October 27, 2005 – 9:15 am
With the whole ridiculous Miers fiasco now apparently behind us, I have to wonder what really happened with all of this.
On the face of it, it would appear simply that the president chose an unqualified friend for appointment to an extremely important position, and it was shut down due to overwhelming opposition from almost everyone, even his usually strong supporters. But for some reason, that just doesn’t make sense to me.
You might call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think that the vast political staff behind any president (especially this one) would have done the research before the nomination was announced that would have indicated the likelihood of the widespread backlash that occurred from within their own party about this nomination. I refuse to believe that they didn’t do such research, so the question I have is why did the president make the nomination anyway, apparently in spite of such research?
Especially on this specific issue, which is so important to most of his “base”. I strongly believe that a large part of the reason that the president was given this second term by his supporters was the impending openings in the supreme court, and both his nominations so far (less so with Roberts, but especially Miers) seem to kind of spit in the face of those who elected him in order to seed the court with Rehnquist clones (or as close as possible).
The only options I can think of are as follows:
- I guess there’s a small chance that they didn’t actually do the research / polling, etc. beforehand that would have predicted this, but that would mean that the president’s entire political staff is pretty much incompetent. I think they’re smarter than that.
- They did the research and did not inform the president of the likely reaction, setting him up for a failure. Perhaps this could somehow play into the strategy for the next election cycle.
- They did the research and informed the president, and the president decided to go ahead with it anyway. Since he’s gotten away with a lot of crap so far, he may have figured that this would blow over as well.
- I’m sure there are other possible explanations, so please feel free to suggest them.
Maybe I am just making this too complicated, but I really think that all politics (especially at this level) is a chess game. In a good chess game, often a seemingly bad single move can only be understood in the context of the next 5 to 10 moves, so it will be interesting to see if there’s something more to this than just a big fumble by the president. I’m obviously not the administrations biggest fan, but even I would give them more credit than that.
October 27, 2005 – 8:49 am
Another post that sounds like it comes straight from the Onion…
The pigs’s blood pen is designed to play on the view of some (not all) Muslim extremists that states that if their bodies come into contact with pigs blood on or after the time of their deaths, they will not enter paradise.
October 26, 2005 – 11:42 pm
Just to show how far behind I am in listening to podcasts, I just heard the TWIT episode tonight where they were talking about GIMPShop. (Check the previous link for screenshot comparisons and the author’s post, and gimpshop.net for easier access to the most current downloads / ports).
For those of you unfamiliar with GIMP, it’s an open source image editing application that rivals Photoshop in terms of functionality, but (arguably) is not quite as user friendly (or at least intuitive). It’s available for Linux, Mac, or Windows.
Being very familiar with Photoshop, I was always hesitant to use GIMP, even though philosophically I’d prefer to, and I’m sure it could do most of the stuff that I could do in Photoshop, the downside was always that I already knew exactly how to do it in Photoshop, whereas I would have to figure out the GIMP way to accomplish the same task.
Enter Scott Moschella, creator of GIMPShop, which is basically just a facelift (menu tweaking, adjusting terminology, etc.) to make GIMP look and feel a lot like Photoshop. It’s an excellent idea, whose time has definitely come (with the current version of Photoshop costing a hefty $600). Now all you PS pirates out there (not to mention any names…) can enjoy quality image editing guilt free.
Now, anyone know of a good “Illustrator killer”?
October 26, 2005 – 7:17 pm
I’ve noticed a lot more honking in support of the anti-war protesters on the corner of Victoria and Telephone lately.
October 22, 2005 – 8:43 pm
Some pictures are up. (No, not the tarantula yet, sorry). This is a link to all the photos tagged with “Fall Drive”, the recent ones are also tagged with “2005″, but I don’t know if Flickr has a link structure for filtering on two tags at once (suggestions, anyone?), so oh well. I know, I could make a “set”, but I don’t really want to go through that much trouble.
UPDATE: Nevermind, I figured out the multiple tag link (for photos tagged with both “Fall Drive” AND “2005″).
October 22, 2005 – 8:34 pm
Just a quick post to say that I’m still here, for those of you wondering why I haven’t been posting recently.
I actually planned to set up and pre-publish a whole bunch of stuff so that new posts would show up during the week last week even though I wouldn’t be doing them at that moment (which Wordpress will do, by the way - if you set the timestamp to the future those posts won’t be shown until that time comes). Of course, I ended up not having the time to prepare all that in advance, so oh well.
I’m not necessarily apologizing for not posting either, though (or checking blogs much at all for that matter); it was good to just take a break from pretty much everything. I may or may not try to catch up and post some stuff about last week, or maybe not. We’ll see.
October 18, 2005 – 9:26 pm
Copied from the Sojourners email list:
Just weeks after Hurricane Katrina exposed the crisis of poverty in America, Congress will debate as early as Wednesday how much money should be cut from the budgets of health care, nutrition assistance, and other vital services for poor and working families. That’s right, they will cut funds - and the question is by how much. Perhaps equally astonishing, they will decide how much - up to $70 billion - they will cut taxes for the richest people in America. In Washington, this may be business as usual, but as people of faith, we believe that budgets are moral documents, and so far this budget is morally bankrupt.
October 12, 2005 – 10:38 pm
After an extended battle with my cable company (formerly known as Avenue Cable, now Wave Broadband, but no change in quality of service), I finally decided to build my own solution (actually more of a workaround) to my recurring dropped connection issues.
The symptoms were basically that the connection would periodically drop, and nothing short of physically powering the cable modem off then on would resolve it. Besides just being inconvenient while at home (having to go to the “network closet” and reset the power on the modem), it is a bigger deal when I am not home, since I frequently SSH into my home network from the outside and tunnel most of my traffic securely through to my home connection.
The attempts to work with tech support were less than fruitful, especially since most of them are trained to only know how to deal with the basic modem to single computer (Windows or Mac only, of course), with the occasional simple home router thrown in the middle which is probably (or hopefully) happening more commonly these days. On the one occasion where someone actually did come out and look at it, once they saw my setup (which was even simpler than it is now at that point) basically told me that they don’t support that kind of complex setup. Trying to convince them why the problem was on their side didn’t produce any favorable results.
So, in the end, I decided to resolve it myself. I ended up buying a “Firecracker” home automation control kit from the infamous X10 company, and writing an app that will monitor my internet connection every minute and use the X10 interface to cycle the power on the modem whenever it goes down. It runs periodically (CRON or Windows Scheduled Task, etc.) and will ping a series of addresses, and if they all fail, it considers the connection down and in need of resetting.
The reason for the post title, for those who may not know, is that X10 is the company that basically invented (or at least popularized) the web popup ad (and maybe later the “pop-under” as well, don’t know about that). Despite this fact, and the appalling design of their web site, I have to say that their product (or at least this one) works pretty well.
October 11, 2005 – 3:18 pm
I was thinking again today about the story about Google buying up a bunch of fiber and also providing free “wifi” access to everyone, and it’s my guess that they will not be making their money on this by somehow inserting GoogleAds into the web traffic.
Rather, I suspect the terms of use will include (as GMail does) the right to view any information contained within your traffic (data on which sites you go to, how long you stay, etc.) which they can sell as very valuable usage statistics to various advertising agencies, especially if it becomes the primary means of internet access for a large number of people.