On eyepatches, peglegs, and hooks

That's good. S-M-R-T. I am so smrt.

iPod prevents boot

I think it's because I use firewire to connect, but Windows won't boot when it's plugged in. Just sits there at the welcome screen interminably. Lame on everyone's part.

Firewire hard drive flakes.

Occasionally I'll get a write failure notification on my external hard drive, and then it won't work for a little while. Powercycling & rebooting usually fixes it. Haven't prodded much in the device manager.

The weird part is that when I tried to run the Ubuntu live cd, it wouldn't boot and carped about an IEEE1394 device, 'till I unplugged the thing. Even though it was off. Maybe the little built in hub is horked.

Keyboard sometimes boots wrong

Occasionally, my computer will boot but the keyboard won't work. It's USB. I can solve this every time by either unplugging and replugging, or by disabling and re-enabling in the device manager.

This also froze the boot process in Ubuntu: During loading USB, it complained that a device was "probably" using the wrong IRQ. I had to unplug my keyboard from the USB port to get Ubuntu up.

Google downgraded Google Deskbar

I installed Google Desktop 2.0, and it took over the ctrl-alt-g hotkey. I couldn't figure out how to switch it back, so I uninstalled the deskbar. I way prefered the deskbar, just because it worked nicely in the quicklaunch toolbar when I threw it on the right of my screen. Now I can't do that.

(Update: Solution to disable the Google Desktop Hotkey)

Outlook has trumped gtalk.

I installed MS Office 2k3, and now mailto: links go to Outlook, even though I didn't configure Outlook as a mail client. The "Set Program Access And Defaults" thing has no entry for gtalk, which I thought was supposed to replace the notifier. So I guess I should try switching back to the gmail notifier before I whine too much about this.

The monitor goes black randomly.

No rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes it's got no trouble, and sometimes it goes black repeatedly for thirty seconds at a time. The little sleep light never goes on. I don't want to spend money on this crap. Ugh. Whine.

My delayed reaction to the Miers nomination.

If slashdot allowed images, I'd post it here.

I read as much of O'Reilly's definition of "Web 2.0" as I could stomach and all I got from it is that "Web 2.0" means Tim O'Reilly likes it.

"Users must be treated as co-developers." That dude can spill some bullshit.

A quote from an interview with the author of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man":

So, let's say we give this third-world country a loan of $1 billion. One of the conditions of that loan is that the majority of it, roughly 90%, comes back to the United States to one of our big corporations, the ones we've all heard of recently, the Bechtels, the Halliburtons. And those corporations build in this third-world country large power plants, highways, ports, or industrial parks -- big infrastructure projects that basically serve the very rich in those countries. The poor people in those countries and the middle class suffer; they don't benefit from these loans, they don't benefit from the projects. In fact, often their social services have to be severely curtailed in the process of paying off the debt. Now what also happens is that this third-world country then is saddled with a huge debt that it can't possibly repay. For example, today, Ecuador. Ecuador's foreign debt, as a result of the economic hit man, is equal to roughly 50% of its national budget. It cannot possibly repay this debt, as is the case with so many third-world countries. So, now we go back to those countries and say, look, you borrowed all this money from us, and you owe us this money, you can't repay your debts, so give our oil companies your oil at very cheap costs.

And that leaves me curious. Is there any reason this wouldn't work on the United States? I mean, sure, we're way richer than Ecuador, so it would take a whole hell of a lot more debt to sink 50% of our federal budget, but it's not like Bechtel or Halliburton are going after Ecuador because it's foreign. They go after third world countries because they are easier to get ahold of. Their government is easier to corrupt and their economy is easier to own. There's no America-World Bank-Halliburton team. Given enough cooperation from our government, I bet they could sink us just the same.

Afterward, I read this Slate article about fiscal conservatives getting the shaft.

I suppose it's obvious how that Katrina rebuilding money is going to get spent. Some of it will go to poor people who lost their shit, but way more of it will go to property owners who lost more expensive shit. They will rebuild, and they won't necessarily need to focus on low cost housing. (That way there won't be any poor people in New Orleans...) The majority will go to government contractors. Halliburton may be planning exactly the kinds of ultra-expensive and unnecessary projects that they used to stick up Latin America. Anyone out there have a television? I can't find any sweeping narratives about where the cash will go.

Maybe not. Maybe they'll build a hurricane-proof elevated train. They could build it out of silk and diamonds for their part of the $200 billion. What did it cost for Bechtel to build BART?

