Cokie Roberts

A couple of elections ago, there was an interesting field of candidates running for election. Amongst them was Jerry Brown, onetime Governor of the State of California, and admittedly a rather New-Age kinda guy. But I thought he had some serious points, and as a third-party candidate, he was willing to address issues which usually get mere lip-service or simply swept under the carpet by the Old Parties^(tm).

At the time, I was driving in my car, listening to National Public Radio. It was election coverage, and Cokie Roberts still worked for NPR, so she was doing the reporting on the candidates. When she came to Jerry Brown, she laughed! She laughed! I couldn't believe it. Whatever you may think of Jerry Brown, he was running on an interesting platform, and it was the height of arrogance to simply laugh on a national network at one of the four 'serious' candidates.

So now I find that Cokie is up to her old tricks, and moreover, the problem is more systemic than that. I have to agree with this essay in The New Republic that the entire media are not doing their job in reporting the news surrounding politics, and succumbing to the bread-and-circuses aspect over all.

Anyway, one more week and we get to find out which four year nightmare we get to live through. "qbullet.smiley"

http://www.thenewrepublic.com/110600/cohn110600.html

Philip K. Dick

Holy Crap! One of my all-time idols of literature, spanning pulp-scifi hackery to literary genius is Philip K. Dick. And now, browsing during lunch, I find that his Web presence is much larger than I suspected. Go figure.

Guess my Sinkhole o' Distractions^(tm) just got measurably larger. "qbullet.smiley"

Intel Growing

I heard today from a co-worker that somebody who used to work at my company is now at Intel, and is trying to recruit folks. I later heard from Burr (a friend at work) that he was fingered as a prospect. Burr's comment:

If I wanted to work for a company that was almost completely uninterested in software, I'd work for...Microsoft!

Gadabout

Wednesday was a scattered day for me. After dropping Kelly off at school, work started immediately with a meeting. After that, I helped Kirk with a GDSII reader bug until 11:30, when we all drove up to the Red Lobster for lunch with the Egyptians. I ate halibut, too much. Carsten and I stopped at Powell's Cascade Books to look for GTK+ books, and I ended up buying the GNOME/GTK+ Programming Bible. Then we scurried back to work, where we had another meeting, after which I raced to the woods to meet Jean for a short walk around the nature trail. Then back to the office to help Kirk work on his bugs again.

When I got home, there was no rest for the weary, as I had inadvertantly screwed up printing on the Mac when experimenting with the DSL modem. It turns out that when I temporarily unplugged the Airport wireless router hub from my ethernet card, I made Appletalk silently switch to the printer port! So it was spewing garbage to the printer, sitting on the printer port so that no application could send work to the printer, and failing to allow file sharing between the desktop and laptop machines. Switching Appletalk back to the ethernet port made all three bugs magically go away.

I was talking with Jean about this after I had fixed printing but before I had completely sussed out the total pathology, and suggested that this made me want to buy Norton Utilities. But as in the last few cases where I've had problems with the computer, NU would not have told me anything useful. It just took good old-fashioned detective work, RTFM and a bit of cussing.

I got up early this morning to go to the bathroom and as I was heading back to bed, Kelly called out to me. I ended up sitting in bed beside her for the last half hour, not sleeping, and not doing anything useful. I hope she still has a good day today, despite the missing sleep in the morning.

Yesterday Evening

Yesterday evening was too busy to allow time for a report that same night. If you're not plugged in to the U.S. calendar, yesterday evening was Halloween, the traditional time for children to run from door to door demanding candy from strangers "qbullet.smiley". I wrote a brief report of last night's festivities which you can now read, called "Kelly's Halloween".

On another front, Verizon did indeed send me the DSL modem that is to go with my account. I spent a half hour hooking all the filters to phone lines, and trying out the modem with my computer. It doesn't work, which is no great surprise. On a more careful reading of Alan's mail, Verizon doesn't have the proper hardware at the Central Office, and won't be able to upgrade their system until November 10th.

So I'll presumably be ready to go in mid-November, but of course I'm a pessimist, or a realistic optimist, I don't know which. I'll believe it when I'm using it.

Kelly's Halloween

Kelly had what I consider to be a great Halloween. She wore her fairy
costume: pink bodysuit with flouncy chiffon dress sort of like a large
tutu, yellow 'sequin' shoes, a wand with streamers, and a pair of
diaphonous pink, translucent butterfly wings. She was determined not to
wear a jacket because it would spoil the lines and folks wouldn't be
able to tell she was a fairy. So I carried a jacket with me in case she
saw the light. She never did.

When I came home from work I brought with me an orange wooden pail, sort
of an octagon of planks, with a pumpkin face cut in it. Inside was a
little orange critter wearing a domino mask. Both were a present from my
friend and coworker Brent, bought for us by his wife Jen. Kelly was
ecstatic, and immediately switched from her plastic pumpkin bucket to
the wooden bucket. We started tromping around the neighborhood around
6pm.

Kelly always seemed to want to go to 'that house across the street', and
I was constantly pointing out how we'd get there soon enough. We worked
constantly on appropriate pronouncements:

• Ring the bell...
  
• When the door is opened, shout: "Trick or treat!"...
  
• Take only the candy offered (this was a tough one)...
  
• When leaving, be sure to say "Thank you!"...
  
• For extra credit, as you walk away, say "Happy Halloween!"
  

I know, you're thinking "how anal!" But if you watch the untutored
Kelly, you'll soon see that she can use the routine. Her own tendency is
to hold her bucket up to the person opening the door and wait silently
while they dish out the goods. I told her that didn't play well. In fact
a few people even prompted her themselves to say the T.o.T. words. Then
when she has the 'loot', she just bolts down the sidewalk. No good by my
lights. The best are of course when she spontaneously strikes up a
conversation: "I like your dog", "You have good candy", and "I'm
pretending to be the tooth fairy!" are all samples.

After about an hour of running from house to house, Kelly decided
she wanted to go home, so we headed back. She emptied out her bucket and
promptly ate a sample. Then she announced that she was ready to go out
again! I made her wait a few minutes to warm up, then we headed out to
canvas the parts of the neighborhood we hadn't gotten to yet. This time
it was later, and folks were giving out more candy per kid, as they
figured out how much they had left, so Kelly's bucket filled up pretty
fast. She made me put most of it into the pockets of my jacket, and went
on to fill it up again. "qbullet.smiley"

I timed the final loop to end at our house almost exactly at 7:40pm,
with the intention of getting her into a hot bath and into bed by her
8pm bedtime. After fifteen minutes of stories from me, and then fifteen
from her mom, we bid her goodnight. I checked on her around 8:45 and she
was already out like a light. No wonder, running around outside for an
hour and forty minutes wearing only a costume! Actually I slept
pretty well last night too!

So I'd say it was a success. Sacking the town with my daughter is one of
the three things about Halloween that make it my favorite holiday of
all. The other two are attending the "NOVA" Halloween Party, and the
preponderance of goofy old monster movies on the television in the
preceeding days. Someday Kelly will be too old to Trick or Treat, and I
won't always be a member of NOVA, but I think Halloween will always be
my favorite holiday.

Not Like Yesterday

Lunch is about over, and I've only posted three items today! I may post something tonight, but first I'm looking forward to taking my daughter out to sack the neighborhood trick-or-treat.

And if that's not enough, Jean tells me I got a package from Verizon today that might, if I'm very lucky, allow me to start up the DSL connection I ordered early in the month. I'm not holding my breath though.