>YES WE DID!
>Congrats Barak Obama!
And, thank you John McCain, your class showed tonight, even if your audience didn’t share it.
>I voted
>I got to my polling place at about 6:50 or so, and waited until about 7:40 to vote. In the first 40 minutes, 240 people voted ahead of me! That’s normally the count by mid-late afternoon!
It, without doubt, is going to be an interesting day.
>The Sony CDX-2180
>Today’s helpful random tidbit that Jeff couldn’t find with Google:
I have a Sony CDX-2180 car radio (complete with its…get this… 1BIT-D/A converter!). Anyway, ever since I changed the battery in the car, the radio defaults to not show the clock (in case your car doesn’t turn off the power to the radio with the key, apparently).
Anyway, the answer on how to fix this is to press and hold SOUND and then hit off. That toggles the display for me, anyway.
>Palin only got her passport LAST YEAR?
>From the NY Times:
Ms. Palin appears to have traveled very little outside the United States. In July 2007, she had to get a passport before she visited members of the Alaska National Guard stationed in Kuwait, according to her deputy communications director, Sharon Leighow. She also visited wounded troops in Germany during that trip.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Somehow she has foreign policy experience by just somehow being sorta close to Russia?
Its a big and diverse world out there. You can’t learn that though a book or through the tee-vee. You’ve got to go out there and experience it. And guess what… the rest of the world isn’t just like the USA, and that’s a good thing. There are good things about differences. For instance, I like German beer. That’s good.
But in other news of the day, she’s also casually thrown out that we might have to go to war with Russia. Good grief. No wonder she’s been kept from doing solo interviews.
I only pray that America doesn’t accept their bold faced lies.
>Summer Driving
>
Summer driving has side effects. Like bugs. As you can see, we’ve had a bumper crop of bumper bugs. I don’t how two Asian Beetles hit the 2.
Too bad no photo really does justice to the spread of bugs. Or, wait, maybe thats really a good thing.
>RIP George
>George, if you’re reading this and you haven’t heard, you’re dead. You didn’t pass away.
The really funny bit comes in at 5:55 in this clip.
And then, with possibly one of the funniest bits ever:
…wait I gotta go out and get some more stuff.
>The New Yorker: The Fall of Conservatism
The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the California governorship. But he saw that he could propel himself back to power on the strength of a new feeling among Americans who, appalled by the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young, and the insults to national pride in Vietnam, were ready to blame it all on the liberalism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Right-wing populism was bubbling up from below; it needed to be guided by a leader who understood its resentments because he felt them, too.
(snip)
Wow. Quite a telling story, especially for those of us who are a little light on the details of how we got into this.
>Intel GM945 causes Gnome to choose the wrong monitor
>So I recently upgraded to a new monitor ($318 on the Sun Matching Grant Program — which really isn’t a matching program anymore, but I digress).
The problem is that I now want to use that as my primary display, and my Dell monitor as my secondary display off my D620 laptop with the Intel 945GM display. That means I’ll have a primary display DVI at 1920×1600 and my secondary VGA at 1680×1050. Unfortunately for whatever reason, the Intel 945GM lists the VGA first in xrandr, which is roughly the way the server sees it. This causes Gnome to choose that display as the primary place it shows the login screen, shows the menus, and so forth.
My current solution is to login and then run this script:
#!/bin/bash xrandr --output TMDS-1 --offxrandr --output VGA --offxrandr --output TMDS-1 --autoxrandr --output VGA --autoxrandr --output VGA --pos 1920x0
This turns off both displays, and turns them both back on. This causes them to overlap at position 0×0 (meaning you’ll see the displays mirrored). Then it slides the VGA display to the right, which is what I want. I’m not sure if it’d work the other way.
>After Microsoft
>
Taken from the same shot that the Windows XP “Bliss” image was taken, 10 years later.
>Dog vs. Screen Door
>Growing up, we had a dog. He wasn’t the smartest creature on the planet (heck, he ate a rock once — I think my dad still has that little souvenir). Anyway, this dog is even dumber:
>The case of the 500-mile email
>Trey Harris should write a book. He’s already got a great title: The case of the 500-mile email
>My Next Car
>If only I could have one of these as my next car:
I wonder if crushing the car in front of you incurs extra insurance costs…
>The Dog Named Lady
>I’m pretty backlogged on my podcasts, so this one is from a while ago. If you’ve got about 5 minutes check out The Dog Named Lady. Its worth the trip…uh…I mean the listen.
>Finally, work can resume
>The Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery building is going up. First, things must come down. Demolition is cool. Its also quite a distraction. Here’s the view from our office:
>Whats the Most Popular Date Easter Falls On?
>I was born on Easter and have had my birthday on Easter twice in my life so far. It led me to wonder, whats the most common date that Easter will fall on between the earliest possible day (March 22) and the latest possible day (April 25). Here’s the graph for the years 1583 through 4099:
The source data came from http://users.sa.chariot.net.au/~gmarts/eastcalc.htm