Friday, August 13, 2004
Julia Child, Rest In Peace
Julia Child is one of those “been around forevers” that I actually knew was still alive. I remember watching her on TV, or perhaps more accurately, being there while my mother watched, when I was a very young kid. You could say that she was the original ”eat what you want“ recipe purveyor.
Here is the Fox article.
Thanks to Jen for the heads up.
The Press Is Not Too Swift
Dean has been on the Kerry lied, press denied story so I don’t have to.
So has he who needs no linkage, pretty much nonstop for days, superlatively. That would mean do the relevant read and scroll routine if you’re one of the three people in America who hasn’t already been there.
Which is a problem for the activist media campaigning, by comission or omission, for Kerry. We’re here, we’re blogs, we’re being seen and not going away. It’s not automatically a Bad Thing for the “mainstream” press to be partisan. It’s bad to pretend not to be, or purport not to be. It’s bad to quash a fair, balanced story that’s newsworthy and fit to print.
If you’re going to spin the news your way, for your guy, say so. It’ll go far toward keeping the fourth estate from being that of a decedent, one who died a journalistic pauper, dead of ideas and integrity deficiency. Enter blogs: the fifth estate?
Too many people read blogs to turn back control of all that we see and hear. Not that the control was ever complete or uniform. People always talked. People e-mailed once that was an option; another way the internet brought “power to the people.” The power of the mainstream press is no longer slipping away. The press itself is unwittingly expending it in an effort to elect NotBush at any cost. It’s almost sad to watch.
Real Versus Delusional
I’d say physically manifest brown books beat imagined digital brown shirts hands down.
Business Blogging Bonanza
Fast Company Now, the Fast Company magazine’s blog, is having a BlogJam in celebration of their first blogiversary. Rob, Jon and others are participating, blogging up a storm.
You should really just go there and scroll, but so far Rob has posted here. Jon has posted here, here, and here.
But doctor, there must be *some* other drug you can try…
Except that if we kill the companies that develop them, there won’t be.
For anyone who is having trouble understanding why re-importing drugs from Canada is not a good solution to the problem of drug prices in America, Rob Sama has an instructive hypothetical you might want to look at.
Thursday, August 12, 2004
A few semi-random observations:
--The fact that you can’t get gay married is no excuse for getting straight married and then fucking around on your wife. Bullshit plays for sympathy like that (i.e., he wouldn’t have had to cheat if society [read Christians, Republicans, right-wingers, etc.] was more compassionate) are exactly the sort of thing that provoke knee-jerk anti-gay-marriage--and anti-gay--reactions. It will never, never be society’s fault that someone didn’t successfully resolve his conflict about where to put his dick, whether said dick eventually went into man, woman, or chicken.
--Steven Taylor stole one of the stem cell posts that’s been hanging out in the back of my mind waiting to be written. Whew. Now I won’t have to write it.
--Things aren’t quite this bad yet with the kids upstairs, but they’re rapidly getting there. Long story. Jay’ll probably tell it after he talks to the landlord type people again. Short version: after blocking my car so that I had to park on the lawn for a week, they want us to move one of our other cars away from the basketball hoop, presumably so that they can play out there (below our bedroom window) when whoever it is that belongs to the second 3 cars that are always around the place come over. Which is always at night. Thank God they don’t play Loverboy. Yet.
--Ith and Jen are both geeking out. In a good way. I’m kind of jealous.
--I’d probably go for another few observations, but it’s late and I’m boiling sitting here, so I’m going to go hide in the air conditioning instead. See you tomorrow!
Oooh, It’s A Holiday
Or would that be: And no tax, for one day in Massachusetts, and Massachusetts, is where they love to tax.
Anyway, bad Bee Gees references aside…
Strange; today is the first I’ve heard of Massachusetts having a sales tax holiday on Saturday. Not sure if it was lack of publicity, or my not “getting out much.” The other day I saw a blog, forget which, mention a tax holiday in another state. That made me think “our state will never do something that cool.”
Whaddaya know! I was maligning the fair commiewealth of Massachusetts unfairly.
