Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I remember reading Margery Williams' classic The Velveteen Rabbit to my kids when they were little. They are now young adults. If you've never read the book, get a copy, and find a kid to read it to. It is a subtle and beautiful work. I still can't read it out loud without getting choked up. But that's just me. "What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?" "Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real." "Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit. "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt." "Does it hap...

Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah/Cozy Kwanzaa/Saturnalia/Solstice to all who put up with my nonsense and lunatic prattling. It's been an interesting year, eh? A holiday shout out to several of my blogging buddies, who, though I don't always agree with, have become good friends. This includes the Whited Sepulchre , TarrantLibertyGuy, Browncoat Libertarian and Stephen Smith . Proof you can disagree without being disagreeable. A special shout as well to my old friend Dan , who I've known since 5th grade and who writes much better than I and has led a much more interesting life as well.

The whole culture war over Christmas can be neatly illustrated by the running edit battles going on in the Wikipedia entry for " Christmas Tree " where one side writes about the pagan origins of the Christmas tree, and the other immediately edits them out. This has been going on for weeks . Check for all the edits labeled for "Pre-Christian roots." This is a little like how Winston Smith spent his days in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. Don't like the truth? Edit it. Then your truth is the truth. I came about this because I'd researched the history of the Christmas Tree and found reference to the pagan origins in Wikipedia, then went back a week later only to find them gone. The hand of God may be invisible but some of his/her bone-headed followers are leaving fingerprints behind.

For some years I worked in advertising. Among the many blots on my soul was the fact that I pimped Christmas and the Baby Jesus to sell worthless shit. Now I discover, thanks to Bill O'Reilly, I was doing the Lord's Work. Now that it's December, Fox News and its various reptilian talking heads are once again hard at work promoting the War On Christmas . Bill O'Reilly kicked off this holiday tradition a few years back. It's like the Right Wing's Charlie Brown Christmas -- they trot it out every year since they know it's a surefire ratings booster. It's most visible form is flogging various retailers who choose to say "Holiday Sale" instead of "Christmas Sale." This strikes me as odd. I have a hard time seeing how using the label "Christmas" as a marketing tie-in is promoting the beliefs of Christendom. If anything, it serves to further secularize a Holiday/HolyDay already weighted down with a vast collection of warmed over ...

A short economics lesson for today, courtesy of the magnificent Bananas Gorilla . A free-market economy is truly a marvelous thing if someone else is doing all the work. More of Bananas' wisdom can be found at the Japing Ape .

Not to beat a dead horse or anything but... 22 million missing emails from the Bush administration have finally been found. In case you've forgotten your ancient history, the Bush White House developed quite a case of  "Gosh, we can't find that," during the stink over the attorney general firings and the brouhaha surrounding the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame . It will be interesting to see if the inquiring minds who are all a-twitter over the so-called "Climategate" emails will find this bit of news worthy of their pronouncements. The newly discovered emails cover 94 calendar days of email backups that include the periods where the above events took place. These are, by the way, mandated by federal law to be preserved. The reason given for their missing status was they were "mislabeled." Uh huh. While I'm sure there may be a fair amount of potentially explosive material to be discovered (well, not before 2014 at the earliest), th...

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Teenagers are so hard to shop for. Not sure what to get for that thumb-twitching, over-caffeinated gamer in your life? Commonsense Media has helpfully compiled a list of the top ten games to avoid (because of " excessive violence , negative role models, extreme gore, sociopathic behavior") this holiday shopping season. Of course, these are exactly the games your little sociopath is asking for, assuming he/she hasn't already bit-torrented them. Now you know what to ask for at GameStop. The list: Assassin's Creed II Borderlands Brutal Legend Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Dead Space: Extraction Dragon Age: Origins Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony Demon's Souls Left 4 Dead 2 Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Remember, nothing says love like automatic weapons fire. Merry Christmas!

And now for a short break from ponderous holiday thoughts. Here's my latest geeky thing. I confess, I love my tunes, which is one of the reasons I finally opted for an iPhone -- it's a great portable music device. And not just when using it as an MP3 player. Lots of devices do that. It also has great streaming audio functionality. Apps like Pandora , Slacker and Shoutcast (to mention but a few) were what sold me. But when I'm home I don't always feel like listening to streams on my iPhone. I've got other stream players, such as my Roku Soundbridge and Linksys WMLS11B . Here's a brief discussion about one way (out of many) to manage tunes for these two devices. Both of these have remotes that let you browse for music servers on your network or  select preselected streams. While useful, both devices have only low-res displays which means a lot of drilling down using the remote -- not a very fast or intuitive method of looking for stuff. Since I can...

