Life is a State of Mind

A cousin of mine, who has since recanted her silly impression, once commented to me that she felt that George W. Bush was a great leader. Of course I scoffed, which perhaps was impolite, but what is the correct response to such an outrageous statement?

Great leaders praise in public, criticize in private; that is what I learned in the military.
Great leaders inspire their followers to do good things for the right reasons without being told to.

It is embarrassing that this ignorant fool and traitor is airing his own stupidity out in front of a foreign government, during their anniversary celebration. Impeach him how, arrest him on charges and begin a public trial. If found guilty, put the ignorant fool in jail or hang him, he is in favor of the death penalty after all.

Even better, deny him entry to this country. He looks like a terrorist to me…

Olbermann says it far better than I do, and I agree with every single word

I have been using Adium for ages to to all my online chit-chat with folks who use AOL Instant Messenger, Jabber, and Yahoo Messenger (Adium supports MSN Messenger too, but I refuse to use that). Adium’s interface is vastly better than the one you get from AOL, and miles better than most of the others I have used on all platforms. Tabbed conversations, clean text only when you want that (or flashy colors if you prefer that), user programmable IM sounds (I use modified Babylon 5 and Tokyo Subway sets).

The one thing that has been very annoying about Adium is that it was really weak at initiating chat rooms. Two way conversations have always worked very well, and joining other people’s chat rooms has always worked, but initiating your own was a problem… until v1.2.5 (released April 28th, 2008). Now chats can be initiated reliably and even bookmarked, so you have semi-permanent chats available to re-start with the same invitees all the time (like your team of co-workers to coordinate server builds).

Anyway, today is a great day because of a little thing like chat rooms in Adium. Yippea!

If you are not reading Stephen Retherford (aka Sisyphus, Hoosier in Virginia) regularly, you should be. He has posted the most thoughtful, well researched, and interesting stuff I am reading on the web for quite some time, very consistently and with remarkable insight. He’s changed my mind a few times, and would have more except that I am typically in agreement with him before I begin reading.

An Italian boyfriend of a Virginia woman is being held (for 10 days and counting) simply for wanting to visit his girlfriend? He broke no laws, is not a suspected terrorist, has not overstayed his visa, and has a history of visiting and leaving on time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/us/14visa.html

Wow - there is a special hell reserved for those who… … …

Update: correct an error on my part where I thought he was a husband to a Virginia wife. They are not married, not that this makes much difference.

On June 10th, registered voters in Virginia’s 8th, 10th, and 11th United States Congressional districts will get to vote in open (to all registered voters) primary elections. Virginia scheduled primaries for all districts, but in all the other districts either no candidates filed in time, or only one did from each party, or the party in that district is deciding by convention or caucus.

The United States Senate race to replace retiring Senator John Warner will have no primary because Mark Warner is unchallenged on one side, and because the other side is choosing via convention/caucus rather than allow cross-over voters to mess with their selection.

You can vote in only the Democratic or Republican primary, not both, and whichever way you vote that day you can elect to vote differently later. Voting in one party’s primary does not register you as part of that party, but it is a matter of public record that you voted in that party’s primary that election.

So, if you are in the 8th district, your choices are:

Democrats:
Jim Moran, incumbent
Matthew Famiglietti

Republicans:
Mark Ellmore
Amit Sing

If you are in the 10th district, your choices are:

Republicans:
Frank Wolf, incumbent
Vern McKinley

Democrats:
Judy Feder
Mike Turner

Voters in the 11th have a little more freedom, there is no Republican primary, and there is a four way race amongst the Democrats (this means Republicans are free to help pick their opinion of the best Democrat, or that they are free to try to get the least electable Democrat nominated so their candidate has a better chance in November; I am not sure how this will pan out, just reporting the facts):

Gerry Connolly
Leslie Byrne
Lori Alexander
Doug Denneny

It is worth noting that in November the 11th district ballot will include at least two additional names:
Keith Fimian (Republican)
Joe Oddo (Independent-Green)

Note: Virginia’s Independent-Green Party is different from the Virginia Green Party. Many people get them confused, I expect there to be a GP candidate for the 11th as well, or for the GP to endorse one of the Democrats if the right one (in the GP’s opinion) wins the nomination.

This post is non-partisan, unbiased, and pure information for voters, but I will comment on it in a day or two about the candidates listed above, and commenters are welcome to express themselves too.

As a veteran, one of the issues I am particularly attentive to in American politics is the support for veterans and the pay and benefits of active duty and reserve/guard troops. For my entire adult life I have see some candidates claim to be better for the military, but never actually honor their promises nor provide genuine support for veterans. I am even ashamed to say that for one election, my absentee ballot cast while in Japan, I supported Reagan because I bought his bull-feathers line about pay raises for the military (we did get a pay raise, but it was tiny and did not even keep up with inflation, and he cut educational benefits with the help of a Republican congress). Anyway, I digress…

One of the many reasons I am so excited about Obama and was excited about Webb in 2006 is that I actually believe them when they say they will try to improve conditions for our veterans.

Check out this story on Americablog for the latest details on Obama, Webb, and Hagel vs McCain, Clinton, and Bush.

My damned cough is back, with a vengeance; but this time with other cold and flu symptoms as well. I think this is the most I have been sick in well over 10 years and I do not like it at all. We’ll see what the doctor has to say about it this time.

In other news, Erci and I have started building an ark. We have two cats (but they are both fixed), the two of us, and two leopard geckos… I guess we don’t have to worry about fish. The weather men say 2-4 inches fell last night, but must be a gross underestimation. I did not formally measure, but it’s far wetter than when the last hurricane came through and we measured 8 inches.

Erci makes some of the best mead I’ve ever had, and after several years of hiatus, she just started fermenting a couple of batches of the good stuff. One is made from BlackCap honey and wine yeast; and the other with Cranberry honey and champaign yeast. Both honeys are from The Bee Folks out of Mount Airy, Maryland.

She will have better details, but I think now we wait and watch, and let the little yeast-y-beasties do their work turning sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. In about a year we will kill off the remaining yeast with boiling and then bottle the meads for storage, gifts, and yummy consumption.

Huge thanks to Alan, Dave, and Brian for helping to nag Erci into action again.

While reading Andrew Sullivan this morning, I ran across a link to this video, which is not for people afraid of heights:

http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=1438490562

Cool music too…

So I wanted to send some money to a cousin who is having some financial challenges. When I was younger, the logical thing would be to use Western Union to wire money; but that is no longer the best solution. It could be, but Western Union has the worst web design on the planet, so online transactions never work (tried eight separate times this morning), phone transactions are predictably horrible (Western Union is not alone in this, but they are no better than the worst phone menu fiascos) and even in person they fail to get the job done. Aside from all that they are really expensive (12% for “Money in Minutes” to any Western Union location, or 5% for “Economy” which can only send money to a recipient’s bank accounts… Uh, Western Union, my bank only charges me $10 to wire any amount to another bank account. Wake up and smell the coffee, oh, and my bank’s website actually works!

Western Union: Epic Fail

I ended up sending money the old fashioned way, putting a check in the U.S. Mail. What a waste of my morning, sure wish I could bill Western Union for the wasted time.

By worst web design:
1) requires non-standard crappy browsers, neither Safari nor Firefox worked on the Western Union site
2) captcha is illegible most of the time
3) site frequently causes the session to reset, forcing you to re-enter the same information again and again
4) credit card transaction fails frequently
5) whole site crashed after I’d entered all the information for the 8th time - gave up