This is my description of my summer vacation. Two weeks in Encinitas to eat plenty of cheeseburgers and tighten up the threads on the vehicle. Then walk for Temecula. Temecula up and down and around through Murrieta and to Elsinore. Bus to Riverside. Leave Riverside for a long walk of mixed uban fare, mostly peanuts and mixed bags of doritos. Walk through Beverly Hills, UCLA, Hollywood. Breakfast at Von's Hollywood. Hollywood to Milton, prayer at St. Sebastian's. Sepulveda to RInaldi, Rinaldi to Hampstead and Devonshire. Santa Susanna pass to Simi Valley. Nice place. Through Simi Valley to sleep next to a Cosmetology schoolon the way outside. Nice area, Simi Valley. Only one dog yammering all night long. Somewhere along the outside of Moorpark, never really saw that town. Long walk through plantation fields to an area of Oxnard where the 1 begins. That promptly diverges or ends and I walked near exactly the same route I drove when I remember having that problem eight years ago in a vehicle, attempting to find and follow the 1. Oxnard to a place on Victoria where there was a large open warehouse commercial space empty for lease. Spent a day or two sewing there, hoping to find a new pair of shoes. My shoes were wearing to the socks, at the top of the feet. If I could deteriorate to walking like a clodhopper (that's, umm, all of you) then the shoes have a good three or four weeks walking remaining at the ankle.

Oxnard up to Ventura, missed the exit to the bicycle path by about 100 yards, turned around to try and walk some way through Ventura, ended up in Ojai. New hat!

North of Ventura is a nice place known as Capenteria. The police advised me to keep walking for Santa Barbara. The police in Santa Barbara quickly informed me that they didn't like homeless people. Keep walking. Goleta, pick up a bell ornament for the hat. Goleta to Orcutt, that's good exercise. Orcutt for a few days, nice church, St. Louis de Montefort. The deputy himself arrived to counsel me that he didn't like me sitting around sewing ("Am I doing anything wrong yet?" after watching the cruisers circling for a morning "No, you're not doing anything wrong yet."). No sense arguing with the fellow that has handcuffs. Difficult to leave that situation. On to Santa Maria. I could stay here or keep walking. I'm more accustomed to leaving tonight rather than sticking around for morning. On from there, across a few fields, next to big power lines to sleep, then coffee in Nipomo. Never managed to find the church in Nipomo, wasn;t looking real hard. Stopped for a few hours to sew a repair or two then on to Arroyo Grande via Pomorroy. That was a fun walk. Arroyo Grande, Pismo Beach, pick up the peacock feather for the hat in Shell Beach. Shell Beach trolley driiver arrives at the moment morning prayer ended to ask if I would like a ride. I didn't see much of PIsmo Beach when I walked through, my kind of area, bowling alley, billiards and pool, and plenty of local and tourist name coffee houses for the tourists, good luck finding Starbucks. Shell Beach trolley driver takes me to Pismo Premium. Oh, now, here's an area. Shell Beach trolley driver hints that the bus north goes all the way to San Luis Obispo, and there's a mission there. A day thinking about it and then up to San Luis Obispo. The bishop is having lunch next week Sunday. Nice area, stay and sew for a week, have lunch with the bishop on Sunday, and then back to St. Patrick's and St. Paul's for a week. Everything in the Arroyo Grande area is another 2 miles just to pick up and walk somewhere else. Very different from 92037 around-the-block routine. Added another hundred miles waking up in the morning, walking to mass, and then to a grocery store area. Walk north through San Luis Obispo. Another nice walk. Walk north to, what, Morro Bay? I wasn't there for ten minutes to fix a few sticks on my hat while talking to a fella showing me where this and that (grocery, laundry, post office, library, the Arroyo Rock), then the whole place turned into a festival of dead reanimated carnival beasts (that's no dog, it's four fishing poles and a couch cushin, the skull is some old dog from the bottom of hell, it's dead, jim, but how do we know it? how do we know it? he's dead jim. The eyes are dead, those are not living eyes. He's dead jim. We know it's the truth but how do we know it?). I decided to walk for the 101. The map and the guide and the fella next to me confirmed that the next three anything through there weren't much larger than the filling station. Long walk up the 41 to Atascadero. Stay for two days and become inspired by a ten dollar bill and catch the bus returning to Santa Maria through San Luis Obispo. Santa Maria to Lompoco, another dead reanimated carnival beast festival as I passed through the town. Leave Lompoc on the 1, fun walk, but the walk up to Atascadero really wore me out. Why am I still walking 12-15-20 miles between towns and never seeing more than a day or two of rest?

