connect the DOOOTS

Greg Palast: "Catch Greg Palast on PBS’ top current affairs program.

WATCH THE REPORT HERE

‘NOW’ furthers the story Palast first busted open for Britain’s BBC Newsnight, the scheme to attack voters of color - the ‘Blue’ ones.

For Bill Moyers’ capable successor, David Brancaccio, Palast lays out the latest evidence never before televised."

the dots:

1. use of choicePoint data to drive the 2000 and 2004 voter purges
   
2. firing of US attorneys for not being with the purge program
   
3. MORE surveillance and data mining you know "for kids" .. I mean, to protect us from the bad people who hate us for our freedom.
   

so on the "who cares about surveillance if you have noting to hide" front, a perfectly cromulent answer is

1. mine the data to find out if you hate america
   
2. mine the data to find out when you're on vacation
   
3. send a registered letter while yr gone
   
4. go to a hand-picked-and installed-under-patriot-act-rules judge and take away yr bleeding-heart commie-scum vote
   

How to install Airport Utility 5

apple guy was over and says "you know... you should update the software on your airport express" .. turns out that apple fucked up and made it so that software update doesn't work .. .unless you have the current version of "Airport Utility" (which replaces "Airport Admin Utility") , but they give no direct download for it.

long story short, here's a link to the remedy:

How to install Airport Utility 5

this is a fucking manta ray

it's fucking giant. and has a very distinctive shape.

for whatever reason
(a) the wife calls skates and regular rays "manta ray"
(b) she gets upset if I say anything about that
(c) when she gets upset she leaves

this upsets me. she has approximately no coping skills. I mean, jesus fuck, what happens if anything genuinely bad is happening and we have to deal with it?

hardware store moment

I'm having a bit of a "hardware store moment" .. I know there's something that I was supposed to look up, but I can't remember what the heck it was.

related: something or other that I was going to write about.

though I could write about household temperatue....

AHA! it was not-just-figuratively a hardware store moment. The item I was supposed to be looking for was a dimmer socket. Now to see if I can find one for a not-outrageous price.

spynocular update

oh, it is nice to have good binoculars. even the jump to the low-end Nikon Action 7x35 was fantastic.

it made me want MORE. so I went to try and trade up to the Nikon Monarch 10x42, but found out that ritzCamera wanted too much money for them. now, recapping, I find out that, yes, that is what they cost.

*sigh*

asshattery confirmed

hartfourd courant has an update on my best-buy asshattery story.

"As a company, everything we do revolves around our customers' needs and desires. It is never our intent to mislead them as their loyalty is incredibly important to us," the statement said.

Then they threw in this interesting line: "Although we have an intra-store web site in place to support store operations (including products and pricing), we are reminding our employees how to access the external BestBuy.com web site to ensure customers are receiving the best possible product price.

their "secret internal website".

dickweeds.

it's time for spynoculars

Binocular Advisor, by Michael and Diane Porter
time for the wifeykins and me to get at least one nonshitty pair of binoculars. 'cause we're gonna go be nerdy and look at birds and whales. Hoot!

items to consider:

• Eagle Optics Triumph 8x25reasonably priced, but not waterproof


• Eagle Optics Ranger SRT 8x42waterproof, pricey


• Celestron Noble 8x32 waterproof, slightly less pricey


• Nikon Monarch Binocular 8x36



• Vortex Spitfire 8.5x32 Binocularwaterproof, reasonably priced



• Audubon Equinox 8x42 Binocularwaterproof, mid-priced


• Audubon Equinox HP 8x42 Binocular(better optics)



le sigh.

the labels bee

here's the field we want to use...

<category scheme='http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#' term='gripe'></category>

and here's how we use it...
GData: updating an entry

should be pretty easy from here. Maybe a nice little flex app.

the rope

Lenin said "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." Wouldn't the socialists try to get it free as it was for the common good and all?

maybe if I get a bee in my bonnet

project: make blogger API app to make it super-easy to apply tags t..er 'labels' to your old posts

bonus points for integration with yr other blogs, flickr, and/or del.icio.us tags

the applescript method

(*
get the name and artist of each track in the current playlist
and put the whole danged list onto yr clipboard

to make it super-handy, turn on script menu and drop this script into your itunes scripts folder
<username>/Library/Applications/iTunes

use at your own risk, disclaim, etc.

CC noncommercial sharealike attribution
drinknerd 12/29/2007
*)

tell application "iTunes"
 set myresult to ""
 activate
 repeat with myTrack in tracks of view of first browser window
  set myresult to myresult & name of myTrack & tab & artist of myTrack & return
 end repeat
end tell

set the clipboard to myresult
say "done"

how to process an exported playlist

this is the no XML, no AppleScript method

1. select the playlist
   
2. menu: [File][Export...]
   
