ouwiyaru

It's that time of the year again--in which I must use my 'Federal Health Savings Account' blah-di-blah, or lose it. Since I'm averse to dental work...I'll buy....Glasses!

What do you think of these:
http://www.zennioptical.com/cart/product.php?productid=753&cat=11&page=1#largeimage
http://www.zennioptical.com/cart/product.php?productid=1067&cat=17&page=1#largeimage

Feel free to make suggestions from that site or another :-)
In other news, my prescription is now weaker! The joke was made at work that all that gazing into a computer screen must help....

What a great line:
"History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

From White Flight:
(commenting on Atlanta's Episcopal private school failing to integrate its schools even after the public schools were forced to)

This is another example of the fact that the Church can be, if it is not careful, the tail-light instead of the headlight in our society; and it would be tragic, indeed, if the Church turns out to be the last bulwark of segregated power.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This quote and perspective is unusual for most of the book, since it's mostly about the white response politically and organizationally to integration in Atlanta. It piqued my interest specifically, because in some sense it's a war the racists lost. I was hoping to identify some blind-spots in the culchuh, and understand some of the sociology.

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If she is designing video games I'm thinking she might have had enough energy to stick out another Bush term. Was this really a good use of her time and power over stopping Bush from picking Alito?

It looks like Hilary Clinton finally stopped taking the crazy pills..

Results like this make me wonder if the 'right' to a trial by jury should be waivable in criminal cases.

I'm not sure whether this falls into the strictly-geek-humor file, or whether it's the beginnings of another popular appropriation of programmer tools. I'm thinking the former....

ComplaintZilla

Well, I'm on time, by my timezone :-(
peace, love, ...drool?

We were in ToysasauRUs today. It reminded me of the wonderful parts of childhood. So many awesome toys. On the other hand, the Transformers have gotten worse since the movie, I presume--only three models and now they're selling non-transforming figures which makes no sense. Back in the day, there were dinosaurs, and all sorts a stuff. Still no girl transformers. What's up with that?

There was also this cool strategy game with lasers (direct the beam through placed mirrors to hit the other player's 'king'). Need to look that up.

Year's taxes done. w00t!

This makes me furious. Anti-McCain groups lag in fundraising --it stems from the reason why many of us figured abandoning the Democratic party in 2000 wouldn't be missing us anything.

I was waiting until we had a candidate before contributing, but this was obviously mistaken.
Anyone else have spare change to save the world from another US hawk? Fight McCain.

Tin Man

I have a long history of voting for the loser, and I think tomorrow is unlikely to be an exception, but this is why I'm voting for Barack over Hilary.
1. Barack's progressive record in Illinois and how he's maintained it in the Senate.
2. His position on the war. As a progressive, I think war spending and hawkishness is pretty much the worst political sin--you're promoting death and jingoism and the industries which support them. Hilary not only famously voted for the war bill, but also joined in rhetoric attacking critics and has never recanted on the value of the Iraq war.
3. Hilary's history in implementing health care under Bill: her stump speech emphasizes that politics needs hard work. Well, that's what she did. She rolled up her sleeves and dived into Health Care policy. While doing so, she ignored most of the concerns from the economists on the team that the policies were wrong-headed, but she hammered down a policy anyway. Then she did the hard work of selling it to Congress--not by working with members, or campaigning across the country, but by waiting for Congress to invite her to testify. I'll grant that she must have learned some lessons since then in working with legislatures, but I don't think she's learned necessary lessons on administration.
4. The politics of negatives: everyone says Hilary's negatives are high. I don't actually think that will hurt her in the presidential run, but I think it will affect how much policy she can implement when she gets into office. The fence-sitting Republicans required to pass legislation will find it easy to bunker down politically against her initiatives before her first day.
5. Barack's rhetoric, on the other hand, is likely to be much harder to attack from the middle--in fact, it's the same bipartisan schtick that Bush pulled (but this time it's our side).

I have more minuscule reasons, but these are the major ones that make me weigh on Barack's side over Hilary.

We're back from Peru. I'm still processing the photos, but why don't I tell you about the most mundane part of the trip first! Traveling hither and thither made for many bus and plane trips, many of which had movies. By the way, Peruvian bus lines are way better than Greyhound in America. Besides 'Next' I would never have paid (even rental fees) to see any of these movies, but as plane/bus movies, they were pretty good.
A Bee Movie, Shreck the Third, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Along Came Polly, Next, The Last Samurai, The Island, and No Where to Run.

