Wes Clark’s letter about Iran is on DailyKos with commentary from bloggers. Definitely worth a read. This is the sort of leadership the United States needs right now.
In other news, Mark Day is video podcasting his entertaining yet poignant monologues. Feed his RSS/URL string into your podcatcher (I use iTunes and Democracy Player) and watch these for a laugh and to be challenged to think a little.
I love having our home filled with happy friendly people. We had another fabulous La Belle Compagnie meeting/workshop/gathering at our place and continued making progress on preparations for the spring reenactor show season. We’ll be going to Military Through the Ages (March 17-18, Jamestown, VA), and to Marching Through Time again (April 14-15, Marietta Manor in Bowie, MD). We are also presenting at the 42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 10-13, UMich, Kalamazoo, MI).
It will be quite a race against the clock to get all the material goods and clothing made in time for the shows, but we have risen to the challenge before.
Wow, it’s been years since I was in Upstate New York during a snowstorm, but that is being changed right now.
Mom has her RoadRunner broadband connection now (an amazing Wave Comm contractor came out in the middle of the blizzard and hooked up her connection, even had to climb the pole outside, though we told he he could come back after the storm). She also has Erci‘s old iMac 800, a new Epson printer/scanner/copier, and my old Canon Elph PowerShot S100 digital camera to play with.
Tug Hill Plateau (about 30 miles North of Rome) is getting 3-5 feet of snow as I write this, and Rome is expecting 6-15 inches with tall drifts. It will be fun digging the cars out of the drifts tomorrow and setting out on the trip back to Virginia.
The Prius is doing fine in the snow and even the bone dry extreme cold yesterday and the day before. MPG has fallen dramatically (only getting around 40MPG because of the heater running all the time in single digit temperatures with wind chills well below zero), and even further to 35MPG today in the snow and warming up the car long enough to scrape windows clear. Traction is good though (relatively new tires) and no problems starting or getting into doors (locks often freeze solid in these conditions).
Had a wonderful visit with Ant and Jammie last night, met their cats Merlin, Tookie, and Buddy; exchanged mac geek files, book reading lists, movie lists, and watched lame SuperBowl commercials. Had dinner at Ninety-Nine (a new local chain with pretty decent food). Sadly I did not get to see Terry and Tammy as the weather (and Terry’s recent travel/drive schedule) prevented it – but we’ll hook up later.
Erci was experimenting with Delicious Library on her MacBook laptop. Previously I felt that the built-in camera on MacBooks and iMacs was a silly and frivolous toy useful for very little. I have to revise that opinion now, because it turns out you can hold DVD, Book, and CD UPC bar-codes in front of the camera and Delicious Library reads the bar-code, pulls information from various resources on the internet and fills in all your text fields for your library inventory for you!
How freaking cool is that!?
Guess we don’t need a bar-code scanner after all. This is splendid.
The Virginia Political Blogosphere is all abuzz about the Democratic Party of Virginia and concerned citizens recording our legislature in session to record the votes and the shifty/sly political maneuvering of the Republicans in power right now. It would all be very funny except that this is our elected government trying to hide it’s business, no our business, from us, the voters. We tried to get them to record the votes of the committees, they refused. So now people and the minority party are recording the same votes themselves to be good watchdogs on our government. The Virginia Republican Party is an embarrassment to citizen politics and should be run out of town as fast as possible.
Many thanks to Waldo and Craig for saying this far better than I could on their websites and blogs:
http://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2007/01/republicans-dpva-video/
http://www.vitter.com/craigsmusings/Entry.aspx?entry=597
This (2007) is an election year for every Delegate in the Virginia House, and many of the State Senators. Make your interest in a transparent government, open to interested citizen voters known by registering and voting against the tyrants and mob-bosses in power right now.
I gakked this meme from chargirlgenius (Thanks Char!) and like it, and for once it fits.
I have had a crushing couple of days at work. Came back to oncall duty during two sub-system meltdowns, a protracted scheduled maintenance, and project installs galore. My poor phone battery keeps getting worn out with all the pages and my eyes hurt from lack of sleep, and I am overjoyed and thankful.