It's just after 8 AM on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Large numbers of my fellow Americans arose in the pre-dawn hours to stand in line for bargains in the unofficial beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Sorry, not me. I prefer to lounge in bed, enjoying a cup of coffee; newspaper and wife at my side. I'll let others shop. In the family room are two sleeping figures: friends of my youngest. We tend to be the place where he and his friends land for their gatherings. In the living room are two more, stretched out on the sleeper couch. At around 2:30 last night I sent a text message to youngest son informing him the party needed to wind down, else I storm out in my boxers and chase everyone out. They are techno-geeks. Unlike older brother, instead of alcohol, this crowd goes for caffeine so they can game and the like all night. Hence the 2:30 shutdown message. This is why I like Thanksgiving. Unlike Christmas, which we've allowed to devolve into...

The spousal companion is splitting time between watching the Macy's Parade and making pumpkin pie . Youngest son, newly reunited for the long weekend, is upstairs asleep. My time in the kitchen will come soon: I'm making purple mashed taters and green bean casserole for the family gathering in a few hours. I've looked over the Black Friday ads and have confirmed there's nothing worth getting up at 4 AM and fighting crazed bargain hunters for. Time to reflect briefly on what I'm thankful for. First and foremost, I'm thankful for my wife and sons, who continue to give meaning to my life.  I'm thankful everyone in my family is healthy, both physically and mentally. I'm thankful my two sons are finding who they are and what makes them happy. I'm thankful I have a roof over my head. I'm thankful I have a job. Despite my occasional grousing, I feel fortunate to be doing what I'm doing. I'm also thankful former colleagues who lost their...

In honor of Texas Christian University (my alma mater) and their number 4 nationally ranked   football team, I will be serving purple mashed potatoes at the family Thanksgiving gathering this year. For those in my family whose loyalty to the Horned Frogs does not overcome their aversion to funny-colored food, I will be making normally colored mashed potatoes as well. It will be interesting to see which go fastest. Go Frogs!

The holidays are upon us. Actually they were upon us sometime before Halloween: Santa now mingles freely with Dracula and Naughty Nurse, and visions of sugar plums are replaced by 20 count bags of mini-Snickers bars. I'm bracing myself for our latest holiday tradition, the bombastic pronouncements about the " War on Christmas ." For the past several years, self-anointed protectors of Christmas  have been creating lists of which retailers are naughty or nice. This seems to boil down to who says "Holiday" in their advertising instead of "Christmas." On the Naughty list have been such Satanic organizations as Sears, Wal-Mart, Target, The Gap, Banana Republic, Home Depot. This year's Naughty and Nice list has been helpfully compiled by the American Family Association of Tupelo, Mississippi. You may recall the American Family Association , led by the Reverand Donald Wildmon, from their previous name, the National Federation for Decency . The...

My dad, a farm boy from East Texas, joined the U.S. Navy in 1945. He had to get his parents' permission to enlist, since he was only 17 at the time. He's now 82. He never did go back to the farm. Instead, like a lot of his generation, he went to college on the G.I. Bill, where he ended up meeting my mother. Of all the things he likes to talks about, his experiences in the Navy are by far his favorite topic. Even though I've heard these tales thousands of times, I'll go on listening as long as he tells them. It's the least I can do. Thanks Dad. I love you.

It's a cool, slightly overcast day and I'm standing in Fort Worth's Trinity Park with a huge, oddly festive crowd. Odd in that it is about brain tumors. But festive in that it celebrates survival. This is the 2009 Brain Tumor Walk. I'm here because my brother-in-law's wife passed away last month, a little over a year after she was diagnosed with the same kind of tumor that killed Teddy Kennedy. The overwhelming message is one of hope. There are survivors of 10 years. Sorry to cut this short -- time to start walking!

I've never been a huge Mac fan, although I have a representative sampling of old machines in my collection o' historic computer junk. Still, I find them interesting. Most of them were either bargains from Goodwill or cast-offs from a local university, running versions of the Mac OS from 6.x to 8.5. I played with them mostly as curiosities. Once finished I'd go back to my Windows or (later) my Linux machines. Being the sometimes artist, I have lots of friends firmly in the Mac world, so I'm familiar with the basics of the cult of the Mac. Because of his interest in the arts, when oldest son got ready to leave for college he chose an iBook laptop (at my suggestion) rather than a PC. He loves it, and later upgraded to a MacBook. His laptop was my first exposure to OS X. A little history The road to OS X from previous Mac operating systems was, to coin a phrase, a maze of twisty little passages, all different (if you're interested in this sort of thing there...

The day we've all been waiting for -- launch day for Windows 7. Let the bloat begin!

