The MacDeskBlog

My prediction for the Electoral College

This is my prediction for the outcome of tomorrow’s election. My basic assumption is that Obama will sweep every state where the polls show him within 4%. A week and a half ago, I thought he’d take West Virginia, but that seems to have returned to and solidified for McCain. On the other hand, a week and a half ago, I wouldn’t have guessed that Georgia, North Dakota, Montana and Arizona would be in play.

McCain supporters certainly have the ability to prove the folly of my assumption by getting out there and voting. Similarly, Obama supporters also have that ability by staying home.

So, do you civic duty. Go Vote. And, perhaps more importantly, Stay The Frack In Line even it takes all day and the official closing time passes you by. If you get into line before the polls close, you WILL be allowed to vote.

What’s your prediction?

I’m not accustomed to just posting links, but this article speaks for itself and I hope a couple hundred million Americans read it before November.

The Politics of Lying

One of the unavoidable downsides of working as a political speechwriter is meeting some smart aleck who says, “so you write all those lies that politicians say.” Between clenched teeth, my usual response is: “I’ve never written a lie in my life.” It’s true: not only for reasons of personal morality, but because no politician I’ve ever met wants to be caught telling a lie.

Sure politicians occasionally stretch the truth or exaggerate, but willful and conscious lying is something else, which makes the stream of fabrications from the [ed.: read the article] campaign over the last week that much more shocking.

It boggles my mind that anyone actually believes a word that comes out of McCain or Palin’s mouth at this point. McCain was for the environment before he was against it. He was opposed to Jerry Falwell before he prostrated himself at Falwell’s Liberty University. He was one of the troops before he was against them. He was against the Bush tax cuts before he was for them. He was for ‘experience’ before he picked Palin. He was for the wrong war before he was for the wrong war. Oh wait, he didn’t flip-flop on that one, he was just plain wrong.

He doesn’t know how many houses he owns. He doesn’t know anything about economics let alone the economy. He was against government earmarks before he picked the earmark happy governor of the most earmark dependent state to be his VP candidate.

And lo and behold, his flip-floppery is contagious. Now Palin says that she is a crusader against the very earmarks that she championed, such as the Bridge to Nowhere. There are so many negative things to point out about Palin, but really, there’s only one that matters: McCain showed the judgement he would use in the Oval Office. He picked someone who eliminates the one argument he actually made traction with: experience. He picked someone to cynically appeal to conservative Hillary backers and/or to pander to the religious right (who, for some reason, forgive both her inability to make abstinence-only education work with her own children and her willingness to let her pregnant teenage daughter make her own decision about continuing her pregnancy). McCain’s experience led him to pick the governor for the past 21 months of the 47th largest state and former mayor of a town of 7000 to be first in line behind McCain who is three years older than the oldest President of the United States.

I just don’t get it. How can anybody support McCain? Sure, he was a “Maverick” before the Rove smear campaign beat him to a bloody pulp in 2000 (btw, I liked him pre-2001). But McCain has remade himself into a pro-Oil, pro-rich, pro-life, pro-war, anti-environment, anti-choice, anti-middle class W-clone in the eight years since then.

I just don’t get it.

Thanks to M. Breez for pointing out a bug in the site. The main page and using the “images from previous week” links should now display seven days of images every time. It was limited to the most recent 14 images which trimmed off an image for 15 picture weeks and displayed less than half of the images for those crazy 30 image weeks back in 2000 (April 5th if that relative link doesn’t jump you back far enough). And if you’re browsing back really far through the archives, you shouldn’t ever receive the same results for previous week searches. You may wonder how that could have happened, so I’ll tell you. If the “images from previous week” search finds no pictures, it checks the prior week for up to 28 days in total. The link was only changing by 7 days even if the search went back 14, 21 or 28 days. So, you could get the same results up to four consecutive times. Now, if the search goes back 28 days, the link will go back 28 days too.

Please let me know if think you find a new bug in this.

Ryan

This morning’s announcement missed one of today’s pictures. I suspect the database backup may have been running at the time, but I’m not certain. The unannounced picture has been up all day. I re-ran the announcements after I got home from work.

