Disorderly Content

If any of your McCainiac friends try to convince you that Joe Biden's misstatements are a big deal, point 'em at this:

Geeze, that's gotta hurt...

I went down to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters at lunch today and cast my ballot. Why wait until the last minute, especially when the day job might call me out of town unexpectedly? So I was feeling satisfied about my participation in the process when I read this post in the Huffington Post. Read it, and tell me if it doesn't suddenly get dusty in the room.

A few weeks ago I let AT&T talk me into dumping my perfectly serviceable Earthlink DSL for theirs. Sure, it was cheaper. And sure, it was supposed to be faster. But why take chances?

At least that should have been my reasoning. But noooooo... So I let them sell it to me, and I got my new modem/router and got it all installed. And it was good. Except it wasn't. It was only marginally faster. And most of the time it was a lot slower. Not the data transfers, mind, but the DNS service. It took absolutely forever for it to identify certain hosts. And using a different DNS server didn't help at all. So I regretted my decision to change providers, and wondered when I'd find the time to call AT&T support and start bugging them to figure out what the hell's going on.

Anyway, today I tried to update the software in the modem/router. And once again it refused. So I though to myself, self, I thought, maybe it doesn't like upgrading from Safari. So I tried it with Firefox, and got the same result. But then a weird thing happened. For no reason I can determine, it stopped sucking. Suddenly my DNS lookups are fast. And they don't fail. And it actually feels faster than what I had before. Suddenly I don't hate AT&T nearly as much as I did before. So this is what being a satisfied customer feels like...

It's twoo, it's twoo, the Republicans were right all along! And not a small fry either, as The Los Angeles Times reports.

What a pity he wasn't committing fraud for the Democrats...

Update 10/20: The RNC had to cancel a press conference about voter fraud in New Mexico after ACORN was able to show that the 28 supposedly fraudulent voters were in fact nothing of the kind. (Thanks to TMP Muckraker for the story.) Obviously somebody at the RNC failed to get the memo from the California Repubs: the only way to be sure there's fraud is to pay for it yourself!

I had a pretty loud disagreement with a couple of my coworkers after the first Presidential debate. The subject was Barack Obama's performance, and whether he was tough enough on John McCain. They argued that it was foolish in a debate to agree with your opponent, that you never, ever give any ground. I wasn't so sure. No, I lie; I thought they were dead wrong. By agreeing before he stated his points of disagreement, Obama was showing a willingness to find common ground. It was, and here's a word I haven't heard in a while, statesmanlike.

But it was also more. It was, as Marlene H. Phillips' article in The Huffington Post suggests, what is required of a black man who would be accepted in a (mostly) white world. She compares Obama to Jackie Robinson, and points out that it wasn't just Robinson's skill and drive as a baseball player that permitted him to break the color barrier; it was also his dignity in the face of the hostility and abuse that would accompany his notoriety. It was essential that Jackie Robinson be better, calmer, more serene, more dignified than white players to be acceptable to a white audience. And it is just as essential for Barack Obama to be accepted and approved of as President by a largely white electorate, both during the campaign and, as looks increasingly likely, after he takes office. It's not remotely fair, but it's necessary. I'm just pleased to see that he's up for the challenge.

If Richard Nixon was defeated by the advent of television debates back in 1960, we may remember the 2008 election as the advent of YouTube. Case in point, some of John McCain's greatest hits from last night:

YouTube: the gift that keeps on giving...

How can I argue with Hayden Panettiere? She's adorable, and she supports John McCain.

Okay, maybe only one of those is true...

This is so cool! By using a tilt-shift lens, a photographer in Sydney is able to make movies that look like they're tiny little models, rather than real people in real situations. Watch:

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo, spotted on Boing Boing.

What does it say about me that on hearing that a real jerk has died, I still think he was a jerk?

Back when I first started submitting photos to microstock agencies, there was a guy on one agency's forum who did everything he could to dominate the conversation. He made it all about him, whether by his comments or his turning the conversation to something he cared about or by a series of "who gives a damn?" remarks. Eventually he was banned, although I thought it showed extraordinary patience on the part of the guys in charge that it took so long.

That was a couple of years ago. Now I see a thread announcing that he's gone. There's a whole series of testimonials to his skills and to his willingness to teach. What nobody's saying is that he was a prick and a total pain in the ass, and that he damn near killed our online community with his assholiness.

So I'll say it here. Look, I'm sorry he died; I don't wish that even on online bullies. (Spammers, yes, and preferably slowly and painfully.) But I won't pretend that I liked him or respected him or thought he was anything but an irritant. He doesn't become a better person by dying. And neither, I accept, will I, when my time comes.

I'm typing this from a San Francisco-bound 767, now at cruising altitude. Which I grant isn't a big deal, until I tell you that I'm typing into an emacs window on my web server, which isn't here with me. It's that onboard WiFi we've heard a lot about but which most of us have never experienced. Except I can't say that any more; I'm one of the few, the proud...