The MacDeskBlog

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.

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

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.

I will be upgrading WordPress for http://macdesktops.com/weblog before next week. Previous upgrades have gone smoothly with just some brief cosmetic changes during the upgrade. If anything goes wrong, I’ll rollback and try again later.

I accidentally let the domain expire. When I realized that on Tuesday, I promptly renewed. The corrected DNS took several hours or perhaps overnight to propagate, but it should be fully refreshed by now. If the site still is not working from some of your computers or locations, just give some more time to refresh.

I’m very sorry for the inconvenience,

Ryan

We closed on the house this morning!

We are heading up to the wine country for the weekend to celebrate. It’s time to open up our 2000 Far Niente Cabernet. Mmmmmm

I hope this is the last post in this category … ever.

We are in escrow on the Berkeley house. They removed their contingency on Wednesday of last week. I just signed the paperwork this afternoon. I’m not sure why I haven’t said anything until now. We accepted the bid on January 31st. The downturn on the housing market has made the entire process rather unsatisfying most of the way through. My outlook and perspective is ticking up now that the deal is essentially done. We close next Friday.

The buyers are first-timers, and I’m happy for them. That house was my first one too. I hope that they really enjoy it. They requested that I fix two items based upon their inspection, which we took care of last weekend. I had to go find a replacement rim lock and strike plate for one of the three remaining original doors. Berkeley has two house material salvage companies, one of which (Omega) carries original rim locks and replica strike plates. The rim lock cleaned up nicely, and matched the size of the original. The other item I had to fix was a “mis-wired” lamp, which actually just needed a new light bulb. Of course I checked the switches which the inspector said were “always on”, and they work just fine. Inspectors definitely fall into the Jack of All Trades, Master of None category.

We close next Friday!

I’m liking the sound of that.

We close next Friday.

MacDesktops.com will be offline Sunday morning from approximately 11:15PM PST Saturday night until approximately 4:00AM PST Sunday morning due to a power outage at the primary hosting provider.

See DreamHost Status » Blog Archive » Planned Power Outage for detail if you are interested.