My silly Sadie girl
There’s a brief update up over at the baby blog.
My silly Sadie girl
Ok.
So I went this morning for the second in a series of non-stress tests, which “looked great” according to the midwife. This little one is so active they were having trouble getting a good read on her. She kept kicking the monitor and squirming away to where it couldn’t pick up her heartbeat. I had to press the monitor into my belly hard enough that it took a couple of hours for the marks to fade out totally. Silly baby.
The monitoring setup the practice has is really nice. They’ve got seriously comfy recliners, and the monitors they use don’t require you to do anything. I’ve read about setups where you have to push a button when you feel movement, but with this one you just lay back and relax and listen to the little one. I can’t doze through it, though, because it jerks me awake every time she kicks the thing. It makes an awful noise when she does that!
Went for an ultrasound last Tuesday...no immediate gratification results from this one, since it wasn’t with a doc, but I was told that she got a perfect score on the biophysical profile portion of the thing and got those gorgeous pics of her. She looks so much like her daddy. 
Unfortunately, her daddy missed the u/s, because I didn’t know it was going to be that thorough, but he’ll get another peek at our last level 2 at the end of the month. And there is the possibility that I’ll get more pics from the weeklies...the tech told me that I’d be seeing her each time. Yay! She’s a total sweetie, and she was so patient with our very active little girl.
I want to talk about the hospital tour, too, but that will have to be in another post. My hands and wrists are so stiff and sore that typing much at any one time is sort of a drag at this point. So I’ll save that for later, but I will say that I’m very pleased with the setup.
I’m right on the verge of getting impatient for this child to arrive.
Pardon my brevity.
Woo-hoo! I’m a danger to society!
This is completely outrageous. It’s wrong on so many levels that I don’t even know where to begin, so I think I’ll just leave it be for the moment, except to point out that it must be terribly unpleasant to live in fear of other people’s choices like that.
I’d miss the days when feminism was about women having choices, but I’m not sure they ever existed, and if they did, they were before my time.
Oh, well.
*sigh*
This is a large part of why I miss living in Pensacola so damn much it makes me want to cry sometimes, even if you do spend half the summer wondering when one of these things is actually going to hit you again.
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
More blogosphere baby news:
The Little Earthling is here! Congrats to Mr. and Mrs. Earthling!
Temporary Exchange Madness
Before we went to see the birth facilities at the hospital where Sadie will arrive (assuming she doesn’t get impatient and insist on a home or roadside birth), I did my usual check of the servers and manual backup of something that the vendor made impossible to automate.
I made a point to check available disk space on the one GB C drive of the mail server (Exchange 5.5). It keeps running low and barfing. This is weird, because most everything except the OS is on the D drive. There are a few residual Exchange files, and there are some log data files that didn’t want to relocate.
I was irritated because the day before I have 60-odd MB free, and last night it was back down to 24 MB for no apparent reason. You’d be surprised at some of the things I’ve deleted or moved in an effort to clear space on the drive. I got particularly systematic. Right-click winnt, properties, it has over 600 MB. Odd, NT doesn’t need that much.
Right-click profiles, that has over 400 MB. Strange; I cleared everything off the desktop and so forth from the administrator profile, and nothing else normally would log in.
Aha! It’s all under the Exchange service’s profile. Exchange runs as its own “user,” after all, so there is a profile, but… there’s data under there?
So I poke around and find it’s all under Temporary Internet Files. What!? All you Exchange experts out there are probably nodding and saying “of course, duh.” I’m not an “expert,” just someone reasonably good at figuring out and dealing with many different things. I’ve managed to keep the Exchange server functioning for five years or so with minimal help from people who really know Exchange.
I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense. Or does it? E-mail comes in containing HTML elements, it puts that in the Exchange service’s temporary internet files location? Or something like that? My concern was it’s a sign of something illicit. I have done zero research yet, and after this little adventure had to flee to get us to the hospital for the maternity facilities tour, Q&A session, and birth movie. We were almost on time despite my getting sucked into the server mystery.
