Still going after all these years.
Thanks to John Gruber for pointing to Austrian coverage of last night’s debate, complete with this bizarre picture of McCain. I think the caption says that he was reacting after he mistakenly turned the wrong direction to shake hands with the moderator. But there couldn’t be a worse image to sum up his debate performance last night:
What does it say about our politics that one party regularly tries to engage new voters and the other regularly tries to suppress them? If you believe the complaints from the GOP, they’re just trying to stave off widespread vote fraud. But study after study has shown that there is no widespread vote fraud conspiracy, which surely the Republicans know full well. Salon’s article Behind the GOP’s voter fraud hysteria covers some of the studies, including the fact that from 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud, 20 were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once, while the GOP worked to ensure that thousands more were disenfranchised.
And that’s really what the voter fraud suppression efforts are about: disenfranchisement on a massive scale.
Hey, Republicans: how about you go out and register your own voters rather than suppressing newly registered ones?
My first generation MacBook Pro, purchased back in 2006, is starting to look a little long in the teeth. The basic machine has been just fine, but I knew when I bought it that 80 GB wouldn’t be enough disk space, and the battery is coming perilously close to the end of its lifecycle; I now get maybe 30 minutes on a full battery.
More damningly, there’s a power cord issue (and if you’ve followed my Mac experience through three Apple laptops over the past eight years, this shouldn’t be a surprise). MagSafe eliminated the problem I had on old machines, where the cable would break or fray. Unfortunately, I found a whole new problem with the design: small beings can knock the laptop off the table or chair where it’s sitting, and if it falls on the side with the MagSafe connector, the case dents around the power cable and makes it much harder for the power connection to complete successfully.
All of which means that the new MacBook Pro looks pretty good right now. Killer graphics, more capacity, AND a case carved of solid aluminum that I would bet is much more dent resistant.
But you know? The new MacBooks are also solid aluminum cases, have more capacity than what I have today, and are about $700 cheaper than the MacBook Pro. And increasingly what I’m thinking is a lower end laptop and a dedicated home media computer (or appliance) is the way to go rather than trying to drive everything off one machine. Unfortunately, this is the wrong part of the stock market cycle to make that happen, but it’s a dream I can have.
Pick up the scraper, paint bucket, caulk gun, ladder. Walk up the driveway. Caulk is quick: push out, drag down, wipe. Let it dry, move on to the window sills. Pick up scraper and start to knock the paint, loosened by rain from a leaking gutter, from the sill.
And I’m back at the farm. I’m about ten or twelve, with my dad and my Pop-pop. We’re doing a workday on the 1857 farmhouse. There’s a porch that needs painting, and fifteen or so cousins and grandkids are there to do it. Gotta get the old cracked paint off first. Scrape, scrape. And when it doesn’t come loose, the heat gun loosens it up. Too close at first: brown mark on 1857 wood. Then the layers come off and the paint can come on.
I’m four sills over and the paint comes loose easily. I prime, paint an already primed frame, then come back and start painting the newly primed wood.
And I’m on the roof of my dad’s garage. I’m sixteen. It’s summer, probably 95° and so humid you could wring the air. The house is mostly brick but the upper part is white painted vertical boards. I’m working on a section between the garage roofline and the gable. The attic on the other side of the boards is cooled by a fan on a thermostat but still hotter than the outside air. I’ve never been up there. Now I’m on the hot asphalt shingles dripping sweat into my eyes painting, painting. Hard white granules embed themselves into my knees.
In Massachusetts. My hand is sore from holding the brush; I change my grip. The shingles on the siding are old, maybe dating back to 1941. They can last one more winter.
I’ve been tasting a variety of Oktoberfest beers, in name if not in style, this fall. The latest, from Avery Brewing Company, is the Kaiser Imperial Oktoberfest. And it’s a big beer. A barleywine, in all but name. But it’s not an Oktoberfest. It’s a great big quaffable (if not sessionable), very tasty, 10% beer. But it’s not an Oktoberfest. It’s not a märzen. If they served this at d’Wiesn, people would be screwing in the aisles and fighting with the oompah band. Or vice versa. But the choice of name seems like a cynical marketing choice.