If you leave everything behind you may walk further and longer, but it is only worth freezing to death once over. I did that one thousands of miles ago. When carrying everything, maybe a person may go three months, but there's a point where there's just no more point in wandering between towns like this.

The 1 back to Goleta is a nice walk, and I was helped by a fella, Mark. Arrive in Goleta on Friday night with a $15 card for Little Caesar's and extra dollars for coffee at McDonald's. Saturday morning prayer with St. Rafael (see the statue out front? he has wings... why yo' ass hurt so much, from having the wings tore off out of the steam press, that's why yo' ass so fat) and then on the bus to Santa Barbara. Spend Saturday vigil and Sunday with Fr. Raf at Our Lady of Sorrows and then on the bus on Monday, oh, shoot, Labor Day, well, back to morning mass and then catch the bus to Oxnard on Tuesday. Oxnard, walk around through Huanome to Camarillo.

A day in Camarillo, a small position in a jazz cafe washing dishes for two hours, twenty-five bucks, and bus money south to Simi Valley, then the Metrolink train to downtown LA Union. "Hello, I am going to Elsinore via Riverside. How do I go there?" "Red Line, 12:40 pm" "Is this MetroLink ticket good for transfer?" "No" (transfer passes usually lose a grade level at transfer points, no more riding the premium rails, trolley and bus only) "How many dollars to Riverside?" "$13" I don't have, $13. "How do I take the bus to Riverside" "You can't", then the equivalent of the THANK YOU and the window closing. I walk to the other customer service, ask same questions. "What you need to do is call this number."

I know there's a bus to Riverside, I've seen the book, I should have saved that bus book, the bus goes there, I know it does. I need the 68, 70, or 76 out of this place. Then I began remembering the walk around the days of Von's Hollywood, and it seemed if I could just make it back there (HAHAHA!) then I could remember the road back (that much longer). The police arrive to interrogate me. "I need to go to Riverside" I squeak, they begin giving the hard muscle stares, so I begin spouting bus numbers "10, 18, 30". The police are now upset. "There is no 10 or 30 from here!" he barks, and he's right. "What you need to do is go downstairs and get on the red line trolley to north Hollywood, that's where you want to go right?" I just want the officer to quit barking at me, and I had just been thinking that if I could just make it back to Von's Hollywood (HAHAHAHAHA!) then I could remember the road back.

So I arrive in north Hollywood and promptly decide that I should not have taken this line this direction. But there had been so much trouble at LA Union, the guards had to escort me through the pass checker point, because my ticket wasn't good as that transfer, or something, I don't know. I was perfectly blind after the encounter with the police, hardly knew which direction to go to ask for directions. So I walked back to downtown by following the signs (didn't intend to make it right back downtown at that exact point again, I was following the signs and reading directions on the way). Was advised by a passerby "Your pass is fine, good for all of today, just get on the gold rail going east"

Now if only I knew what bus to find after that. It wasn't until another night, after I spent the final remaining dollars on Starbucks and cookies (SUGAR, need SUGAR to keep knockin' down these miles), that, hey! look, right there in front of you, all the time. The 68. Walk through the Korean and Vietnamese districts watching the 68 go past me every twenty minutes or so, wishing I had bus fare. I yet didn't know how the 68 would make it to Riverside, only that such a feat was possible, and I had no excuse to ask the bus driver if I didn't yet have any fare in my pocket, so I kept walking on by general direction. Turns out that neat any of the transit centers from Fontana on will have some service-or-other to Riverside. Would have been nice to know that some select stations will see a bus from places, like, oh, PROMENADE in Temecula. At Baldwin Park I take the rail again (10:57, leaving, the hell with it, money or not I am on this rail). Then I knew, somehow or other, maybe I talked with somebody, but I knew the 215 goes to Riverside.

