dude, where's my country?

posted by jack at 06:56 CET in / politics

Lately I've been bingeing on left-wing books complaining about our selected president and his corrupt cronies. I started off with Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, continued with the excellent The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast, and am now following up with Mark Crispin Miller's (at this point somewhat outdated) Bush Dyslexicon. The latter book is the one that's got me in a posting mood at the moment.

Written in those halcyon days before 9/11, Dyslexicon deals mostly with Bush's conduct before becoming president. Miller is able to deftly define what I've had a hard time putting into words: Bush is unfit to be president not because he's unintelligent (he isn't), but rather because he embodies the worst of what is wrong with the decadent upper crust of our society. Bush attended the finest schools our country has to offer, but failed to master basic English language syntax or understanding of how our country's government works; His string of failed business ventures in the 1970s and 80s, which would have sent most people into the poorhouse, were instead perpetually financed and bailed out by his father's associates; In spite of a self-professed lack of interest in issues of governance, he has used wealthy patrons to finance election campaigns (and, at least in the Texas gubernatorial case, occasionally win). Born into wealth and privilege, Dubya expects to have the world served to him on a silver platter, and remarkably, he has so far gotten what he's expected.

The joys of broadband

posted by jack at 13:21 CET in / network

I've recently gotten broadband service at home. When it works, it works great, but unfortunately our provider has decided to use some new bleeding-edge equipment that doesn't play well with the houses on our street. The network uses the same co-ax as our cable TV, and if our TV "accidentally" sends voltage out the cable (which apparently some TVs do) it fries some critical piece of network equipment.

So, it can work great for weeks at a time, then be out for days and days. So I had no network access at home from noonish last Friday until today. And just when I had started messing with this blog! Crikey.

The joys of broadband

posted by jack at 13:21 CET in / compute / network

I've recently gotten broadband service at home. When it works, it works great, but unfortunately our provider has decided to use some new bleeding-edge equipment that doesn't play well with the houses on our street. The network uses the same co-ax as our cable TV, and if our TV "accidentally" sends voltage out the cable (which apparently some TVs do) it fries some critical piece of network equipment.

So, it can work great for weeks at a time, then be out for days and days. So I had no network access at home from noonish last Friday until today. And just when I had started messing with this blog! Crikey.

the first entry

posted by jack at 21:12 CET in / compute / blogging

blog this, blog that, blog blog blog. everyone's got a blog now, right?

i actually started blogging years ago, creating a quickly-abandoned site that is still floating around on a free webserver somewhere. In those days, I was relying on the web-based blogging system at blogger.com, which was just too prickly to really want to use on a regular basis. Now I've stumbled across this new-fangled blosxom doohickey which looks like it will make my blogging efforts a bit more manageable. We'll see!