Pinging stuff I care about.
The D.C. Madam was found hanged in a shed near her mother’s home.
Not that somebody facing a huge prison term might not choose to end it all, but still…Â Damn, that’s convenient for a lot of people with great power and a lot to lose.
News and wondering what the hell via Jeffrey Rowland’s journal.
Went there last night to see Alfie Kohn speak. Took picture. :)
Picture is perspective-tweaked with Hugin, which I’m finally kind of starting to understand.
“The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago,” Obama said of the man who married him.
[From Obama denounces former pastor – Barack Obama News- msnbc.com]
Thanks a lot, Hilary, for bringing things to this point with your relentless dwelling on Rev. Wright. Thanks a lot, Barack, for not letting a decades-long close friendship get in the way of your presidential bid.
Apparently if she can’t beat him, Hillary will turn Obama into someone like her, someone who will say or do anything, regardless of issues of personal integrity, for the sake of his political career.
Yesterday the kids/family’s computer’s hard drive took a dive. (It’s a very old desktop machine which my wife bought from her employers for something like $10 when they upgraded all the machines; that was two or three years ago. It has always run Ubuntu Linux in our house.) Wouldn’t boot, couldn’t even hit the grub menu. Wouldn’t be so bad but the hard drive was big and I’d been using it as a backup drive for a lot of stuff. I have a new backup system (a portable HD that I back my macbook up to) but I still had a lot of old stuff on there that I would like back. I haven’t yet looked into whether it can be resurrected. I took it out and swapped in an old small drive.
Since there’s a spanking new version of Ubuntu available, Hardy Heron, I burned a CD of that and installed it. Install went smoothly but the graphics have been killing me.
There were two problems, one now solved:
The problem at the root of all this is that they have kicked autoconfiguration of X11 into overdrive. It is no longer possible to manually configure your graphics card and monitor set up by any straightforward means. It autoconfigures, and the configuration file which it was once possible to tweak is now a nigh-empty stub. (It’ll still respect what you put in there, but I don’t know enough off the top of my head to do anything with it.)
The causes of the two above-mentioned problems come from this autoconfiguration:
I was able to turn off the whizzbangy desktop effects which ruined the desktop, through the Appearance item in the Settings menu. I haven’t yet figured out what to do about the resolution. We’ll see how that goes tonight.
On the upside, everything else about the machine is Just Working.
Friends of a comic-book store owner shot in an apparent robbery said they can’t understand why the shop would be a target.
David Pirkola is in critical but stable condition in a local hospital, said Stephen Jahner, who owns Apparitions Comics and Books with Pirkola.
“People open comic stores because they love comics and are lucky if they can make a living,” Jahner said. “It’s not like we ever have a lot of cash in the store. It’s just unbelievable.”
Kentwood police said a man entered the store at 2757 Ridgemoor Drive SE around 7 p.m. and demanded money, shot Pirkola and fled.
Jahner said Saturday he has known Pirkola for decades.
“He’s just a sweet guy, one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet,” he said. “He’s the kind of guy you want watching your back.”
That’s where I buy Knights of the Dinner Table and PvP every month. There are few places I can think of less likely for a robbery an shooting. I heard about this late Friday night in the news and I still can’t believe it. Dave’s a totally nice guy. Robbing a comic book store? Robbing Dave’s comic book store? And shooting? And now Dave’s in the hospital in critical condition for a gunshot wound? It’s terrible and it doesn’t make any sense.
UPDATE: Friends of Dave’s have set up a donation page so people who want to help out can do so.