Naturally I tried to delete the temporary internet files, spread among four directories. I highlighted the contents of one, pressed delete, and it all disappeared. Went to the other temporary internet folders and those were then empty too. Odd. Yet no disk space was cleared.
It was as if my “deletion” was a hiding instead. Emptying recycle bin and rebooting didn’t make any difference. Weird. That’s how I left it, with that mystery awaiting resolution. I haven’t tried actually logging onto NT as the Exchange service myself yet to see if that gets me anywhere. I managed to get the free space back up to about 60 MB before I fled, but it’s nagging at me, no doubt mocking me intentionally. Heck, I am assuming it won’t hurt anything to delete those files, any more than if I deleted them from my own profile.
The goal is to get them out of there, make them go to the D drive in the future if possible, and limit their extent if possible. Then again, by the time that many more accumulate, we will have switch servers and Exchange versions. Presumably.
Anyway, enough blogging. I need to go wrestle with Peachtree, swap someone a better computer, see if anyone has paid me, and possibly talk to a prospective new client today. I hate the whole “initial contact” thing, hot referral from someone or not.
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Sadie Says Hi Everyone
I posted this and more ultrasound pics over on the baby blog. Click for a larger version in new window:
Update:
Included Sadie Rose in today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.
What A Cutie
[Originally published to the old baby blog.]
Deb went for the weekly ultrasound. It took a bit of extra time, between needing to do detailed measurements, and the little squirt being hyperactive in the face of attempts to observe her. I think she mistakes herself for a quantum state.
Anyway, we got pictures! Including a full face shot! Deb’s all excited at how much she looks like me, at least in the upper face. Click on each of these for a larger version. These were increased in brightness by 5% to make them a bit clearer. Enjoy!
Just Sad
It occurred to me last night that I have been troubleshooting and working on one particular laptop computer, in a couple different incidents, not only long enough to have billed enough to pay for a new one, but about long enough to pay for two new ones. That’s pretty sad.
Dean and Rosemary:
Congratulations! I can’t even begin to tell you how happy we are for you.
*doing happy dance*
Woo-hoo!
My life as an incubator.
Another appointment this morning; I have the feeling that this thrice weekly monitoring stuff is going to get old pretty fast. Still, I do have to admit that I love any excuse to go in and listen to and/or see the little one, and the technology is useful, so I can’t complain. Well, I can, but I think that’d put me into the ungrateful wench category, which is so not where I am this morning.
In any case, I’ll probably not be around to blog much, since I have errands to run after I’m done at the doc’s. Not that that’s much of a change of pace, but I’m feeling chatty this morning, so I thought I’d share. *grin*
Monday, August 09, 2004
Carnival of the Capitalists Beams Over to PoliBlog™
I might have known that Steven Taylor of PoliBlog™ fame would have a Star Trek themed CotC. Very nice, and tons of entries for you to check out.
But then, you probably already visit Steven all the time, since his is one of the best blogs out there, so you may have stumbled across CotC there without needing me to tell you about it.
Anyway, for more info and a list of future hosts, there’s the Carnival of the Capitalists page. There’s also a page of past CotC locations.
Next week’s host will be Dispatches from the Frozen North, taking your entries now via capitalists -at-elhide -dot- com, until about Sunday evening.
Speaking of Memes…
Why, no, I’m really not feeling wordy today. Why do you ask?
Toast and CotC Taste Great Together?
Poliblog™ has the latest Toast-O-Meter up. Carnival of the Capitalists should follow sometime today. I’m glad it’s Steven doing two big memes in one day, and not me.
This morning’s rhetorical question:
If there’s no pollen, and there’s no mold (and accoridng to the folks that track that sort of thing, the count here is very near zero at the moment), why in hell can’t I quit sneezing?
Sunday, August 08, 2004
So Stupid He’s Brilliant
This seems to have people all excited, but George Bush is outmaneuvering the opposition, or at least the loonies, again. He does that so well.
By inviting an organization to observe the elections, he pulls the rug out from under the calls for UN. Monitoring.
By calling in an organization that is not the UN, he circumvents that utterly inappropriate precedent from taking hold.
