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A Budget Last Updated: Wanna buy a pen?
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Update At On tentacle number the first, we have the California courts rejecting an appeal by Mr. Tookie Williams - he doesn't want to die. Funny, I'm betting his four victims, plus countless others who were killed in gang violence he helped to spread, said the same damned thing. My wife and I were discussing this last night. The death penalty is not a deterent, it's not punishment, and it shouldn't be applied lightly. Given the advances in technology, I think over the next century or so we should be able to weed out those who might have gone to death erroneously (yes, that's a polite way of me saying "we killed the wrong man"). However, the death penalty is for two groups - those who have done horrible crimes and see life in jail as not too difficult a period in their lives, and those who have to live with the horrible after-effects of said crimes. The death penalty, in my book, is about closure. Certain people - say, Jeffrey Dahmer - should have been put to death because of the horrific nature of their crimes and because an animal like that should not be warehoused or otherwise stored for "study". We know all we can know from a psychopath like that - those who continue to read and relive his crimes "seeking understanding" are probably two or three steps away from doing it themselves - they just lack the motivation that someone like Dahmer had (and yes, I know, Dahmer was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, and then an inmate who said he heard voices and was "doing God's work" killed Dahmer. Perhaps the guy was doing God's work - I'm not going to judge him). So that's the first piece of good news out of the way. The second, which had me giggling with glee, was word that the Texas state redistricting plan, version 2003, would be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Granted, this is a court that will, by that time, likely be made up of mostly prunish old men and women who are not exactly impartial when it comes to political leanings, but so be it. Texas is in the unenviable position of having their noses rubbed in it because they've done hanky-panky before, and have to have their work overseen. Oh - for those two of my three readers who do live overseas, a brief review might be in order. Let's see. Sixth-grade civics lesson, away we go. Every ten years (in years ending in zero) we do a census - a whole lot like Cesaer did in Luke's gospel (if you don't read the Bible, think Linus from Charlie Brown - what's that? Oh, all right, we count noses to see who's where). Census - tells us who lives where, and how many live there. Then we move on to the next step - we have two houses of congress. The senate, or upper house, which is equally representative of all states. A large state, like Alaska, has two senators. So does a small state, like Rhode Island. A populous state, like California, has the same number of senators as does a sparsely populated state like North Dakota. These people are elected to six-year terms, and elections are in even-numbered years, one third standing for election each cycle. The lower house, called the House of Representatives, has people elected by geographic area, but each is supposed to represent a certain number. I belive at the moment the number is something around a half-million people. The number they represent changes as the population changes, as we can't just add congress-critters - at least, not unless we add states. The number of senators is limited to 2 x the number of states - in other words, our fifty states have 100 senators. The House membership is not limited to a set number, and more populous states - such as California or Texas - have huge delegations, whereas states with limited population (such as North Dakota) may only have one representative. Here in Minnesota, we have eight. California has, I think, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty - and Texas has something in the neighborhood of 32. These poor buggers get elected every two years - which means they're always running for re-election and are, in theory, anyway, the more responsive (and excitable) house. The Senate, on the other hand, is supposed to be calm, staid, responsible, and ... well, frankly, a bunch of stuffed shirts. Now, that census we spoke of a couple of paragraphs back comes in handy - because every ten years, they go over the map and make sure that we haven't had population shifts. Because the population ALWAYS shifts. Some years ago, there was a great deal of noise made about the shift from the "rust belt" (manufacturing areas predominantly around the Great Lakes and Northeast) to the "sun belt" (south and southwestern states, including California). So - to make a long story short, the 2000 census caused the Texas legislature to redraw it's districts on schedule. In 2003, Tom Delay used some muscles to essentially game the system (we'd call it "cheat" if you re-wrote the rules of the game in the middle, but Mr. Delay is a nasty piece of work with far more lawyers than I'm liable to ever be able to afford (however, I'm related to enough of 'em to get me out of most day-to-day problems), and so we say "game"), and the boundaries were re-drawn - again - this time to Mr. Delay's party's advantage. Now, because those crazy Texans haven't been playing fair with the rules for so long that it's a requirement that the federal government oversee any redistricting (that's what the procedure is called) in Texas, looks like Mr. Delay's various body parts are, again, indirectly, in the wringer. I've known many a Texan - and dispute the contention that only steers and queers come from Texas. However, Mr. Delay is the worst sort of Texan, in my opinion - and the sooner the other Texans figure this out and get his shameful ass out of congress, the better. Then again, this is, after all, congress, and Delay's in his element with others of his ilk - a bunch of individuals for whom "ethics" means a committee and not a personal code of behavior. And so we move to the third tentacle, wherein we have the federal government (the courts) telling the federal government (FEMA) that they can't kick people out of temporary housing until February 7th. Now, I happen to have very little understanding of what it's like to live through a rather horrific natural disaster - like Katrita. However, there's a big meatloaf of irony here because we have one branch of the federal government telling another branch of government "no, you can't do that, ya morons" - and both are fighting with my money. Lawyers working for the federal government are paid to defend FEMA's decisions, and I'm sure in the end the federal government will be paying the legal bill for those that sued. Oy. That Second American Revolution thing is looking better all the time.
