Month: July 2004

Feature Creep: 500 Books In Your Gadget Bag

So I was watching MSNBC last night for post con wrap up, Joe Scarborough was doing live talk with the crowd at Fanueil Hall– and a woman came up and started yelling into the mike about Lori Klausutis, until security came and hauled her away. Did my heart good.

And who, you may ask, is Lori Klausutis? And why should Joe Scarborough care? Read here for the background… basically, it’s a lot like the Chandra Levy case except it involves an actual corpse– and a Republican.

And it’s been real interesting to watch Reagan deliver commentary, both on MSNBC and at the convention at large.

Lance Henriksen on the San Diego Comic Con held this past weekend:

“There are 80,000 people who are going to pass through here, and there are only 35,000 at the Democratic convention. What does that tell you?”

Along with this, it tells us how easily we’re all amusing ourselves to death:

Last summer, [Andy Rappaport] got a call from Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, a fund-raising and advocacy group in Washington. Would Rappaport mind sitting down for a confidential meeting with a veteran Democratic operative named Rob Stein? Sure, Rappaport replied. What Stein showed him when they met was a PowerPoint presentation that laid out step by step, in a series of diagrams a ninth-grader could understand, how conservatives, over a period of 30 years, had managed to build a ”message machine” that today spends more than $300 million annually to promote its agenda.

Rappaport was blown away by the half-hour-long presentation. “Man,” he said, “that’s all it took to buy the country?”

You know, it’s bad enough to be so far behind on blogging that you’ve missed writing a catch up entry, but it’s probably even worse when you’re so far behind that someone has even beaten you to the catch up entry:

Catch-up post. So, how about that (1) Iraqi �handover� (2) John Edwards (3) New York Post (4) Seymour Hersh speech (5) Spider-Man movie (6) Martha Stewart sentence (7) new poll (8) Federal Marriage Amendment (9) Canadian election (10) intelligence report (11) Bill Clinton book (12) new poll (13) ongoing genocide (14) inane Hollywood scandal (15) new poll (16) upcoming political convention (17) Microsoft security flaw (18) thuggish Dick Cheney remark (19) blogosphere controversy (20) Fahrenheit 9/11 (21) new poll?

Okay, that�s done. Onward, then.

You may have noticed a certain paucity of posting. Most of this has been due to my laptop having problems. The screen fritzed out on the 4th of July in the wee small hours, which required me to go to pick up a few spare hard drives for backups before I could take the thing in to Tekserve for repair.

I was told it would be ten days, that this was a know problem with this model of iBook, and that they would pick up the cost. In the meantime, I’ve been muddling through on backups and my old iMac, which is showing definite signs of aging (dead Firewire ports, dying CD-Rom drive).

I got a call from TekServe on Thursday, the day I was supposed to get it back. Apple claims the problem is theoretically the hard drive, not the normally defective logic board. Hence $350 to repair, erasing my hard drive, and I don’t get it back until next week. If I decline the repair, Apple charges me $200 for a diagnosis fee anyway and I have a white paperweight.

I find this a tad hard to believe. The hard drive worked well enough after the monitor went for me to boot it as an external hard drive (which these laptops can do) and I was able to perform a complete backup. So I’m a bit incredulous.

If I’m lucky, they’ll zap it and discover that the logic board is the problem anyway. Then at least I won’t have the money hit, just the joy of restoring a hard drive and synching it with the last two weeks of work. And hoping that I can get to some of the passwords I’ve forgotten…

essays & effluvia points to an interesting piece on American attitudes on free speech. Yeeesh…

I was at the Subway Series game today at Shea, thanks to the kind auspices of Peter, Kathleen, and Caroline, who took ill and had to stay at home. Hence, Brandy and I got the tickets for Kathleen and Caroline.

In the stands, however, the crowds showed the true meaning and best case scenario of free speech.

First, some misguided souls would shout, “Let’s Go, Yan-kees!” Others would reply, “Yan-kees SUCK!” And on it would go, back and forth, each side shouting loud and clear and giving the other point of view equal time to rebut. No overlapping, all perfectly fair.

If only our political debates were so civilized.

UPDATE: Contrary to reports, Ariel and Peter were yelling “Yankees Suck!” to Keith, not me. I try not to be excessively rude to people that I owe stories to and that have proposals of mine in hand.