Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I'd heard this and scratched my head... Ron Paul, long-time Libertarian hero and current U.S. Representative from Houston (Republican) is facing a trio of  Tea Party infused challengers in Tuesday's Republican primary . They say he's "gone Washington." I thought only the Democrats ate their own kind. It's a funny old world...

I often get myself in hot water. But not since yesterday. In the morning I appreciate a good parboiling before I begin my day. Yesterday's shower was, at best, lukewarm. I went upstairs to investigate. Uh oh. So today I'm working from home, waiting for the plumber. That 40 inch HDTV I'd had my eye on just turned into a new water heater.

Reading some of the sentiments in the blogosphere coming from the "Patriot" fringe, I am reminded of Sinclair Lewis's overlooked masterpiece, It Can't Happen Here . In it, a populist is elected President and America slips into fascism (hence the title). Written half a dozen years before we went to war with Nazi Germany, it is a disturbing and fascinating conjecture on the tenuousness of our grasp of liberty. While there are some obvious differences in the political climate between now and 1935 when it was written, it still has a lot to say to our current situation, in particular the rise of the so-called Tea Party movement. Haven't heard of it? Give it a read. You can find a free electronic copy of it over at Feedbooks (which I heartily endorse): PDF , ePub and Kindle.

Would-be Texas Governor Debra Medina continues to trot out her Tea Party infused alternate universe. The latest glimpse of her [ cynicism/ignorance/crazy ] came when she finally commented on last week's airplane attack on an Austin IRS office. The Dallas Morning News quotes her as saying the decision of a man fighting the IRS to crash his airplane into a building in Austin reflects "the hopelessness many in our society feel." Perhaps remembering the uproar that resulted from her fuzzy answer about the 9/11 bombers, she gave a half-assed assurance that she was not actually sympathizing, adding weakly, "I grieve for him. I'm very sympathetic for his family, for the families of those innocent victims in that building." I call bullshit. Coming from an avowed Tea Party candidate this strikes me as more than a little pandering to your base : anti-government soreheads and miscellaneous sociopaths . Joe Stack, the pilot, had a history of anti-tax zealotry ...

WebDesignerDepot.com has a great story entitled 20 Years of Adobe Photoshop . It is a mark of the ubiquitousness of this amazing piece of software that it has become a verb: " photoshopping " (as in digitally manipulating an image -- usually with the intent to decieve). The Knolls brothers originally called their program Image Pro when they released in it 1988. After unsuccessfully pedaling it to both SuperMac and Aldus, they finally hit paydirt with Adobe Systems, a little company founded to market the page description language known as PostScript. Version 1 was available only for the Mac. The first Windows version was 2.5. The first version I owned was version 3, which I got bundled with a scanner; it introduced layers. The rest, as they say, is history. The WebDesignerDepot.com story has lots of screenshots of early versions as well as video clips of interviews with the creators. Thanks to Slashdot for mentioning the story. Enjoy.

According to the news media (not always reliable, but there you are) we easily set a new record for snowfall yesterday -- 11.2 inches, easily breaking the old record of 7.8 inches set back in 1964. I'd decided before I went to bed last night I wasn't going into the office. I still got up at 6:00 AM (I'm a creature of habit), and went to check the school closings. Our DirectTV stopped working at one point yesterday, so I had to go online. It appears every school (including colleges) and school district is closed for the day. There are a few optimistic organizations that are bravely claiming they'll start at 10 AM or noon. We'll see.

Well, it managed to snow gently but continuously for most of the day. A neighbor told me we hit a new record for today: 7.9 inches. Dang! I've already decided to work from home again tomorrow (and have informed my boss of same). The school where my wife works has already announced they'll be closed tomorrow, primarily because all this wet, mushy stuff is going to re-freeze tonight, with predictably awful results. Here are a few more snow shots from around the house at various times of day. Above, looking towards the back porch from the studio. Above, looking towards the street from the front porch. Looking down the street from the sidewalk. By morning this will likely be ice. The sidewalk in front of the house.

Well, hell must be freezing over, or something like that. Washington DC is currently sitting under several feet of snow, and much of the business of government has been shut down, to the delight of various political persuasions. George Mason University (Fairfax VA), where Youngest Son is a freshman, has been closed since Monday and will likely be closed tomorrow. Below is a photo from his window in the dorm (he hasn't ventured out too far). Meanwhile, we are having a bit of inclement weather here in Texas as well. Here's a view from my front porch. This of course has all the Global Warming / Climate Change doubters in a fine fettle. Expect more on this from my friend and sparing partner, the Whited Sepulchre . Me? I'll let others have the snowball fight over that issue.

I've been doing a bit more web-coding of late. Despite my Linux pretensions, I typically do the coding on my old Windows XP box (I'm a creature of habit). A lot of what I've been doing needs to be testing on a webserver. Just viewing the local file in a browser won't work (paths, you know). While I could upload everything to my Linux box with Apache, that's a little time consuming if I'm making a series of minor tweaks. And installing a full blown Windows version of Apache seems like overkill. For a while I've been using a handy little program called TinyWeb , written by Maxim Masiutin and distributed by RITLabs . The executable is 53K (compare that to, say, Microsoft IIS). Granted it is pretty limited in what it will do and it won't be running your e-commerce site, but if all you want to do is preview some files, it's perfect. This is a command-line only tool, so you will absolutely want to download TinyBox , which is a graphical front end to Tiny...

I've warned my wife: I plan to be camped out in front of the television all evening, watching the season opener of the final season of LOST. No phone calls, no conversation: I'm here for the night. If I could pre-order the complete series boxed set tonight from Amazon.com, I'd do it at the next commercial break.

Now there's a new way to blog on the run. BlogPress Lite is a free iPhone app from InfoThinker, written with the support of the Blogger team at Google. It supports adding photos, with hooks into your Blogger Picasa account. The full version supports blogging platforms. Needless to say I'm writing this while lying in bed, since I'm not quite ready to get up.