I find it ironic that McCain spent ~2 years moving himself toward Bush’s positions in order to make himself more electable, only to find out when he got there that (a) it still wasn’t enough for the Uber-Republican base, necessitating a choice like Palin to mollify them, and (b) Bush had lost so much popularity that among the rest of the voters, the association was now a liability… leading him to trot out the “maverick” characterization that no longer remotely reflects his position.
Tag: See Also: LiveJournal
Halloween Bust
Halloween this year was a bit of a bust. Katie had made herself up as a vampire, and we’d bought three bags of candy, but I was so exhausted when we got home that I flopped onto the bed for “10 minutes” that turned into an hour and a half. But the entire evening, not a single trick-or-treater knocked on our door. Katie saw groups tromp up and down the stairs right next to us, but they passed us by entirely. She figured there must be some sort of signal you’re supposed to put on your door to say, “We accept trick-or-treaters,” and no one told us. So I figure I’ll just take most of the candy into work on Monday. It’ll go pretty quickly.
NBC 3D
[Tonight] we went up to Anaheim to see a showing of The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was the new 3-D version, and it was at a theater (Cinema City) that looked astonishingly like the Irvine Spectrum theater on the inside (in decor, not layout), but wasn’t an Edwards or Regal theater. We wondered if it had been built or renovated right before the whole industry went through its consolidation phase a few years back.
There were maybe 12-15 people in the theater by the time it started, all adults. Perhaps some high-schoolers at the youngest. Naturally the pre-movie programming was aimed at children. It’s animated, right?
The movie was good, as always. It was the second time we’d seen the 3D version, which works quite well, though there was one problem with the presentation: This theater uses all digital projection, and the resolution isn’t quite as high as it should be. In scenes with high contrast or fast movement, we could see the pixels at the borders.
Editor’s note: I’ve replaced a rather sparse imported tweet with a more thorough bit from my LiveJournal that I wrote a few days later.
Well, that was a wash
I’ve been putting off getting my car washed for several weeks. Over the weekend, I decided I was going to take it to a nearby car wash Monday morning before work. So I did. It was sunny and clear, with a few clouds off to the south that had made for a very nice sunrise earlier this morning.
As I sat there reading, I noticed the sky was getting darker, clouds moving in front of the sun so that I no longer needed my sunglasses. As I got in the car, I realized it had become overcast, and the owner’s remark about “Enjoy this beautiful weather while it lasts” took on an entirely new context.
As I got on the freeway to go to work, I could see rain falling in the distance straight ahead. A few minutes later, I actually saw a bolt of lightning. I don’t think I’ve seen lightning directly in several years. The occasional flashes out of the corner of my eye, sure (and I saw another of those as I pulled off of the exit), but actually seeing the bolt? It’s been a while.
When I got to work, it wasn’t raining, but it was cold and windy. (And here I was in short-sleeved business casual with no jacket.) It clearly had rained, and looked like it might again. Off to the north maybe 1/4 of the sky at most was still blue.
I could swear that when I looked at the weather report yesterday there was no indication of rain.
Mastercard Chase: SDCC Security Snafu
A very long story about the adventures of a credit card at Comic-Con. May be funny someday. Continue reading
It Pours
My desktop computer has been a bit flaky for a few months now. Well, more than that. There’s the problem where it won’t display anything in plain-text mode, but that’s not really a big deal. It was when it stopped running anything higher than 1024×768 that I started getting annoyed.
That turned out, oddly enough, to not be the video card. And not the monitor, since I could display higher resolution from the Windows box perfectly fine. And not my OS, since running a live CD had the same problem.
So I figured it was a motherboard issue. Fine, I’ll upgrade. Eventually. Wait ~4 months, and I’m starting to notice data errors on the hard drive. Great.
You know that old saying about how any project requires at least 3 trips to the hardware store? It applies to computers, too.
I finally got around to looking for a decent mobo/CPU/RAM combo, and a new hard drive. Ordered online. Arrived yesterday. Ran backup last night.
Today I dismantled everything, hampered by the fact that I could not find the box that has all the case components (faceplates so I could remove the ZIP drive which I haven’t used in 3 years, etc.), though I did eventually find the screws. After I installed the motherboard, I started plugging in connectors… only to discover that the power supply didn’t have the right kind of connector.
Off to Fry’s to get a new power supply, after stopping at storage to see if I could find that box with faceplates and stuff. No luck, and power supplies are astonishingly expensive, though I found one that fit my specs and was on sale and had a rebate, so that worked out. (Some of them are 1000-watt monstrosities that cost as much as a cheap computer, and in the words of another customer, “look like they should be in a Chevy.”)
Came back, hooked everything up, moved it back into the bedroom to hook everything up…and couldn’t go into the BIOS to set the boot device. After messing around a bit, determined that the text-mode problem, at least, actually was the monitor. So I’m borrowing Katie’s monitor while I install an actual 64-bit OS. Once it’s at the point where I can let it sit for a while, I’m going to run out to Best Buy for a new monitor. I suspect the resolution problem is different, but at this point I’m no longer inclined to suffer through it.
Still, it’s worth the upgrade (assuming, of course, that everything continues to work once I close up the case), since the old system was single-core, 32-bit, and ran on an IDE drive, and the new system is dual-core, 64-bit, will have more memory, a faster bus, a SATA drive, etc. This should be much faster.
Once it’s done, anyway.
Originally posted at LiveJournal.
YouToons
Re-watched some classic cartoons yesterday. It started when we were talking about Duck Dodgers at breakfast, and wondered when it had been made. That led to an IMDB lookup, which mentioned it was #4 on a list of 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time from 1994, and that had me looking up “One Froggy Evening” to verify that it was in fact the cartoon with the singing, dancing, Michigan J. Frog… and that had a link to the cartoon on YouTube. And YouTube brings up a list of related videos at the end of each clip…
By the time we stopped, we’d also watched “What’s Opera, Doc?” “The Rabbit of Seville” — absolute classics — and a couple of World War II propaganda cartoons featuring Daffy Duck and Donald Duck (the latter in a cartoon based on “Der Fuehrer’s Face”).
At the other end of the spectrum, a week ago I watched 2 DVDs worth of 1967 Filmation cartoons starring various DC super-heroes. I wanted to do a write-up of the Flash, Justice League and Teen Titans cartoons, and figured I might as well watch the whole thing and do a review. They were seriously cheesy. They were played straighter than Super-Friends, but can’t stand up to the Bruce Timm-designed Justice League series.