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[Link] My daughter received an iPod Mini from her uncle this past spring. I downloaded and installed iTunes (hawk-spit) and today she asked me to send a couple of songs from CDs she owns to the iPod. Problem the first - how in the hell do I back up what's there? Is there a way to copy the music FROM the iPod so I can re-load it if I screw up? Problem the second - if I can't, is there any way I can add new music to the damned thing? I keep getting told that "The iPod 'Rhiannon' is linked to another iTunes music library. Do you want to change the link to this iTunes music library and replace all existing songs and playlists on this iPod with those from this Library?" Okay. Problem the first partially resolved. It's documented here so I know how to get the music copied from an iPod. Apple folks are ... surprisingly easy to circumvent, I guess. How I did it - Connect the iPod to the USB hub. Wait for the I: drive to appear. It will have four folders - Calendars, Contacts, iPod, and Notes. The iPod folder will be dimmed. Click on it anyway. Under the iPod folder will be a MUSIC folder - also grayed. Copy that, paste it to the NAS. Sheesh. Now it's telling me that music is in M4a or Mp3 format. I guess both play, so who gives a rodent's tuckus. Okay - screw it. Now that I've got the music on my PC, I'll just dump and reload. Thank GOD I'm smart enough to put "her" music into a single folder. Wow. In a lot of ways, this is a lot like car mechanics. Keep poking and proding and taking apart, and sooner or later you'll hit the right buttons. There's a deeper philosophical truth here, somewheres...
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Update At Then again, I can console myself with the fact that my early band teachers were real bastards, who yelled, screamed, and tolerated only perfection. They weren't, but I can imagine they were. In other news, the "iPod Shuffle" worked yesterday, about 95% of the way. It seems three or four songs (none of which Rhiannon was permanently attached to) were attached to some sort of Apple DRM, and while I could copy them FROM the iPod, I can't send them back DOWN to the iPod. I'm also a bit stumped on deleting songs from the iPod that the kid no longer wants there - she wants to make room for more. Now, mind you, when I was a kid I had a music collection that ran to some 120 cassettes or so, probably four dozen albums, and that was fairly small by comparison to some. So a 30-gig collection of music is probably not all that large - but when you're trying to shoehorn your favorites into 4 gig, it can be problematic when you're twelve. So that's the struggle for today. And finally, I'm just checking - anyone else sick and tired of hearing about "Brokeback Mountain" yet? I overheard someone the other day saying the film was "truly unique". Right. The only thing "truly unique" about it is that it's yet another Hollywood film. Sure, it's a film about gay cowboys. Big whup. If Hollywood wanted to do something truly unique, make King Kong gay, not a couple of cowboys. Just grouching...
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Update At It probably didn't help that I tried to start it while standing outside the car. I should know better by now. Five years of owning this thing, I should know that when it is cold and the weather is uncooperative, the car needs a shot of gas at just the right time to get going. 99% of the time I'm more than capable. 1% of the time I screw up. Oh well. So the short version is that Jack missed chess club this morning, and he was mildly bummed. Rhiannon, on the other hand, is a snorting, sniffing, wheezing collection of symptoms and is home from school/choir today. Poor kid. She makes more weird noises when she's sick than your average morning drive-time radio disk jockey.
[Link] Stupid is as stupid does - while I'd like to think that this fellow may not have reproduced yet, he lives in one of those nice countries where women are still property and brains are obviously not passed out - or exercised.
[Link] Here's an interesting site for those of us who believe the First Amendment is the most important in the Constitution. Or "That piece of paper" our current President has supposedly called it. And for those of you who like panoramas of where you've been but don't know how to put them together, try Autostitch. It looks pretty slick - all I need to do is get some panorama pictures...