Hate Crime on Video

"The problem is that too many cooks in Washington are spoiling its Mideast soup. In his magnificent new book, "The Sleepwalkers," Prof. Christopher Clark of Cambridge describes how World War I was in part ignited by small numbers of anti-German officials in France, Russia, Serbia and Britain who often undermined their own government's moderate policies.
The same process occurred under President George W. Bush when cabals of neocon officials in the Pentagon, State Department, CIA and media drove the US into a calamitous war whose negative effects are still being felt.

Today, other pro-war cliques in official Washington are at it again, each trying to dominate policy. Add a bunch of pro-Israel billionaires who have bought both the Republican and Democratic parties, apparently including Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president."

Went with some friends tonight to watch Hungary play Northern Ireland in their Euro Cup qualifier match.

It was held at Groupama Arena. It was my first time there and it is a very nice facility. We bought lower priced tickets but it still felt like we were very close, especially compared to what it is like at Ferenc PuskÃs Stadium.

It was 0 - 0 through the first 75 minutes. I felt like Hungary had the majority of the possession over that time and the bulk of the scoring chances. They had a corner and I told one of my friends, "It would be a shame if Hungary don't get something more than a draw out of this match." Seconds later they scored.

It was fun and I was pretty excited. Unfortunately Hungary appeared to finish playing defense at around 80 minutes and ended up losing 2 to 1. Really a disappointing result. They could have and should have won.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Im6BK-HA9Y0

If your genetilia has been turned into a fine red mist by the dynamite vest you just blew up to kill 30 infidels in a coffee shop?

http://journal-neo.org/2014/08/03/the-myth-of-russian-aggression/

The term "Russian aggression" has been inundating headlines across the Western media and even graces the title of a US Senate bill introduce this year - S.2277 - Russian Aggression Prevention Act of 2014. But what "aggression" is the West referring to? A cursory look at Russian history over the past 500 years compared to say, Britain, France, or even America and its "Manifest Destiny," portrays Russia as a nation preoccupied within and along its borders, not in hegemonic, global expansion. The idea of far-flung former colonies is one unique to the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish. Even today geopolitical, socioeconomic, and even outright military intervention in these former colonies is exclusively the pursuit of the United States and Europe.

The United States alone has hundreds of military bases around the world, has been permanently occupying Germany and Japan for a half century, Afghanistan for over a decade, and had invaded and occupied Iraq for nearly as long.

"Russian Aggression" is a Marketing Gimmick

Canadian PM Stephan Harper's "op-ed" in the Globe and Mail titled, "Our duty is to stand firm in the face of Russian aggression," fallaciously states:

The world is saddened and rightfully outraged by images of the charred remnants of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, and by the loss of almost 300 people from 11 countries, strewn across fields in eastern Ukraine. While the grim work of identifying victims' remains and tracking down the perpetrators of this appalling crime is just beginning, the world can be certain of one thing: There can be no weakening of our resolve to punish the Putin regime for threatening the peace and security of eastern and central Europe.

Harper's disingenuous attempt to link Russia to the MH17 disaster reveals the truth behind "Russian aggression," a marketing campaign implemented by the West to undermine an obstruction to its very real, very demonstrable global aggression. The fact that Harper presides over the nation of Canada, which is in no way threatened by "Russian aggression" real or imagined, further exposes the disingenuous nature of the narrative peddled by the West.

Aggressors Playing the Victim - From Hitler to NATO

From Libya, to Mali, to Syria, Egypt, Ukraine, and beyond - the West has engaged in direct and indirect geopolitical meddling and manipulation through various forms of force including covert military and intelligence operations to proxy terrorism, and even outright direct military intervention. As the West nears the boundaries of nations capable of defending themselves and a defense is in fact mounted, pundits and politicians have begun framing it as "aggression." The impediment of Western expansion across Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America is framed as "aggression" just as Adolf Hitler did in regards to nations chaffing against expanding Nazism during the 1930âs.