Sound a little odd?
Let me ‘xplain…
I am hugely thankful that in this crisis the team I am working with is pulling together. The unfortunate lad who owns the two sub-systems that are melting down is being covered for by all of us and by his management (after all it’s not his fault the code was delivered bad and the back-out option was wiped out by lease returns and corporate over commitment). The serious Tandem expert has hit it off with the new generic UNIX guy and they are teaching each other their tricks. I am only oncall this week because my hero and team-mate switched weeks with me last week to cover for me when I was in surgery, and he has been hovering and swooping in to help fix things all this week as well. Two members of other teams in the department saw the problems inherent in the project launches and jumped in to help us out. My boss is exceptionally graceful, focused on what is really important, supportive of all her people, and calm through this storm. The developer for the newest launching project is amazingly helpful and thoroughly documented their new code. But the most impressive thing of all is that last night, in the middle of system melt-downs, the specific other team who has reliably let us down on 24×7 monitoring in the past stepped up to the plate and began being genuinely helpful and interested in one of the melting projects and figured out what I was doing every time they paged, and started actually doing that rather than paging me.
Still tired, but completely and fully happy. Blissfully hopeful that through teamwork we will not only prevail, but improve some process while we do it. Very thankful.
Also thankful that I am breathing through my nose so easily. Woohoo!
Yikes! I nearly missed this one despite the best efforts of friends like Bruce and James (thanks guys).
If you live in Prince William County, Occoquan District and are registered to vote, you are eligible to vote in a special election to fill the seat vacated by Corey Stewart (who is now a Chairman) as Supervisor from Occoquan district on Prince William’s Board of County Supervisors. The special election is on Tuesday, January 30th from 6am through 7pm at your usual polling place.
According to the State Board of Elections this election will be between Jeff Dion and Mike May, running against each other to fill open seat.
Voter turnout is usually light in a winter election for a local office when it is out of cycle (“Special”) and only one office is up for grabs… so your votes will count far more on Tuesday than they normally would (there may be as few as 1000 people voting).
If you are eligible, please consider voting for Jeff Dion. He’s a good friend and a great guy and he’ll make you proud of your district at the county level. If you are not in Occoquan district, but do live in Prince William county, you will be impacted by this election, so consider getting involved.
Today was my first full day back at work, and it was grueling. My heros are co-workers Peter and Uwe who brilliantly covered the most critical projects while I was out and even managed to make progress on them. I was really tired after a day of work and another follow-up with the doctor. Turns out I already have little post-surgical polyps growing back in (surprised the doctor a little). She pulled a few out, OUCH! I see her again next week where she’ll pull them out for real. I hope this is not the beginning of a new trend.
Ready for sleep now.
I am a gadget freak. I love technology, gadgets, audio and video toys. I am typically the first guy on the block with a new device. I’ve had PVRs since before there were Tivos. I had LaserVision and and flying-rease head VCRs when people were just getting VHS decks. I still have one of the only linear-tracking tone-arm turntables on the market, and that is coupled with a tiny moving coil cartridge instead of a brute force magnetic media cartridge.
I must confess though, that I do not have High Definition Television (HDTV) and I still have no interest in getting HDTV. You see, along with my gadget-freak status I also inherited a keen sense for being scammed. Frankly the whole HDTV marketing push is a scam, shrewedly designed to separate consumers from their money for no additional services.
The key question anyone considering an HDTV purchase should answer is: Where is the High Definition content and is that content something I am interested in seeing?
For me, there is basically still nothing available that I am interested in seeing. Blue Planet on HD Discovery stands out as a notable exception – and that would be amazing… but is it amazing enough to justify thousands of dollars in new gear?
A few sports games are reliably high definition now. Beer commercials are all high definition (hell – the beer companies have figured out how to sneak what looks like HDTV into my old standard definition equipment!). One channel of HBO or Showtime or The Movie Channel is often high definition at least some of the time. PBS is reliably high definition, unless it is one of the really popular shows PBS viewers insist on seeing regardless of source, so it is usually standard definition then.