   (system will open a dialog titled "Save: iTunes")
   
3. set the 'save as' filename to "myPlaylist.txt" (optional-- but it makes the example easier)
   
4. set format to "Plain Text"
   
5. press [Save]
   
6. open the terminal
   
7. cd to the directory where it was saved (I think default is Documents)
   
8. here's the magic: (enter it all on one line)
   
awk 'BEGIN {RS="\r"; FS="\t"; OFS="\t"} {print $1, $2 }' myPlaylist.txt

   or
   
awk 'BEGIN {RS="\r"; FS="\t"; OFS="\t"} {print $1, $2 }' myPlaylist.txt > cleanedPlaylist.txt

   

GOP scandal rundown

(election is done... googlebomb deleted)

BestBuy.com Contact Us Form

four things, related:
1) it is unclear from the web-site that the web-site prices / 'shopping cart prices' may not be available in the store
2) the in-store web terminals do not have 'shopping cart' prices for items
3) the employees at the Emeryville store do not know this, or won't admit it to customers.
4) As a result, a clerk at the Emeryville store pretty much called me a lair. I went to Circuit City, where they were able look-up and give me their web-only price.

arm fell off

my arm fell off. it's all due to the damn tetanus shot they gave me on monday.

problem is, when I stretch. the old "let me just give a good stretch and then I'll get up and accomplish something" -- and the shoulder says "nah". so then I'm back to sitting at the damned computer waiting for bugs to fix.

le sigh.

lamont

Ned Lamont for Senate: "The fact that Joe Lieberman says calling for Hastert's resignation is too 'partisan' demonstrates that he's been in Washington so long that he can't recognize the difference between what%u2019s right and what's partisan."

Perspective Time

Rice More Sordid Than Foley: "Call me old school, but I am still more concerned with the Republicans molesting Lady Liberty while pretending to be guarding the nation's security, an assignment which they have totally botched. The news about the Foley coverup, while important as yet another example of extreme hypocrisy on the part of the Republican virtues police, should not be allowed to obscure the latest evidence of administration deceit as to its egregious ineptness in protecting the nation."

oh my god... how could you ignore the plight of privileged white american children?

if I were a regular contributor, I would call this an installment of perspective time.

I will not deny the icky grossness of the Foley situation. But... its perspective time, and I'm going to point out that the US government and its proxies forcibly detain, sexually abuse, torture, and kill innocent people, some of them children, all over the world. But I guess that doesn't fucking matter, because the victims are not privileged white american children.

itunes 7 yay! boo! almost

yay:
I am oddly obsessed with the cover art flipper in the new itunes. I spend far too much time gathering artwork for the items that it fails to automatically grab.

yay:
new, useful, metadata added: skip count, last skipped

boo!:
asshats! 'skip' does not reliably get set. as far as I can tell, it gets set SOMETIMES if you skip to next between 3 and 10 seconds into the fucking song. SOMETIMES? dickweeds. it's not a hard field to implement. if you want to be wussy about "ooh I don't want to sully a song by marking it skipped" then give a fucking preference ignore skips before N seconds or after N seconds, so I can set it to "all skips count as skips".

though it would be useful (hmm.. maybe I'll write a script to squirrel it into the comments field) to know just how much I hate a song, based on the mean time at which I skipped from it. heck -- numbers are cheap, particularly if they're hidden -- I want to know not just the mean, but also the deviation -- that way scuds can be ID'd (wow. I really fucking hate that song -- not only that, but it takes me 10 full seconds to realize it) (or... wow. I really need to trim that stupid 60 second artsy blank tail off that song)

duh! sweet!

Sony GPS-CS1: Tags Photos With Location - Gizmodo: "This little GPS clips onto your digital camera to tag your photos with latitude and longitude. How? By synching the clock in the GPS with the timestamp on your photos, on your PC. "

sweet! how astoundingly simple. wonder how much this puppy costs. (and how long it'll take for someone to write the near-trivial code to make it work on the mac / with flickr / etc. ) (that is, unless the sony folks were asshats and made the data hard to get to.)

TPMmuckraker: caffienated vindiacation

TPMmuckraker: "No Foam: Just what it means. (I should note that some traditionalists believe (rightly, I posit) that a latte should have no foam at all, making this qualifier redundant. Starbucks baristas, however, are ordered to include a 'quarter-inch' of foam on their latte creations 'to create a delicate first impression,' according to the company Web site.)"

asshats. back when I was on the bean, if I forgot to ask for "no foam", I'd get a 20 ounce cup with 12 ounces of coffee/milk mix and 8 ounces of foam.

tomorrow: why they always screw you at the drive thorough.