Entries in Life

I’ve been playing with Epiphany for a little over a month now and just now tracked down an annoyance: Epiphany doesn’t work with traditional X11 Cut-n-Paste.

For those of you not steeped in the traditions of X-Windows, an explanation. When you highlight text in X, it is automatically copied to the clipboard. Clicking the middle mouse button (or both buttons if you only have two buttons) should paste the text. This is quite handy since it means you can do cut-n-paste without letting go of the mouse.

Seems like this is a pervasive problem with Gnome. I would guess that this is what comes from developing your own toolkit from scratch — you annoy the purists.

Someone who uses nnrss asked for OPML import and export of subscriptions so that he can move his RSS reading into Gnus.

I think I’ve got it working, but there’s a problem: I can’t find the specs documented anywhere. Sure, the OPML format is (minimally) documented, but I don’t know what attributes other people use or look for. So, for now, I spit out text and xmlUrl which seems to be what Radio uses. Oh, but wait. There’s a problem with case-sensitivity among other things. Hurrah! I love standards and “xml”.

I just set up ClarkAlumni.com and noticed that dcm had practically filled up the page. Time to fix that.

In other news: I bought one of the old campaign laptops for Alexis. It took a bit to figure out the hardware (I love that part of Linux), but now she has a laptop where the only non-free (as in freedom) piece of software is the Flash plugin. She’s been using OpenOffice to write. (FlashNav: if you read this, I hope you didn’t use this laptop for any impure activity.)

“They will appreciate their butter, dammit!” — Alexis while shaking the cream.

Alexis and the kids love reading the Laura Ingalls-Wilder stories. They eat, sleep and breath it. At least the eating part is literal. Alexis found out how to make butter, so she’s decided to give it a try with some heavy cream. The kids shook it, sliding the jar back and forth between each other. Then they shook it some more. Still no butter.

We just read that website where it talks about “souring the cream” and using the right temperature. They’d been using fresh, chilled cream.

I remember that my mother made great butter to go with her home-made bread when we lived in Indiana. It was great. But she did it in about five minutes using a blender.

We don’t have a blender, so it looks like we’re gonna be here a while.

Just in case you wanted to see what a junk house looks like…

Besides introducing other Clark staffers to Yatta (and capturing their stunned amazement for you here), I’ve been doing some more “Visibility” for the campaign. Evidently, the more “visible” our signs are, the more likely some people are to vote for us. Whatever. It’s better than cold-calling people and asking them to vote for Clark

So, we stood at the intersection of two rural highways today holding huge signs and getting people to “Honk for Clark”. Many people gave us secret signs — a finger or three extended in our general direction. One SUV driver even managed to get her children to signal us with their three-fingered salute. Must’ve been “W”es Clark supporters.

If nothing else, I’ve lost a lot of my cynicism about the role of cash in a presidential primary. Dean was able to raise $700,000 in a single day, while Clark is struggling to do it in a week’s time. And we’re placing ahead of him in the polls and the recent primaries.

And then I look at how Kerry, Edwards, and Clark are viewed by the media (and how the public seems to reflect this in their voting) and I get sick. The cynicism has returned, but it’s in a different place.

The DNC has made a concerted effort to shorten the primary season so that the democratic candidate can raise more money. This short-circuiting of the primary process can’t really help. It will provide an opening for disaffected liberals to desert the party and support Dean when he goes third-party or Nadar’s re-appearance.

Being a registered voter in a “late primary” state, I’ve a feeling that I’ll really see my interest in voting wane as the vote would serve only to endorse or register dissent against the front runner.

Of course, a lot of people are much more pragmatic than myself when it comes to voting. They’re willing to vote for a candidate they dislike simply because they find the other repulsive. Many of these same people will turn around and claim that I must vote since voting is the cornerstone of democracy. Obviously, its hard for me to vote for something that I don’t believe in, so when people argue that I should vote simply because we live in a democracy, it grates me the wrong way. Abstaining is a way of expressing yourself in a democracy.

This week, I’m in Tennessee with other people from the Clark tech team. This morning, we did “visability” at a Kerry rally. I had fun convincing the Kerry supporters that we weren’t all just Clinton supporters.

It started snowing last night and this morning it began to stick. That alone made this trip worth it. It only got better when a CNN reporter decided to do a live feed outside the Kerry rally — but not about the rally. She was talking about the “thing of the week” — Janet Jackson’s breast exposure at the Superbowl. So we had fun waving Clark signs behind the woman as she talked. Till the Kerry supporters noticed. Then Anita Bailey, a Kerry staffer, shoved her way through our line. dcm took a hit for the team.

If it wasn’t clear enough when McDermott executives talked about moving their IT center to Dubai then it has become clear while working with a bunch of Democrats (a fair number of whom are protectionists), listening to the occasional bit about IT jobs leaving for India on CNN (which is always on at work, but usually muted), and reading articles in Wired. I’m going to have to get creative over the next couple of years in order to continue to make a living.

I’ve not yet decided just what I’ll be doing, but I’m sure that it’ll involve something more creative than just baby-sitting other people’s infrastructure.

Former Red-Hatter dcm has published pictures that he took of our co-workers and myself. You’ll notice a number of un-shaven men. This isn’t their normal state.

A few weekends ago, just before Fred left us, we were eating at Vino’s when the beard meme started. “Rally Beards”, we called them. Our own superstitious effort to boost Clark’s chances at getting the Democratic nomination.

Now, we’ve had exactly one caucus and one primary and the focus has shifted from Dean as the front-runner to virtual nominee Kerry. Shaving looks like it is in many of these guys future. The number of people who’ve actually voted is approximately equal to the number of people at the Super Bowl in Houston, but somehow the match has already been decided and everyone assumes that Kerry and Bush will face off this November (with Bush winning, of course).

Perhaps if more Democrats and the media thought there was a real chance that Bush wouldn’t be re-elected, then things wouldn’t feel as if they were already decided.

Of course, I’m influenced by what I read in the paper, hear on the radio, or see on the Internet. And because of that same influence, a few weeks ago, I thought the race was between Dean and Clark. There is still plenty of time for the published wisdom to be proven wrong — and I hope that it is.