Because it’s an organization that watched our 2002 elections, it’s not a new or unprecedented thing. Funny, it went so unremarked last time around, despite it being two years closer to the Democrat’s antics in 2000.
Since the organization can do nothing but express an opinion and publicize any problems they see, it doesn’t affect sovereignty. At the same time, if there are problems, they should be publicized so they can be addressed. It’s in nobody’s interest for there to be a festering belief that fraud or unfairness occurs, even if it traditionally has, to the dismay of Republican candidates over the years.
The Congressweasels who called for UN observation of the elections should be tossed out of office in disgrace. The action borders on traitorous. The action was a blatent up yours to Bush. They and their moonbat cheering section have been rendered moot in one clever strike that preempts further such nonsense. If you read the article, it makes Barbara Lee and Jesse Jackson come across as lunatics. Well, not that that’s hard.. It makes the President sound Presidential.
This is a far cry from where the whole issue could have gone had he done nothing, not even inviting the same observers who were invited for the last election. Very smooth. The worst flack will come from conservatives who equate any international observers with the admittedly evil and obsolete UN, and who don’t follow the larger political picture.
Update:
James has now discovered this story and adds himself to the plethora who vehemently disagree with our take.
A Long Awaited Party Post
Deb and I went to the wonderful blogger bash at the Weekend Pundit Manse Saturday. Traffic was sooooo bad getting there, far beyond the normal “I-93 needs widening on this stretch and people need to gain driving competence” southern NH slowdown, that we were getting rather cranky about having said we would go. Even the rest areas were crazy, with Deb witnessing the ultimate scumbag move of someone cutting off a pregnant lady going into a stall. Classy.
It was totally worth it, and traffic on the way home allowed me to look accurate about how close I’d said it was before we left. One highlight was the late day boat ride. I haven’t been in a boat like that for years. When I was young, my father owned a small motorboat for a number of years. We even rode down the Cape Cod Canal in it. That brought back memories.
I didn’t make a point of taking posed pictures of individuals who were there. Jeff Soyer had that well in hand, so for good pictures of many of us, you should go here. Jeff also took some nice scenery pictures and put them here.
I did get a nice, non-group picture of Chan and Deb:
As usual, click on the picture to open a larger image in a new window. As not per usual, most of the larger images are the full size produced by the camera, rather than being trimmed to modest file sizes and standard 800x600 resolutions.
I also got an individual shot of Jeff:
When I joked about blackmail material, I was only kidding. I think for this one the lighting and camera zoom were not my friend. Oh well. This picture the small version is a crop and resize, so clicking gets you the huge version with all the background in it. This is just as Jeff was cutting out on us all too early.
Jeff resembles a guy I worked with who, unfortunately, was hopelessly incompetent to be doing tech support at that level, but was a nice guy. Also pretty obviously closeted. It was rather surreal meeting Jeff as a result, but he was as cool as you would expect, “knowing” him from the blog.
This picture of a rainbow past the people on the porch came out unintentionally artsy looking, especially after I cropped it a bit:
I got a couple more of the rainbow. This one Deb set as her wallpaper today. Feel free, if you like it as much. If you look closely, you’ll see the rainbow has an echo:
For the sake of redundant repetition, here is another one of the rainbow, not as good as the above:
Here are a couple of the the yard where the grill was located, with Chan presiding over the cookery at the time. A whole slew of kids were there, in addition to adult bloggers, friends and family. They were remarkably self-contained and perfectly behaved, with older ones entertaining and watching out for younger ones. I wish I had half their energy.
In the above, you can clearly see Chan, Sol, his wife, and N.E. Republican. In the one above that you also get Bogie, her husband, and Mudge, sort of.
The rest of these are candids taken of people milling about and talking on the manse porch.
Let’s see… You can see Bogie, Chan, Jeff, BogieHubby, Sol, N.E. Republican, Deb, Deb, Jillian the pink hater, Submarine Tim, Geoffrey (sort of), Mrs. Sol, Submarine Dawn, random kids and the back of someone’s head in these three pictures.
I think that last one was what I ended up with at the end of an “oh shoot, what happened to the camera, why won’t it snap a picture” episode in which I had unwittingly hit something that made it record a clip of video.