A while back I texted youngest son and asked "Should I come for Family Weekend or not?" He replied back "Either way is fine." I took that as the closest I would ever get to an affirmative and made my travel arrangements. The main event on Friday (arguably for the whole weekend) was Mason Madness -- the fall rite that officially kicks off basketball practice for the upcoming George Mason basketball season.  Unlike Texas, where football is the state religion, the eastern seaboard worships (to a much greater extent) at the altar of basketball. And George Mason (which won the 2006 Eastern Regional NCAA Championship) is no exception. The five days preceding my trip I ran a low grade fever, hacking and coughing like death. By that Friday my fever had broken but I was but a shadow of my usual self. Note to the savvy traveler: if you've been under the weather, expecting to make it to the airport to catch a 7:00 AM flight is wildly optimistic. After only one miss...

Youngest son (and fellow Colbert Report junkie) clued me into the launch of a new app from the Colbert Nation which features clips of all of Stephen Colbert's " The Word ." Now you'll never be more than a screen tap away from Stephen's truthiness. This may be the single best reason ever to get an iPhone. You can view the featured (most recent) Word, or choose by date--all the way back to 2005. You can go by the title and by most popular. Or select Random and pull up some long-forgotten Wisdom from any of the past five seasons. Best 99 cents you'll ever spend! Screenshot shamelessly nicked from TheNoFactZone -- best source of information on All Things Colbert. Follow the link for more information and additional screenshots.

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I have seen the future of eBooks. It's the Foxit eSlick Reader . Unlike the Kindle, Sony and other eBook readers which use document formats that lock you down to a single source, this one reads PDFs. While Adobe originally created PDF as a proprietary format, they released it as an open standard on July 1, 2008. While Kindle and its kin are well made devices, the reliance on a single entity is problematic: should the company decide to discontinue the device and end support for the document format, you're screwed. With the eSlick Reader, even if Foxit stops making the unit, you'll be able to continue to get new books, as well as read the books on any other device (including your computer) that reads PDFs. Quoting from the overview page, The eSlick Reader has an internal memory of 512MB and comes with a 2 GB SD card (supports up to 4 GB). Resolution is 600 x 800 pixel. As with almost every other device out there, it also plays MP3s (great for audio books). It also ...

The article is " How To Respond Effectively to Design Criticism " from Smashing Magazine , a site focusing on graphic design. I'm going to have to add this to my weekly reading list. I forget how I ran across the post but it made some excellent points. Fear not if you aren't a designer -- the general principles the author outlines are applicable to any number of disciplines. Far be it from me to quote extensively -- just go there and read it yourself.

Okay -- if you accused me of link-whoring I'd be hard-pressed to deny it. Ron Paul, anointed as one of the few worthies amongst my erstwhile Libertarian drinking buddies, was on Jon Stewart last night to promote his new book. Despite his rock star status within the ranks of the Libertarians, Representative Paul is technically a House Republican. I'll say I can tolerate his brand of Republicanism a little more than some of the other flavors. Jon Stewart did a pretty good interview,although it seemed (to me anyway) there were times the Representative from Houston was clearly thinking, "What the fuck?" I'll let you decide for yourself why. As Stewart would say, "Here's your moment of Zen..." The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Ron Paul www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

Actually this happened a couple of weeks ago, right before I took the young scholar off to George Mason University. Looking back, most of my cellphone decisions have been driven by the whim of my offspring. We got cellphones in the first place at the urging of our oldest, who foolishly thought it would make his mother easier to get hold of. Now we've switched to AT&T because the youngest wanted an iPhone. Since we regularly found ourselves standing on the sidewalk to make calls due to T-Mobile's crappy coverage, I was game for a change. And I get a modest discount from AT&T's mobile price thanks to my employer. Not to drag this out, but in the end we all ended up with iPhones -- youngest and me with 32GB 3Gs models, mom with the 8GB 3G. Mom (who shows slight Luddite tendencies) was the straggler. But after a weekend session of showing her what mine would do, she decided she liked the idea of having a cool phone. Thank you, Steven Jobs. Overall I'm fin...

Arrived at my office at 7:30 this morning only to discover half a Domino's pizza abandoned on the breakroom table. Someone's weekend must have sucked.

My employer, the Sisyphean Corp, announced today the retirement of our beloved CEO, L. C. "Soupy" Soupington III, after 17 years of service. He's regularly mentioned in the financial press for his unique hands-off management style, and was recently voted "Third Worst CEO in the Fortune 500." Although share values have plunged over 90% in the last 18 months, Mr. Soupington is fond of reminding employees their 401ks are buying more stock, more cheaply. He's done his bit to ensure that's possible by dumping huge amounts of his own holdings before the vomit-inducing plunge in stock prices. Insiders were surprised at the low-key announcement. Some privately remarked they expected the announcement to come on the national news, accompanied by video footage of Mr. Soupington being frog-marched from his office in handcuffs. When asked his plans, the usually CEO reserved grinned, "Play golf, gain weight and be on my guard for angry shareholders."...