In fact, the Guardian would admit in its 2004 article, "US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev," that (emphasis added):

...while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.

Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade.

But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.

The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.

In other words, from Belarus, to Georgia, to Ukraine, and Serbia, the US has been insidiously overthrowing governments not through outright military aggression, but through covert military, political, and intelligence operations aimed at manipulating elections and overrunning regimes that refuse to accept the subsequently skewed results. Surely, then, regimes resulting from such a practice are not then "voluntarily" joining NATO - and NATO is surely expanding itself through a campaign of insidious, violent, lawless subversion of sovereign nations, one at a time with Ukraine once again in its sights.

Nazis At the Gates (Again)

The parallels between NATO and Nazi Germany are unfortunately more than merely academic. In Ukraine, the current regime in Kiev backed by NATO and the European Union are quite literally Nazis. From the "Fatherland Party" to the overtly Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and their various militant wings including the now notorious Right Sector front, ultra-right fascism is once again the leading edge of expansionism into, not out of, Russian territory.

Current attempts by the West to portray Russia's concern over Ukraine and the Nazi menace festering on their doorstep to Soviet leader Josef Stalin's invasion of Poland aim to stir up anti-Communist, anti-Soviet fears and hysteria long programmed into the psyches of Western audiences - but incidentally provide a valuable historical parallel. While the invasion of Poland was a violation of Polish national sovereignty and an act of war - it was done to create a barrier between the Soviet Union and the rise of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. Such a barrier was arguably one of several factors that allowed the Soviets to mobilize a counteroffensive to Hitler's Operation Barbarossa - the invasion of Russia, a counteroffensive that ultimately turned the tide against Hitler and led to the downfall of fascism in Europe.

Besides cause and effect, there are few other similarities between Stalin's invasion of Poland and the modern day Russian Federation's political support of eastern Ukrainians who have been fighting the regime in Kiev for months with increasing success. Besides the same variety of dubious accounts the West fabricated against nations like Iraq, Libya, and Syria as a pretext for war, little in terms of evidence has been produced by Washington, London, or Brussels to affirm accusations that Russia is "invading" eastern Ukraine. Russia has instead chosen restraint despite multiple attempts by the West to bait it into overt military intervention in Ukraine - and in this restraint, has secured a growing global consensus long driven weary by the West's attempts to dress up its own global aggression and expansionism as "democracy promotion" and "humanitarian interventions."

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine " New Eastern Outlook".

September 2, 2014

Take my money please.

The drive died but not before I got copied what I wanted copied. Clonezilla failed and then it just totally tanked. So I just put in the drive I was trying to clone over to and did a fresh install. Now I'm copying back some stuff.

My Slashdot subscription ended and you can't buy it any more. The page seems to say this is temporary but I wonder if that is going away?

As I was doing my setup after installation I found some helpful notes from past journal entries. I need to collect all that stuff in one place.

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5620727&cid=47812019

UIs are just getting worse and worse. Things are now bigger and larger, colorized even. "We really think you want to click this" has taken precedence over usability. I feel like i need to be an idiot to use such software.

I was in the Quicken For Mac 2015 Beta. At one time i reported a bug that the back button was disabled. But, as it turns out, just because a button is greyed out and the other button is big and red does not mean the button is disabled. Really?!? No, seriously, really?!?!

I went Citibank to pay a credit card. I had to look for a minute to find the "MAKE A PAYMENT" button. I saw the two other options, which are links and in camel case, easily. The payment option is different in three ways! It is a button, the colors are inverted, and it is in caps. I think my brain tuned it as if it were spam. It's as if i had to refocus on the page to see it.

Oracle changed their forums again. The old, old software was good. Then they moved to Jive, which was so bad i left the forums. Eventually i came back, as the pros outweighed the cons. Well, they did it again, and this new software is just plain terrible. Not only is there a huge bar on top to tell you where you are and where you can go, the site itself took a greyish look, except for buttons that are red. The red pulls my eyes (basic design principle) and is inconsistent. I use Element Hiding Helper to block some stuff/ now. I only stay with Firefox because of the addons.

