Category: General

I spent the holiday in Iowa and got to see what it’s like being pandered to constantly by candidates. Highlights:

Kucinich has no ad presence in Iowa. Bummer.

The only Republican ads I saw were from Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo — I got to see the famous Tom Tancredo “oogabooga they’re gonna get you!” ad several times.

Amusingly, a relative of mine who lives there didn’t realize Tancredo was running for president — he thought he was just making ads about how Islamic terrorists were infiltrating us disguised as Mexican immigrants in hoodies for whatever reason. The ads barely mentioned his candidacy…

Obama and Edwards have a strong ad presence and both focus on the middle class getting the shaft at the hands of large corporations and hyper-rich, which is good — they’re focused on something important.

Clinton’s ad, which I saw several times, strongly suggests that her health care plan is to personally phone hospitals and convince them to give people health care for free, which I think is just awesome. Rock on Hillary.

Old and busted. The new hotness.

Extra Dork Points: I got this working first within a Parallels ubuntu image on my Macbook (while reading howtos and trying them out on the mac, which itself was on wifi), before trying it out on an independent ubuntu machine.

Free Software Foundation – Anti-Features:

RAW is an example of an anti-feature. Anti-features are sold to customers as features but are fundamental or unavoidable aspects of systems that can only be removed or withheld through technological effort. Unlike real features, producers of anti-features charge customers for not inhibiting access to their products’ full functionality. Technological and legal barriers that keep anti-features away from the users of intentionally less featureful end up costing all users their freedom. It is more difficult for Canon to make cameras that output JPEGs than cameras that output RAW, and it’s not significantly more difficult to offer users a choice.

As the poster points out, one of the nice things about free software is that as a matter of course, and with zero coding effort, it will provide all the “anti-features” that nonfree systems make you pay for.

RIP Mr. Whipple – The Charmin Man » Pop Culture Will Eat Itself suggests a 21 squeeze salute — and includes a couple vintage Whipple commercials.

My copy of Nobody Knows Shoes came in the mail today!

UPDATE: sigh Well…. Shoes is still very buggy. Cool to play with though.

UPDATE 2: I got on the mailing list and _why’s fixing bugs almost as fast as I report them. Wow.