I can take the MTD’s Blue line right from half a block down onto campus and back again, as well as downtown being walking distance from the house.

I’ve been trying (and succeeding!) to read more these past few months. Last night while I was home from work, I was reading some more Terry Prachett. I’d like to say he does to the fantasy genre what Douglas Adams does for science fiction, but in my opinion, Prachett does it better. Perhaps I need to refresh my memory of HHGttG, but Adams just can’t keep me laughing for pages and pages like Prachett can.

Roger Allam, Badass

Roger Allam is the all-American British badass. If you’re looking for an imposing, “love to hate” bastard for any given production, look no farther.

In the original production of Les Miserables, he played Inspector Javert. In a 2000 London musical Speer he played Hitler.

However, most of us ‘Merkins most likely know him for roles in two pop-culture movies: E. P. Arnold Royalton in Speed Racer, and Lewis Prothero in V for Vendetta.

What we really need is a movie, starring Samuel L. Jackson versus Roger Allam.

Note to self:

Next time I go to have emacs auto-indent a 12,000 line FORTRAN77 source code, do it before I leave for the evening. It’s now 3:30, and it’s been chugging with roughly 85% of one of my workstation’s two cores for the past half hour.

Dear Michigan and Florida voters…

…if you’re going to cry and hate on people for the DNC choosing to count your states as half, please cry to and hate on the duly-elected state-level Democratic Party officials, who decided to hold your primaries early in blatant disregard of party rules.

The Democratic Party is not the government; it doesn’t have to count your vote to begin with. Be thankful you’ve any votes being counted at all.

That is all.

Dear Strawberry Fields…

…when I want tea, I want tea, damnit. I don’t need some herbal remedy for ailments including but not limited to: PMS, Prostate Health, Joint Health, Sexual Health (!), Random Pain, Dumbness, Smartness, Sleepyness, Awakenness, or anything else.

I just want some black tea that has something along the lines of a citrus fruit in it. Bigelow’s “Lemon Lift”, or almost any Earl Grey blend will do. It shouldn’t take me 10 minutes looking like a fool in the tea isle to find something I want out of all the over-the-counter medicines masquerading as tea.

Thank you.

So long, Open Solaris!

I’ve been running OpenSolaris Nevada on my file server for a while now. While ZFS makes administration of filesystems beautiful, I’ve been disappointed with the zpool functionality.

In addition, administering the rest of Solaris is a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Things like Perl’s CPAN, which is supposed to have a high level of “JustWorks”, fails hard in Solaris (which includes both 5.6 and 5.8). Things like libtorrent/rtorrent and FLAC with Ogg support, which compile just fine on Mac, Linux, Cygwin, and OpenBSD, fail it hard under Solaris. I’ve been frustrated with all the little quirks of the system that just don’t seem to appear under other platforms. I’m underwhelmed by the SunPRO compiler set, and the system just feels *slow* to use, as compared to Linux on the same hardware.

So, using my handy-dandy external backup drive, I backed everything up, and installed the brand-new Ubuntu 8.04 on it, and while it’s back to mdraid and lvm, the rest of the sanity more than makes up for it.