The fight between HD DVD and Blue Ray is a joke, because no consumers are interested in either format. We are perfectly happy with standard DVDs, and still sorting out the difference between animorphic widescreen and letterboxed or pan and scanned. Most consumers don’t even know the difference between those last three terms. So most DVD sales are now, and will continue to be for some time, standard definition DVDs.
There is a possibility that content off the internet via Democracy and/or iTunes Music Store will change this dramatically, but I consider that remote. Fans like me will pay to bring Terra: The Nature of Our World to high definition screens (still computer for me, at least until my Apple TV gets here); but that is still very little content.
So for now, and for some time to come, I am firmly happy with my standard definition television.
Which means, no need for upconversion, down conversion; no need for HDTV tuners, no need for special expensive and confusingly labeled devices. No need to be scammed.
People have been pinging me about 2008 Presidential Contenders, and while I still think it is too early (we have a 2007 election here in Virginia to get through first), I have already spent a little time on this topic. Everything I said about Wesley Clark in October is still true today. I firmly believe that he is uniquely qualified to lead the United States of America out of the quagmire that is Iraq. Furthermore as a man of integrity rather than ego, he has been waiting until the congressional elections of 2006 are completely resolved before committing to a presidential race in 2008, I completely agree with that set of priorities and heartily applaud him for holding off.
I see that Hillary Clinton is in the running now, and I am not at all surprised, nor interested in the slightest. Hillary’s participation in the race will make it vastly more expensive for all players and she neither has a chance of winning, nor should she. She is far too conservative for the American people. She is pro-war, pro-corporate power, anti-populist. She’ll make it expensive, and cause great divisions between Americans who what she represents and who hate what she represents; and she does not have the diplomatic skills to heal that breach. America will be even more divided as a result of her ultimately unsuccessful bid for the oval office. The only question is, can she get the Democratic party nomination, and thus lock in a Republican victory. We should all pray not, but she has proven a fierce competitor in the past and she certainly has a lot of backing. She will make it much more expensive at the very least. I wish she would take her ego, and her money and sit this one out. She is doing some good as a U.S. Senator from New York, she should finish her implied obligation to the people of New York State before trying for another office, and she certainly should not give up a firm seat in the Senate for a white house run. Congress is more hosed than the administration right now, and is in greater need of repair.
I am surprised and very disappointed that Barack Obama has entered this race. He, like Hillary, owes the voters of his state (in his case Illinois) a full six year term before chasing other goals. Likewise, he is an excellent U.S. Senator, doing good things in the senate, having him become President or Vice President is a waste of skills we know he has now. Furthurmore, it is not entirely clear that his seat, if vacated, would stay in the Democratic column. He needs to stay where he is and not let his shining star get carried away from him too soon. He does not have the international experience to be president, and though inexperienced presidents have succeeded in the past, they did not inherit the crapload of trouble the incoming U.S. President (whomever it is) will inherit in 2009. Obama is a promising candidate for future bids for the office (2020?) but not now, not yet, and certainly not when the Senate balance is this damned delicate.
I am as excited about the prospects of Bill Richardson as anyone else, in many ways he is the perfect candidate for the office. My main reasons for supporting Wes Clark first, and Bill Richardson second are that Wes clearly has the experience needed to get us out of the mess we are in now regarding both Iraq and Afghanistan. Let the man with experience get us out, then step down after only one turn (yes, Clark has the integrity to do just that) and then let the healer and diplomat take over in 2012 and beyond.
I have enormous respect for Kucinich, never want him to be president, but always enjoy his bids for the office. He makes pertinent political points when he does so and brings new and interesting ideas to the race every time. I like the populist that John Edwards has become, but still think he is doing more as a non-president than he will as a president. Al Gore and John Kerry have had their chance to run and they both flubbed it. I still like both men, I like the job Gore is doing as a private citizen, and I like Kerry as a member of the Senate. I want neither man in the oval office now.
The only thing more discouraging than Hillary Clinton leading the Democratic pack of contenders right now is that the Republicans have basically no one acceptable at all. Where is the leadership in this country?