Surprisingly, the same was true of the Oktoberfest from Otter Creek. While sessionable and tasty, the hops made it more of an American pale ale than an Oktoberfest beer. I haven’t done a side by side tasting, but the hops really felt more Cascadian than Bavarian.
This is when I start to wonder why it’s so hard to find a beer that tastes like it was brought in a one-liter mug by a busty barmaid to a table full of enthusiastically drunk German college students and hollering Australians. That’s when I remember the most authentic tasting Oktoberfest I’ve had–perhaps because of its freshness–from Berkshire Brewing Company. Mmm. Mmm. I feel sorry for those outside the limited distribution range, because this beer is right on.
I’m not used to having time to myself on Columbus Day, but for whatever reason, my company has the day off, and Lisa’s doesn’t. So a fairly leisurely morning, a luxury bagel, a little blogging, spend half my eMusic subscription for the month, and then get outside and caulk and paint some places where the house needs some help.
It’ll be in the mid-70s here, and while I surely don’t mind, that temperature is unaccustomed too. Weird is maybe a better way to describe it.
And it’s worth reflecting that, whatever Christopher Columbus’s faults, we’re here freaking out about the stock market and feeling cautious optimism about the presidential election and congratulating Paul Krugman because a Genovese navigator had an idea about a better route to the Indies. Sometimes it’s worth chasing those ideas.
One of the downsides of being an early adopter in some areas is that I’m a late adopter in many others. I was using a desktop RSS aggregator back in 2002 (Radio Userland, then NetNewsWire) and so came late to the web-based news aggregator market. When I did hop on board, I used Bloglines, one of the early web based aggregators, and so missed out on Google Reader. I’ve stuck with Bloglines because it works and because it works well on the iPhone.
Yesterday, Bloglines wasn’t working. I haven’t seen anything posted about this, but while the site’s UI was up I didn’t get any new results for any of my 175 feeds from about 11 AM on. So in the early afternoon I decided to give Google Reader a spin.
One of the nice things about feed readers is that it’s pretty easy to take all your feeds to a new reader, thanks to OPML (one of Dave Winer’s many innovations in this area). Most feed readers support exporting your feed list to OPML, a structured XML format, and support importing feed lists from OPML. So you can pack up your feeds and easily bring them to a new place–minimizing vendor lock-in. I did that with my Bloglines feeds and was up and running quickly in Google Reader.
One thing that struck me almost immediately was the poorer UI in Google Reader. While it uses the same left pane navigation–right pane reading metaphor as Bloglines, the left pane is cluttered with a bunch of stuff on the top–starred items, trends, shared items and notes, a big help pane, and THEN your list of feeds. Bloglines’ feed list takes up the whole left pane and is just your content–much easier to manage–while other information like your personal blog and “clippings” are in separate tabs. If you’re just interested in reading feeds, Bloglines’ navigation is easier and less cluttered.
The right pane UI is a little better too, imho. I find the separate drop-shadowed feed boxes in the expanded view (what NetNewsWire used to call “smash view”) distracting; Bloglines’ zebrastriped list is visually flatter and doesn’t get in the way of the content. And I can’t imagine a use for the list view for most of my RSS feeds; though perhaps the notification-only ones are better suited for this kind of presentation, I can’t imagine trying to read BoingBoing or even Krugman this way.
Google Reader does feel a little snappier–feeds update more frequently and quicker. But the reading experience is actually slower, because items don’t get marked as read on display, but only if you scroll them off the screen. That might be beneficial for some people, but I’m a quick scanner and like to run through the feed list quickly. And because Google Reader doesn’t fetch all the items in a folder at once, dynamically fetching items as the user scrolls, there’s no way to quickly scroll to the bottom and read everything all at once. You have to wait for the fetch to catch up, then scroll to the bottom again.
So this morning I was pleased to see Bloglines is back online. I’ll still test out the Google Reader iPhone experience, because there are things that don’t quite work for me in Bloglines’s. But I’ll be continuing to use Bloglines in my browser.
The commentariat are going to love this moment, because it sums up some things that the conventional wisdom has been saying about McCain — cranky, really angry, hotheaded — and surfaces some new memes. Like disrespectful. Like borderline racist. Like, can’t believe he’s losing to this guy.
I think this is McCain’s “heavy sigh” moment.