DreamHost Status » Blog Archive » Planned network outage July 11

On July 11, 2008 starting at 10pm we will have a brief network outage to restructure our routing tables. We are planning two hours to deal with any quirks that may come up, however our Cisco network engineer estimates the total downtime to be under 30 minutes.

Netflix: Requests and Suggestions

Hey,

My wife and I share a queue and we frequently have problems where we’ll get three of my movies at home and none of hers. It can really gum up our queue. Sometimes, I have to send one or more of the movies back and put it BACK INTO OUR QUEUE for another chance to watch it. Other times, when we’re trying to catch up on TV series, we’ll end up receiving the discs out of order (blame the USPS) when we’d really rather have our next movie arrive in lieu of having two discs from the TV show at the same time.

It would be really great if you provided a way for us to have separate queues. That way, we’d always be assured of having something to watch when one of us is out of town, and we’d never get frustrated by looking at Disc 4 when Disc 3 is still en route.

Oh, and related to this, when you combine my love of serious anime like Akira and Princess Mononoke with my wife’s love of Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell comedies, you end up making horrible movie recommendations which neither of us like, such as Pokemon and Paddington Bear. I really think you’d give us better recommendations if you tracked us separately.

I’m really hope that you implement this. It would eliminate all of the frustrations which we currently have with Netflix and keep us from switching to Amazon Unbox, Comcast PPV, or iTunes movie store.

Thanks for your consideration,

Ryan

MacDesktops is 10 years old today. In 1998, I bought a new 20″ monitor. It was huge. It had a massive 1280×1024 resolution. I searched the web high and low for desktop pictures to fit it, but nobody provided pictures that huge. So, I generated a few desktops and shared them. I was pleasantly surprised that the site generated a couple thousand hits that month, and a few more in May. By June though, interest was trailing off. So, I decided to start posting new pictures weekly. Eventually, weekly became daily. MacDesktops joined MacNN for a couple of years. MacNN’s servers crashed and MacDesktops went offline for a few months. I unhitched from MacNN and relaunched the site independently where it has stayed ever since and weathered two more extended downtimes due to server outages.

In 1998, you’ll notice several Power Computing desktops, as Apple was ending its clone phase. Apple was fighting for survival with market share dwindling below 3%. MacDesktops’ pro-Mac pictures helped bolster the confidence of Mac users under siege. Apple’s combative advertising compared Intel processors to snails and lit the Intel “Bunny Suits” on fire. Apple encouraged everyone to Think Different by buying a Mac. Then came the iPod and iMac, each of which increased Apple’s standing and decreased pressure on Mac users everywhere. Apple had some great advertising campaigns when they returned to Chiat-Day, and they have produced some terrific products since 1998. When the two have converged, MacDesktops has benefitted from the excitement and buzz with tremendous submissions of Apple product desktops.

In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq under false pretenses and I took a subtle stance here. This pissed off some people and encouraged others. When I posted Movie picture #146, I pissed off some more people. Such is life. I put a lot of effort into building this little soap box and there are times when I must stand on it and speak rationally to whomever will pause and listen.

During these past ten years, my own interest in the site has waxed and waned several times. Sometimes generating and posting pictures is a joy. At other times, it is a burden. I felt bad for contributors when the submission queue was 8-12 months long. And I feel worried now when it is less than 2 months. I rely more and more upon consistent contributors to fill up the queue when I would like to provide a wider variety of content. My huge 1280×1024 monitor from 1998 is now tiny. Creating original artwork for 30″ Cinema Displays takes more effort than making something for a 15″ monitor. In 1998, digital cameras were expensive while capturing low resolution images. Today, most of the desktops come from inexpensive, high resolution digital cameras.

How has your Mac experience changed over these past ten years?

By request, I upgraded Television, and University and College Campuses from searchable keywords to categories. Of course, the real intent of the request was for more submissions in those categories, as well as more Family Guy, more Cars/Autos, more Logos, more Music, more Humor, and more Multiple Monitor Sets.