Month: November 2006

Don’t worry about the government

David Byrne says he was mysteriously left off the voter rolls last Tuesday. He writes, “As someone who doesn’t trust this government one inch I wouldn’t put it past them.” I guess that settles some questions about the interpretation of some of his earlier songs.

Byrne goes on to write about some things that have challenged me about this country recently, the need for checks and balances and the country’s emergent “bully culture.” I have coworkers who shrug about the administration’s endorsement of torture and its dismissal of habeas corpus. I think he’s right that there is a lot of rebuilding to do in the country as a whole.

Friday Random 10 – Going Fishing

Not really, but wouldn’t that be nice? As Henry Thomas (and apparently Taj Mahal) would say, “Big fish bites if you got good bait.” I don’t know what the hell it means but it sounds profound.

  1. Cat Power, “Wild is the Wind” (The Covers Record)
  2. New Dominions, “Burning Down the House” (Bon Time)
  3. David Byrne, “Dirty Hair” (Lead Us Not Into Temptation)
  4. Hilliard Ensemble, “Sanctus” (The Old Hall Manuscript)
  5. Mark Eitzel, “Steve I Always Knew” (The Invisible Man)
  6. Monty Python, “I’m So Worried” (Contractual Obligation Album)
  7. Henry Thomas, “Fishing Blues” (Anthology of American Folk Music)
  8. The Rolling Stones, “Wild Horses” (Sticky Fingers)
  9. Spoon, “Stay Don’t Go” (Kill the Moonlight)
  10. R.E.M., “Burning Hell” (Dead Letter Office)

Wrap-up, stage 1…

thumbnailCountertop.jpg

We returned late this afternoon from New Jersey (a visit to my inlaws which bracketed the HDI ITIM conference in Vegas) to find… done. The contractors had been here this week—plumbers, electricians, painters—and the following was completed:

  • Sink and garbage disposal reconnected
  • New drinking water filter and tap installed at sink
  • Dishwasher installed
  • Filter installed in line to icemaker; icemaker active for the first time since refrigerator was installed in 2004
  • Under-cabinet light installed at the butler’s station
  • Front door and shutters painted
  • Flaking trim painted inside
  • Bathroom door painted
  • New toilet installed in bathroom
  • Lots of trash removed from the garage

There’s a lot left to do, but the ongoing Flickr set documents some of the more dramatic changes in the kitchen.

Meet the new country…

…same as the old country, with a few important differences.

Yes, the Democrats have taken the House and appear to be within reach of the Senate (assuming Jim Webb’s lead survives the recount). Yes, a Democrat (albeit a former NFL quarterback) took a House seat in western North Carolina (sorry, Uncle Forrest). Yes, anger at the President and the Iraq war have unified the country.

But those issues alone don’t mean that the country has gone progressive. Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin all passed amendments making gay marriages unconstitutional; the Virginia law even curbed the ability of businesses to recognize domestic partnerships.

If this election was a victory for the Democrats, it was a vindication for Howard Dean, whose 50 state strategy put safe races in play and swung enough house seats to shift the balance of power.

But compare the Democratic house victory yesterday to the Republicans in 1994. As bankrupt as the Contract with America ultimately became, it was based on coherent ideology and gave a clear direction for the country. Where is the Democratic direction for the next two years? I’m a supporter, and I don’t hear anyone articulating a vision of the role of government, the rights of humanity, constitutional limits on the power of the executive, America’s role in the world. We need the party to step up and put those stakes in the ground.

The Democrats have to show they can lead. But right now I’ll settle for our regaining a voice—and power—in the process.

Nothing odder

…than watching election returns from a Las Vegas hotel room.

Someone asked me who I was pulling for in the elections today. I said, “I’m pulling for habeas corpus.”

Maybe we’ll be able to welcome back that old friend in coming months. We hoped for the Senate back but we’ll definitely take the House.

Provided, of course, that the Democrats act decisively to curb the excesses of the administration. My one plea to the party: reverse the mistakes of the last twelve months; strip the administration’s power to suspend habeas corpus and to impose martial law; and return to fiscal discipline. I want to see all of those things happen, as much as I hate to say it, before we witch-hunt through the administration for illegal acts. We desperately need to return checks and balances on our constitutional powers before we spend all our political capital going after the evil slimelords in the executive branch.

Waiting for the votes to come in

I hate that I’m on the road this week, so I won’t be able to watch the election coverage from the comfort of my own home. But I have to believe that there will be somewhere I’ll be able to watch here in Las Vegas. Not that I want to place any bets on the outcome. This year’s race for the Senate is a real nailbiter.

Two links for the morning. One is an eloquent post from Zalm about the challenges of looking at this race from a Christian perspective, especially in light of the Ted Haggard implosion. The other is a reminder that the Electoral Vote Predictor site, which takes nationwide polling data to predict election outcomes, has been retooled to predict the composition of the US Senate. It’ll be interesting to see if this year’s polling data is any more accurate than two years ago, when the site was predicting Kerry/Edwards in a win for the presidency.

Closing the door: no more comments on this blog

I’ve touched on the problem of comment spam before, but this weekend I’ve decided to call a halt. Starting right now, I’m disabling access to the comments and discussion features on this site. If you have something to say, write about me in your own blog and I’ll read it in Technorati, or use the contact form to email me.

