Month: May 2006

Rigorous Intuition is a guilty pleasure.  It’s a conspiracy theory blog.  I haven’t yet sussed out everything the author believes or is into — he seems to be farther out than Robin Ramsay but not as far out as David Icke.  He’s got something interesting, occasionally something really wild, to say about just about any news that comes out.  Plus each post gets a really interesting Photoshopped collage image, and some lyrics from Dylan, Lou Reed, or Leonard Cohen.

I guess I like reading RI because it’s not much more depressing than the “real news,” which I’m trying to kind of avoid right now, and unlike the real news I can comfort myself, thinking that RI is largely wild speculation and little or none of it may actually be true.

Anyway, the author, Jeff Wells, is a good writer and churns out a whole lotta original bloggage.

Nation’s Liberals Suffering From Outrage Fatigue | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

This old Onion article describes me pretty well lately, except with issues outside of the Bush administration as well.

globeandmail.com : Captain America – fugitive

This is cool as HELL.  However:
<Comic Book Guy>

“There’s even a rumour that Marvel’s Canadian hero Alpha Flight might get into the mix.”

ExCUSE me, Alpha Flight is a superhero TEAM, not an individual Superhero. Sheesh.

</Comic Book Guy>

How To Steal an Election — a comparison of voting machines and casino slots that gets the point about the sad state of voting machines across very well.

Which is why I don’t really have much hope for Democrats in any upcoming elections… I fully expect narrow Republican victories anywhere there are already Republicans controlling the voting machines (e.g. Ohio in 2004) — victories that contradict exit and other polls to a degree that would be considered proof of election fraud in any other nation.

I’m not sure we’ll ever see a non-Republican-controlled congress or White House anytime soon, approval ratings be damned.

OK, I use my laptop primarily as a windows machine.  There’s no hassle about getting my hardware to work with it, but it’s not as much fun to be in windows as in linux.  I have a partition there for Ubuntu, but I had hardly done anything with it, until just recently
Traditionally I report futzmonkey twiddle here, so here goes…  If you’re not familiar with Linux, just don’t even bother reading further.  There’s nothing there for you.  Summary: I was reminded why Linux hasn’t taken over the world yet.

• I tried updating Ubuntu linux to the beta of the upcoming version, codenamed “dapper drake.”  When I did that,  the wifi stopped working.  It had, as best I remembered, “just worked” on the old linux install.  (I was wrong about this.)

• I tried installing SimplyMepis, Debian Sarge, and the CD installer from Dapper Drake.  None of them completed the install successfully.  However, they did succeed in trashing the partition where GRUB was expecting to find its boot menu, thereby rendering me unable to boot even to Windows.  Niiiiiice…  Before it was all blown away, I did notice that my old linux install seemed to be using ndiswrapper for wifi.  Doh!  It hadn’t “just worked” after all!  I needed to ndiswrapper it!
• I reinstalled the current stable version of Ubuntu which I’d had before, and made the wifi work.  I noticed sound wasn’t working, so I futzed with that all the ways I knew how… with no luck.  No sound.  I also noticed that suspend-to-disk and suspend-to-ram didn’t work.  But at least there was a relevant grub boot menu.
• I realized I could live with the awkwardness of developing with open-source software on Windows, and sighed sadly.  Honest sadness because I like using Linux, especially Ubuntu, quite a lot.  It’s a pleasant place to work and play.  I just hate fighting with it about whether a given piece of my hardware is going to work with it.  It did very well with my thinkpad, but this Gateway… not so good so far.