If two web-surfing vectors talk about the same thing, why not add to the chatter? I read that Orexin A stimulates appetite and removes all drowsiness symptoms and that we're already self-medicating our brain anyway, so brain drugs are here to stay.

It's the appetite-sleep duality that made me wonder: is sleep really necessary for the mammalian body to function? Could it just be an evolutionary artifact to conserve energy in food-scarce environments? Why not just force the body to rest instead of requiring extra energy to keep going? Of course, in the rich environment of modern society, we have all the food we need. We should be able to have an extra meal or two instead of sleeping for 8 hours a day. Then sleep would just be another way to trip out, dreaming.

Three days ago M's computer failed, coming up without any settings and giving strange errors. I've been harping on her forever, saying this or that would be easier or cheaper on Linux. It seems that the gratuitous boot corruption was the last straw.

So...Two days ago, M said I could install Linux as long as I backed up her data (of course), most importantly her desktop background image. However, she wanted to dual-boot the computer, just in case she didn't like it. Well, I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu, and ran the installer (after backing up M's Home folder, of course). Well, it must have cut out during the installation of the bootloader--maybe related to some incompletely marked bad sectors on the disk. So, then the machine wouldn't boot at all. Fast forward a bit, and I say to M, "Well, we aren't surrounded by sharks yet!".

Yesterday, I came into work with M's laptop asking our tech crew whether we had any professional grade tools that will fix a corrupted partition table. The answer was no (well, nothing I hadn't tried the previous night), and when M came into pick up my laptop to use (Internet deprivation for a morning was apparently too much) she heard the prognosis from someone else that it might be better to just forget the old partition and start from scratch. With that it seems, M blessed the abandonment of her old partition. So, in the evening, I went to work again, Ubuntu took the whole disk without problems. Besides that, I was a little surprised to see Dell hardware work less out-of-the-box than my imported-from-Japan laptop: it took an ndiswrapper to get her wireless working, though ACPI (laptop functions) worked perfectly from the beginning. Then I spent the rest of the evening on the small stuff--making sure it worked with her Zen mp3 player, installing EndNote (my first experience with Wine).

So, some outcomes: avoid half-measures; now, M gets my full attention should she want her computer to do anything.

I fasted yesterday as pre-Thanksgiving atonement for the indiginous peoples the USA has run over. I don't quite have the institutional antagonism in me to fight head-on a feast holiday, but the US needs some reserve in its rituals.

Republics and democracies seem to have this problem--the sociology is such that a new group of elected officials loses all culpability from the previous government. Promises and compromises are forgotten.

In learning about how the Texas-Mexican border-crossing market is changing, the post points to an economic theorem saying that high fixed costs favor higher-expense goods, and can allegedly describe long-distance relationships.

This says that long-distance relationships will be more common in 'markets' where the cost of any relationship is 'expensive.' My original intuition said this isn't true (because I saw it as saying on average long-distance relationships are of higher average quality), but now I'm not sure. Thoughts?

I've been thinking of putting in my hat this year, but haven't really thought of an idea I'd want to execute in an unremitting stream of words. I still haven't, but I have thought of a process which would make it fun, but it takes another consort.

The idea is that we choose a topic/theme. In theory the stories can be radically different, but somehow each day's content is a response to the previous (day's/couple days') content written by the other person with respect to the shared topic/theme.

Something maybe similar to:

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.
	There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.
Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.
	Well, fix it dear Henry, dear Henry, fix it.

Hopefully the themes and shared metaphors could get a little more interesting than emptiness, cycles, and couples (though, I guess those could get pretty complex after more than two lines), and the engagement could be more direct at times.

My hope would be that the stories and back-and-forth would be the NanoWriMo equivalent of a long dialogue in letter form like back in the ol' days.

Anyone game or interested in a similar scheme?

One moment in Paris was at an English book store. In the window, was a new book by one of my favorite authors of old. The import-factor made it too expensive for airplane reading so I resolved to find it when I got home. It turns out that The Stone Gods is only published in Britain, so far. Well, I caved in and ordered it from amazon.uk.

For the meantime, I picked up The Powerbook. Jeanette Winterson is really poetry, and the poets have all scattered either to music or prose or visual arts. So, I find it hard to recommend her to modern friends--people read stories and listen to music now.

But what's most interesting about reading her again--she writes about love--is that the last time I read her my understanding about love was so different. Before she was a wise old witch, and now she reads more innocent. I might be learning more than before for that very reason, but I can't tell yet.

Finally, pictures. Stories and explanations to come later.