january 2006

january 26 2006 08:40 pst removed ads for the time being. I'm not making any money anyhow.

january 26 2006 01:25 pst alex and I went to watch mexico beat norway in a friendly warm-up to the world cup matches this summer. the desire in the air was palpable- the will of the audience for mexico to win was so thick, you could feel the pressure everywhere around you. even the announcer at candlestick park (they call it monster now, but we all know what its name really is) spoke in spanish the whole night. mexico scored the game-winning goal with 4 minutes left in regulation time. it was worth sitting in traffic for 2 hours to see that moment live- i can only imagine how great it will be to sit in the venues during the world cup this summer and see history being made.

btw, i've noticed that there are some crazy ads coming from google on the right side of this page.

impeachment is coming. it's only a matter of time.

january 24 2006 18:50 pst let's see how long this picture which comes from this article stays up on the web (note: after karl rove's stormtroopers force them to take it down, you can still see it here).

january 23 2006 23:54 pst had a great day at n* on sunday. once every two weeks isn't quite enough though. i want to carry that euphoria with me for longer than a day or two; it would probably help if i could get two days in a row instead of this drive-up-saturday-come-back-sunday nonsense. still want to get 20 days this year and the math doesn't look good.

january 19 2006 7:46 pst is obstruction of justice an impeachable offense? you bet it is. And really, what else can you call it when the president forced an end to an investigation in 2002 of essentially the same charges that the suspect pled guilty to in 2005, in front of a different court? let's not forget at the time that our suspect in question is on record for providing over $300,000 in legal fees to fund the florida vote fraud efforts of 2000- and that there is no indication that the bush campaign ever repaid that in-kind donation. quid pro quo, anyone? i guess you could call it 'delaying the inevitable.' yes, there is a pun in there somewhere. or you could call it 'conspiracy to obstruct justice.' that's probably what i would call it.

january 18 2006 20:50 pst had an interesting email exchange with my father today. his question was: why aren't there riots on campuses and civil unrest on the streets? my answer was that we tried that, and it didn't work. dissent is illegal, didn't you know that? we even voted for the other guy, TWICE, and the other guy won the election BOTH TIMES, and we're still stuck with these fascists becuase someone hacked the voting machines. all that people can do now is try to get the message across in non-confrontational ways that don't leave personally identifiable evidence behind. one way to get your message across is the internet, and a lot of people are doing that. the two big problems with the internet are that (1) sometimes you have to know where to look, and in this case for a variety of reasons you're not going to find much in the mainstream press about vote fraud, and (2) if you're sitting in front of a computer, you're not getting arrested for staging a die-in at 1600 pennsylvania ave. as an alternative to the web, some people are taking their message to the streets, literally.

january 18 2006 01:55 pst finally someone is standing up to call these liars on their bluff. I hope that this is the one that lands them all in prison.

january 16 2006 22:04 pst what rational action can you take ahead of time when you know inflation is coming? well, you can buy hard assets, like gold or real estate. or you can try to export your wealth into other currency markets. both of these strategies have the downside that you can't buy groceries at the local market with anything other than us dollars.

as a country, we've been in a selectively difficult financial patch for a while now. consumables have maintained a level price- a gallon of milk still costs about the same as it did in 1999. same with eggs. the same is mostly true even of cigarettes and mcdonalds hamburgers. at the same time, the price of hard assets has been increasing wildly over the past five years.

things are going to get a whole hell of a lot worse rsn. there are indications that world oil production has already peaked, as of fall 2004. the problem is not that we're running out of oil; the problem is that every barrel of oil we pump from this point on is going to be more and more expensive to get out of the ground, which means the opec countries and their state-controlled oil companies are going to charge more for it when they sell it to refiners, and the refiners are going to charge more for all those wonderful petrochemical products that they sell to plastics manufacturing companies and fertilizer producers and oh yeah, gasoline consumers like you and me and the farmers who produce the food we eat. and the airlines that fly us around. and the truckers who move goods back and forth around this country.

and the chinese, who are buying cars like there's no tomorrow. which is apropos, because there really isn't a future for cars that use gas as a fuel.

but enough about gas. it turns out that this thing in iraq wasn't really about oil, like we all keep assuming it is... it was about currency. when the saudis can sell oil to the chinese denominated in euros instead of in good old us dollars, our currency really will go in the tank. we'll still probably be able to buy bacon and eggs, but we'll never be able to scrape together enough hard currency to make the down payment for the kitchen we're cooking them in.

january 15 2006 12:35 pst oh, and they fixed the phone- we have dial tone again.

january 15 2006 11:55 pst already halfway through january and i've only been up to tahoe once this year. for one day. this was not in the plan... i knew in the back of my mind that having a new job would shake things up from a tahoe perspective, but i guess i didn't expect it to be as disruptive as it has been. i just wish everything had been shifted one way or the other by 6 months or so.

january 10 2006 20:00 pst still fighting a low-grade cold. sinus pressure, slight drippiness from the nose, and my voice is about 2 octaves too low. people can't recognize me when i call them on the phone. i hope that i can kick this before too many more days go by.

january 9 2006 19:28 pst only 211 days until w outlasts nixon. do you think he'll make it?

january 6 2006 9:06 pst you would think that will all of the spam out there for h3rb4L V1ag4ra, someone would send me emails about cures for the common cold, or the flu, or a scratchy throat. if i was already feverish, i would probably buy it.

january 5 2006 22:26 pst today i finally called sbc about us not having a dial tone. and i went to comcast and got them to call off the dogs. and i got mail about our car insurance bill going up- i guess california dmv and kansas dot do talk to each other after all. rats. and i think i'm coming down with strep. double rats. on the bright side, at least i have a lovely wife and a warm cat who is guaranteed to sleep on my neck to keep me warm.

january 3 2006 23:57 pst detected some odd traffic coming from the x20 windows laptop yesterday. think that some of it might be from dns problems at sbc, where they seem to be having problems dealing with the rain. i still don't have a dial tone on our land-line phone; if you try to call the house, you'll get a busy signal, and i can't make outbound calls.

the laptop was making periodic queries to ip addresses owned by uc berkeley, on port 137 which is netbios, a windows-only networking protocol. when i tried to install the latest ad-aware from lavasoft, the laptop wouldn't 'see' that webpage. so i had to dl the software to another peecee on my network, then transfer the file over (without logging in from the infected peecee- i had to burn the installer on a cd and then carry it over to the infected box) and run it, and hey presto! but there was a bunch of crap running that we didn't put there and it was trying to call out every now and then.

long story short- i think i cleaned it up, then i checked out my other peecees to make sure that they looked clean, and then i gave it up as a job for another day.

despite the continued production of windows-only software, it's frustrations like this that will eventually drive me to install linux on all my local boxes and prohibit windows from having any presence in my house. i just don't have time or patience to deal with it when something breaks, and there is just too much at risk.

january 3 2006 22:57 pst brought home some robitussin. hope that it helps her sleep a little better tonight.

january 1 2006 17:30 pst happy new year! i've been writing essays all day. well, not so much writing new essays, as trying to cobble together something coherent from everything i've written about over the past 5 years. i have a lot of ideas, and writing them down as they happen helps a lot... but that doesn't make it any easier to come up with a winner on demand.

there were 2 salamanders in the compost heap today. dad suggested that they were eating the snails or bugs or something. i've been creating an ecosystem and i didn't even know it.