Somehow I managed not to get a picture of WP founding blogger John Eddy, despite having talked with him at length. Oh, hi Dean! We got your greeting. Blah blah book mumble server mumble regular backups blah blah hoping it’s all better now. I also got no pictures containing MommaBear or PoppaBear, or the third Deb and her lovely family.
I’m looking forward to the next time we can get together with like-minded bloggers this way. It was a blast! I do believe that we solved all the problems of the world in a single afternoon, just like that. It’s the implementation that’s the problem.
Other posts on the bash:
Weekend Pundit
Solomonia
New England Republican
Dog Snot Diaries
Bogieblog
As noted, Alphecca and Alphecca too.
32 Weeks
8 months today. I insist on counting that way. Actually, one of the funniest phone calls I ever got was from a girlfriend who said, “Nobody told me it was 9 full months!” I felt so bad for her, but she was so funny. And I think it’s completely fair to walk around for a month telling people you’re nine months pregnant. After all, once you get there anything can happen…
Yeah, I’ve got a bad case of wishful thinking. I’ve also got a lot of house left to clean. Another girlfriend warned me that at about this point I’d start in with the early nesting stuff, but I’ve come to believe that the 8 months bout of cleaning isn’t nesting at all. It’s sheer panic. I could have a baby in as little as a month, and though it will likely be longer, I don’t want to count on the extra time. (I don’t want to be 100% ready, either, though, because if I am she’ll show up late just to mock me. Heh.) This house *still* looks like we just moved into it, which in cosmic time we have, but in normal-people-time...well, it’s past due to actually be organized. Sheesh.
This ought to be an interesting week. Tomorrow marks the beginning of the extra monitoring I’ll be enjoying, with the first of many non-stress tests. The schedule as it currently stands is NSTs Mondays and Thursdays and ultrasounds Tuesdays. I’ll report back on how it goes. Seems like rather a lot of fuss to me, but it’s also kind of neat that I’ll *know* that she’s doing well, and if she’s not, she can be liberated from her mean old mommy promptly. The wonderful thing is that at this point there’s no reason to suspect that there will be any problems, so I can relax and enjoy it. Or something.
Anyway...time to fix supper. More updates as news is available.
Bye Kerry, Bye
Devastating. Absolutely devastating. I had no idea just how fraudulent Kerry was. He should never have used Vietnam as the basis for his run for President.
Oh, and ouch.
On another note, I was thinking the other day that once he has blown his chance to be President and we have all breathed sighs of relief, it is time for someone good to run against him and ensure he gets out of the Senate, where he doesn’t belong either. I’d even consider an honest Democrat as primary opposition, if no electable Republican is available.
How hard could it be? His name isn’t Kennedy, and Massachusetts already has no problem electing Republican governors.
BFL Update and More!
In light of the recent additions to the Bear Flag League, I’ve updated the BFL roll. If anybody is still missing or at the wrong location, let me know.
There’s a Mini-New England Blogger Bash post on the way, but I’m letting the husband write that one, since he’s so much better at that sort of thing than I am. Theoretically, this will happen today, though we both have a bad case of Sunday afternoon. I do want to thank Chan and Deb for putting together such a lovely party. Y’all are the best.
Saturday, August 07, 2004
Courtney
Friday, August 06, 2004
Good Bad News
I have bad news, and I have good news.
The bad news is blogging will be minimal at best tomorrow the rest of today. Well, Deb suspects not everyone will consider that bad news, but hey.
The good news is we will be going here in more than a merely virtual sense. That’s right! We will be in the Paugus presence of Chan and John. Should be quite Eddyfying. (My wife is going to hate me for these, so let it not be said I can’t be brave.)
Better still, we should get to meet a wide variety of other bloggers while there Saturday.
It should be fun, so long as nothing untoward prevents us and the mini-bash from converging in the same basic space-time continuum. I expect we will be rushing on out of here in the morning and gone the rest of the day, but we’ll try to remember the camera so we too can gather blackmail blog material. All else fails, we’ll update you Sunday.