I've grown weary of posting and arguing various political screeds here, as well as engaging in debate with friends and acquaintances. Across the political spectrum, the current level of rhetoric has entered a particularly shrill and nasty phase. Consider the recent health care discussions. I don't think any of this ranting solves problems.  However we've gone through other periods of bad civic manners, so I have no doubt this one will pass as well. No side is immune from this nastiness and unfortunately it's easy to get sucked into this bullshit. When I do, I find myself quickly turning into a nasty, mean-spirited person I don't much like. So at least for the time being, I've decided I'm going to resist the urge to butt heads. I'd rather find points of agreement than disagreement. Just to get it out of my system once and for all, here are my thoughts on various hot button topics of the day. While I think I'm right, I'm not going to insist ...

Okay -- a follow up on my previous post about KDE 4's apparent memory leak. Despite following the steps I listed I found I was still prone to creeping molasses. Here's what I ended up doing, which seems to have helped. First, uninstalled all of the widget libraries I could locate (relax -- I reinstalled them). Then I went in and basically re-installed KDE 4, using Synaptic. I'll note for the record I don't have a lot of love for the newest release of Adept; it's a sorry downgrade of the version that came with KDE 3. Next I installed OpenBox , which is an alternative window manager. Once completed, I had the option, when logging in, of starting my session with KDE / OpenBox. This substitutes the OpenBox window manager for Kwin , the default KDE window manager, while retaining the KDE look and feel. Compared to Kwin, OpenBox is a light weight . I confess, I can see no discernible difference between the two once I've logged in -- other than the fact tha...

Boys and girls, here's the socialist indoctrination message your right-wing nutcase parents didn't want you to hear: 12:06 P.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Hello, everybody! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. All right, everybody go ahead and have a seat. How is everybody doing today? (Applause.) How about Tim Spicer? (Applause.) I am here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we've got students tuning in from all across America, from kindergarten through 12th grade. And I am just so glad that all could join us today. And I want to thank Wakefield for being such an outstanding host. Give yourselves a big round of applause. (Applause.) I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it's your first day in a new school, so it's understandable if you're a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right n...

For the last month or so my Kubuntu Linux box has been plagued by a particular problem: after running for a little while it would gradually become more and more unresponsive, to the point of unusability. I'm running Jaunty Jackalope on a pretty quick Intel chip, with 2 GB of memory. I've got a 256 MB NVidia video card to boot -- one previously purchased by youngest son (the gamer). I'd walk away from my desktop and find when I came back it was stuck in molasses. Clicking on a button would do .... nothing. I'd have to hold the mouse button down and wait.  And wait.  And wait . Usually I've found this sort of weirdness can be explained by overheating, but that didn't seem to be the case here. Couple that with the fact that I didn't see the problem when running another window manager and signs pointed to an issue with KDE 4. After suffering through this for a while, I discussed the situation with clever youngest son ( now a freshman computer science / inf...

The New York Times has an article that discusses how the iPhone (my new favorite toy) is responsible for huge network slowdowns in certain parts of the country (New York, San Francisco), because it sucks up network capacity like a Hummer sucks gas. I can see why. I just got an iPhone and I am constantly checking mail, downloading apps, and streaming music. In fact, the ability to listen to music with free apps like Pandora and Slacker was one of the reasons I got this bad boy (and paid through the nose for the data plan). It does so much cool stuff the fact that it's also a phone is gravy. It's a little hard to feel sorry for AT&T, since they've milked this cow for all it's worth. I know a number of people who'd like to get one but refuse to deal with AT&T. I made the switch after years of having to go to the sidewalk to make calls with T-Mobile.

Youngest son, Ed, has been successfully installed at George Mason University , in Fairfax, VA. I got back yesterday evening (only to be greeted by a work emergency at midnight). We flew down Wednesday, arriving in the afternoon. We managed to get everything in a large duffel bag and Ed's backpack (with a few things in my small suitcase. Travel hint : put clothing in freezer bags and squeeze the air out before packing. The decision to fly rather than drive meant getting quite a bit of stuff locally. Rather subjecting the high-priced Taylor guitar to the dangers of air travel and dorm life, I offered to get a dorm-worthy guitar in Fairfax. So first stop (after an early dinner at our favorite Indian Buffet) was the Guitar Center. After much debate, negotiation and testing, a suitable candidate - an Epiphone AJ200SR six string - was bought and paid for, along with a gig bag for it to live in. Next we hit Target and stocked up on bedding and toiletries. During all this dr...