I hate having to do this; after all, this is supposed to be the two-way web. But I can’t keep up with an army of unpatched zombie PCs sending unsolicited spam comments. I had to delete over 900 spam comments last night, and there were 150 more when I checked this afternoon.

This will be a temporary measure until I can move this blog and its existing content over to a WordPress host, or to some other modern hosting system. But for right now I don’t have any other choice.

I guess this is the future of technology. Once it was only big players like Dave Winer who had enough comment grief that they had to disable comments. Now, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, everyone can experience what Dave was going through four years ago.

Continental and FCC 1, Massport 0

Boston Globe: FCC rules against Logan’s WiFi ban. And about time, too. For a few years Massport has trotted out every lame excuse in the book, including Homeland Security, to keep its tenants and vendors from dipping into its lucrative airport-wide WiFi service monopoly. While some frequent travelers, like me, have taken the plunge and gotten a monthly subscription to Boingo to remove the sting, there are probably still plenty of schmoes paying $8.95 for a “day pass” that will probably only be useful to you for a half hour.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link, who also point to perennial WiFi pundit Glenn Fleishman’s analysis. I will summarize his summary of the decision:

Restrictions prohibited by the … rules include lease restrictions… Massport misreads … misconstrues … the safety exception is … inapplicable… no arguments that Massport has made give us reason to change our earlier conclusions that the Commission has statutory authority in these circumstances.

Heh.

RIP, William Styron

New York Times: William Styron, Novelist, Dies at 81. While others will remember him for Sophie’s Choice, Lie Down in Darkness, or The Confessions of Nat Turner, I will of necessity remember this writer from my hometown of Newport News for Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, which he wrote in 1990 about his struggles with depression and which proved (aside from a short story collection) to be his last published work.

When I read Darkness Visible in the early 90s, there were few writers who had addressed the sufferings of depression in a public, accessible, direct way—and virtually no successful ones. Styron’s writing gave me pause as I reflected on its parallels with my own experiences. In retrospect, it has given me hope that depression need not always marginalize the sufferer.

Other encomia to Styron via Technorati.

What makes Massachusetts different?

I love watching the pro/anti discussion on the Massachusetts Question 1 (should stores with grocery licenses—basically any store that sells perishable products—be permitted to sell wine?). But the argument against Question 1 on the Beacon Hill Wine and Spirits blog (a great wine store, a lousy perspective) really made me raise my eyebrows. My response, reprinted from their comments section:

As someone with lengthy residence in both Washington and Virginia, states where wine and beer sales are permitted in groceries, convenience stores, etc, here are the advantages that I see to question 1:

  • Better price on low-end/ commodity wines
  • One-stop shopping (dinner plus wine)
  • More retail outlets means a larger market for the distributors and might lead to a larger variety of products being available to the end customer
  • Better retail hours. In my area, the small independent stores are open only until about 8

I also wonder, with tongue in cheek, why we are worried about kids getting wine. I would think that the wine industry with its rapidly aging demographic would welcome any indication that younger customers were interested in its products, rather than beer and vodka.

Finally, I have to ask what makes Massachusetts teenagers different from teenagers in other states where alcohol is available in grocery stores and other outlets. Are teenagers in MA uniquely susceptible to the pressure to drink? Are the stats on teenage alcohol consumption really tightly linked to restricting the type of outlets that can sell wine? I haven’t seen those numbers, but I would suggest that whatever it is that makes us unique as a state has more to do with the byzantine state and local liquor laws (only three stores in a chain? liquor available in one town but not another?) than any behavior differences on the part of our teenagers.

My only remaining question, as a bona fide beer snob: why can’t the question include beer sales as well? I don’t think the availability of beer in convenience stores and groceries in Washington State has hurt the sales of truly good independent or craft beers; on the contrary, there’s a huge variety of micros that arguably are harder to find here in Massachusetts (where is the championship of Berkshire Brewing Company, to name one example?).

See also the related thread on Universal Hub, where I found the original blog post.

Piskawhat?

I’m getting buried alive under an avalanche of spam. Most of the offending items appear to start with the nonsense word piskasosiska, plus a unique numeric code that appears to correspond to the contents of the spam message. Presumably this is to make it easier to verify the spread of a particular unsolicited spam comment.

Anyone got any idea which bot network is sending these messages? I want them gone, and I’m about a heartbeat away from shutting comments down on this site entirely.

Finally, counters

Unbelievably, at long last we have countertops. And they’re even installed.

The counters were one of the areas where we scrimped in the kitchen redo. We wanted to do solid surface (granite would be a little impractical for us right now) but couldn’t really justify the budget, so we went laminate. I’m kind of glad we did at this point, though, since the installed counters look great and didn’t cost nearly the amount that we would have splashed out on solid surface. The budgetary numbers we used were around $800 for the laminate counters (it ended up being a little higher due to complications in the installation), or about half the cost we were seeing for some solid surface or stone tops.

The biggest issue we faced in the installation was a window whose sill came below the installed counter height. We knew it was there when we planned the counter run but figured we could work around it. Our installer earned his pay by painstakingly chiseling the existing sill back so that he could bring the countertop to the wall, then bringing the remaining sill up to counter height. You would never know there was ever a problem if you looked at it now.

Pictures will be posted in the next few days once I caulk and do a few more finishing steps. But in the meantime, our plumbing gets reconnected on Friday—along with the long-awaited dishwasher. Can’t wait…