Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

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.