So what's the point of the $1 trillion war in Iraq, the $145 billion drug company handout, the $260 billion highway bill, and $200 billion for Katrina aid ($200,000 per person! To Halliburton!)? How about the reduction in taxes worth $2.2 trillion over 10 years? We'll have over a $500 billion deficit this year. This isn't even Reaganomics. No one has argued that this combination of reduced taxation and deficit spending will improve our economy so much that we can afford all this shit. Way to fucking go, "conservatives".

Putting two and two together, I would like to suggest the possibility that our wealthy elite are conspiring to pull off an "economic hit" on us. I bet they could do it. They already are the government.

Does anyone know if there's a PAC or nonprofit dedicated to eliminating shareholder indemnity and increasing corporate liability in general? Maybe the National Lawyers Guild or the Association of Trial Laywers of America is the closest we've got. What do y'all libertarians have to say for yourselves?

I'm curious if there's an organization that focuses on this exclusively.

It's kindof important.

This is along the same lines as I want favicons everywhere.

If an item in an RSS or atom feed contains a picture, and your feed reader doesn't display it to me in whatever size fits its GUI, your feed reader sucks. Sucks!

For example, Google's new blog search does not show picture thumbnails. That's dumb. Dumb!

Also for example, syndication in WordPress is lame. Lame!

So. There are very 8 employees in the IT department in my company, plus rotating people at the help desk from a consulting company. Three of us (not me) have the capability to monitor people's web browsing.

In general, those three people are way, way more concerned about privacy than I am. I can't think of better people to have that unenviable task. So I was talking to one of them the other day, about meeting someone's baby, and he asked what I thought were good baby names.

I jokingly said, "Iduno. Wilbur. Cleetus. Maybe Elwood."

Absent mindedly, he said, "Yeah. Who is Elwood..."

"Dowd?" I finished.

"Yeah. I always wondered..."

And from this point on in the conversation, we both spoke with the understanding that I used the nickname "Elwood P. Dowd" without discussing where or how he knew that.

"He's Jimmy Stewart's character from the movie Harvey. <beat> People usually think of Elwood Blues from the Blues Brothers movie."

"Oh. Yeah. I thought it was from Blues Brothers."

So, uh... if you're reading this, IT co-worker, no sweat. I figure if I'm going to get fired for my web browsing at work, it should have happened a long, long time ago. Back when I was on that horse porn bender. Joking.

I just googled for "Suppose you wanted to get rid of economic inequality." because I was curious if anyone was going after Paul Graham's latest batch of self obsessed bullshit.

Google said that no, it didn't have any other occurrences, but

Did you mean: "Suppose you want to get rid of economic inequality."

Ha-ha! No!

I'm not as smart as Maciej Ceglowski, so I'm not going to pick apart this latest essay. But I'll start: Who the fuck advocates the elimination of economic inequality? Sure, I mean... communists. But who in our current political landscape is Graham arguing with? People advocate the elimination of poverty, but that's not the same thing. It doesn't even entail a reduction of economic inequality. People advocate the elimination of economic injustice, but that is also not the same thing. It also does not entail a reduction of economic inequality. I suspect his real problem is with progressive taxation, but if he wanted to make that specific an argument he'd just be parroting every simpleminded libertarian. And that argument has been made and unmade a million times.

Aside from his first sentence, few or none of his points are true. I mean, I've heard smart people say them all the time, but everyone has to take time off from being smart.

So if you see someone pull apart PG's "Inequality and Risk" article, gimme a holler.

(Edit 9/13/2005: Tim Bray took it on. He aims at the same point as me, but he actually makes it.)

I feel like I've graduated from VB6 to HTML.

Well. No matter how bad at programming I am, I still think it's neat.

(Edit: Ugh. Jackass. It doesn't work in IE. Either IE is auto-escaping single quote marks or I've over-escaped them myself. Not looking into it right now.)

Has anyone heard of the excercise of writing an application that outputs its own source code? I remember first hearing about it when reading about the Haskell programming language, and I haven't heard of it since then. I forget the word for this kind of application.

I want to write one, but for practical reasons not for intellectually stimulating ones. I spend my time writing TSQL and VB6. I'm not a very good programmer. So I'm interested in any kind of pointers that will help me along my way.

It'll be in Javascript, which I've never used before.

Edit 8/22 #2: Here it is. It validates XHTML 1.0 strict. Works in Firefox and IE6. Now I want to add some features to it so that it's self-descriptive.

Try http://www.littleblur.com/kmls/littleblur-link.kmz and tell me what you get.

Assuming you have Google Earth.

I want favicons to show up in del.icio.us and my yahoo and personalized google.

I want bookmark webpages to have an option to display an RSS feed as images.

More pictures and less text, basically. Kindof antithetical to all these blogger assholes, so it'll never happen.