Windows 8 has that big screen to choose application. I can't find anything. What was Microsoft thinking? Luckily, i can search control panel to find things, since they moved everything around again. Sometimes i remember the executable's name (e.g. appwiz.cpl) and can windows-r it, but i feel so stupid searching for something which is categorized, and i don't want to re-learn the new hierarchy. Though i have switched to the mac, i am stuck with Windows at the office (7, currently, modified to work like XP) and to support people in the community. I'm even a little scared about the mac, as 10.10's flat look might just be a harbinger or the "one UI" stupidity. I want my devices to look different! Different types of devices are used differently.

I am befuddled by these and similar changes. Changing the color of buttons has three problems. One, the color may not be noted by the colorblind. Two, color pulls the eyes. Three, changing the looks of similar items can be misinterpreted as the items not belonging to the same group. An example of this is Window's 7 Explorer which shows the current selected item as its icon. I often do not register that an explorer windows opened to the desktop (shows computer) and another opened to a directory (shows folder) are both from the same program. I have opened multiple explorer windows on many occasions because of this. Or maybe they don't expect anyone to use the keyboard and alt-tab anymore.

Web accessibility has always been neglected to some extent. But of late it seems to be rejected entirely. I feel as if control is being removed as some designer decides what it is i should be doing and hiding the other options. It is frustrating. I want to scream at this idiotic trend, though i don't know if they are stupid or just plain ignorant. Did someone think this approach was a good idea and others blindly followed?

One refreshing website is PerlMonks. Every once in a while someone starts a discussion modernizing the UI or the like. The replies usually mention that PM wants functionality and many things can be changed in Display Settings anyway. So, at least one site has people that use their brains. A diminishing trend, for sure.

It is not a word spoken,
Few words are said;
Nor even a look of the eyes
Nor a bend of the head,

But only a hush of the heart
That has too much to keep,
Only memories waking
That sleep so light a sleep.

-- Sara Teasdale

I remember.

Booted up my Fedora box at work this morning but instead of starting normally it put me in emergency mode with a message to check the logs. On the whole I'm very pleased with this development. It gave me a prompt to give it the root password and then I could view the logs with journalctl from there.

Unfortunately though the resolution of the text was such that I couldn't read most of it - it went off the screen. So that's a bit of a problem. I had the system start up to the default state and then I was able to look at the logs in Konsole - which was a lot nicer. Looks like the hard drive is on its way out the door.

I ran smartmon and double checked. So now I'm copying everything off that I might be worried about. (In addition to my normal backups. I like to do this just in case.) And I think I've found the Western Digital drive that I'll be buying to replace this Seagate drive that is toast.

From what I've read WD is much more reliable than Seagate. Though I can't complain. It is the original drive that came with the machine and I bought in 2010. I don't think 4 years is an impressive time for a drive to last but I don't think it is terrible either.

But kudos to Fedora for alerting me to the problem and giving me time to plan ahead. The system still seems to run fine, I'm typing this JE from it - but I know that this wont stay true. And probably I could route around the damage for a while but I'd rather not. Storage is too cheap nowadays. I'll be picking up another TB drive for about $50.

A while back due to a freak accident, the glass broke on my S3. I decided to buy a kit and replace it myself. It went o.k. but I wasn't too crazy about the result. Touch didn't work as well afterwords and the home button was a little too recessed. I figured either I didn't get the adhesive set right or the glass was thicker.

Not long after I fixed it ( within 6 months?) my daughter knocked my phone off a counter and the glass broke again. So I ordered another kit.

This one came with a sticker on the glass packaging. It said, "There is a thin layer of plastic on the glass that is very difficult to see. Be sure to remove it."

As I pulled up the glass I installed the first time it broke - it pealed away with a layer of plastic under it. The first kit hadn't had that warning and I installed the glass without removing the plastic. Now that I have it in correctly it fits much better and everything works much better. I celebrated by updating Cyanogenmod and now I'm running KitKat.

So my daughter did me a favor busting the glass on my phone.