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Update At For those of you who live in warmer climes, you can ignore this part. Yesterday's snow was referred to as "heart attack snow" because of the water content. The Eskimos have about seventeen or so words for different types of snow - while that's nice, it's still a four letter word in most vocabularies. Our snow differs a lot mostly because of where we live. There are times we get a very dry snow - it's usually when the temperatures aloft and near the ground are colder, and the snowflakes are smaller and very, very light. This is the sort of snow you can just blow away - as in breathe on it and it's gone. Then there's the stuff that falls out of the sky when we get a temperature drop to below zero. It's not technically snow, but it usually comes about when we have had some warmer, moister air that suddenly cools - then the stuff falls out of the sky, sometimes without benefit of clouds. So be it. Yesterday's snow was one of those "damn, bad timing" things. A low pressure center out of central Canada was working it's way south, and a moist warm low pressure area was headed north from the Gulf of Mexico. The two of them managed to mangle one another as they conjoined over Wisconsin. I'm no meteorologist - but I do know a bit about weather from watching it all these years. Low pressure systems seem to have winds, at least in this area, that circle counter-clockwise - which means that on the "front" side of the low (the east side), the weather here is usually warmer. On the "back" side of the low, it's usually colder, because our air is coming out of the north. Lows are usually our "warm weather" systems in winter, because they bring clouds. Highs usually mean cold, anywhere from "brrr" to "BFC" to "Brass Monkey Cold" to "I've frozen my ..." cold. Anyway - yesterday's warm, moist air from the south managed to link up, on the back side, with the cold air coming from the north. Which meant our snow was heavy and wet. Which in turn meant you had to be careful shoveling, as it could bring upon a ... that's right, heart attack. Me? I'm fine. Well, not really - I bent a shovel (A $5 shovel I picked up at a KMart store closing sale the week after the last snowstorm in the month after we moved into the house, and my lower back is still reminding me that there were plenty of inexpensive snowblowers in the thrifty papers this summer. But that's water under the bridge - or snowpiles at the side of the driveway, as it were - now. The only casualty so far, and the condition is temporary, is the car not wanting to start. This morning I shall begin to remedy that by picking up a battery charger (on sale) and putting the charge into the battery (because of where the car is parked, I can't get jumper cables to the engine unless they're about thirty feet long - with is too damned long in this neck of the woods). Other than that, let us hope it's a slow news day.
[Link] Oy.
[Link] "This" is an interactive on-line web-safe color palette generation tool. Pretty slick.
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Update At Times like this I really have to wonder - not about the employment market, but about myself. I'm a pretty bright guy - I've got extensive experience in a lot of areas, and it's rather surprising how many places I talk to that are still on NT 4.0 despite the thing being unsupported by Microsoft for nearly two years now. There's nothing wrong with that, just like there's nothing wrong with driving a classic car. The bottom line is that you need to upgrade. And I'm not just a Windows guy - I've got anything from moderate to heavy experience with Linux, depending on the version. At the last job, one of my main servers ran SuSE Linux and that one box (most likely due to the load and the configuration) required a fair amount of attention at first, until I got it to behave. But I do have to wonder when I look at things like the local computer freebie and see an advertisement on the back for network administrator training. I've had the best training there is - real-world on the job experience, for the better part of fifteen years - and yet there's clearly something someone won't tell me that's wrong with me. That's disturbing. On other fronts, today I need to clear out the garage to get the car in. I need to get the hood of the car open so I can attach the battery charger to charge the battery so I can start the car to move it into the garage - which is a hell of a lot more work than it should be. I also need to figure out if the card reader I got last fall to work with the new camera will work with Windows 98. It came with no software, Windows 2000 just recognized it. It's an off-brand thing (I bought cheap, yes, I knew it at the time). And no - despite the fact that, just five paragraphs ago, I bewailed the state of NT 4, the Windows 98 installs I have here are on a couple of Toshiba laptops - without the proper CDs from the vendor, I'd rather leave Windows 98 on than try to upgrade seven-year-old hardware (That still runs fine) to a newer operating system. And yes, I know, the same applies for Windows NT - which is why I do not typically upgrade computers running Windows NT unless I can't help it - or need to make an arthritic goat into a temporary thoroughbred stallion. I also need to get the kids moving - Rhiannon serves church this morning, followed by her band party, and Jack needs his parent spelling test.
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Update At Then again, I don't work in Politics (or anywhere else, at the moment), so what do I know?
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