Return To The Center

Will Matt, Meredith, and Al Sit Down & Shut the Fuck Up?

The war president I help elect has gathered his staff and his generals and sent them out to sell our country's latest tragedy to us: 30,000 more of our children will be sent to the graveyard of empires for a no win, no exit strategy, no plan expedition.  They've even enlisted the aid of the "50 Ways to Cook Your Holiday Turkey!" crowd of the Today show, Matt Lauer, Meredith Viera and Al Roker to market Barack's "thoughtful approach to the crisis in Afghanistan."

Yesterday, while eating my fake eggs and swilling French-roast at my kitchen table, I watched as softball questions were tossed to Secretary Gates.  No followup, no probing, no challenge, no nuttin. Then there was the truly vomit-inducing scene of Matt getting all erect over an Army MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicle.  Matt showed us the keen way the bottom was shaped to direct the blasts outward from the vehicle.  He gushed that the windows were "this thick!", indicating about three inches with his well manicured fingers.

What none of them said of course is that we shouldn't be in Afghanistan at all. Period.  They didn't even raise it as a possibility.  War is a given.  Their job is to socialize the notion of perpetual war to the nation.  Of course, they can't come right out and say that because their parent company is G.E. whose Ecoimagineers make a pant load from mil-spec aircraft engines etc.  Wouldn't it be just a bit of bloom off that earth-friendly flower to link their interest in war profits to "bringing good things to life?"

Oh yes - one other thing friendly, handsome Matt forgot to mention about the studly MRAPS: While they certainly have saved lives, they also crush spines and cause blunt force trauma head injuries.  These injuries stem from when the explosions lift the vehicle into the air and it gets slammed back down to earth (as a 16 ton item is wont to do). Human bodies contained in these "cool-o" machines don't do well while they're being tossed around.  Matt didn't mention that spinal cord injuries were way way up for troops in both of Barack's wars.  Why would he do that though? That would be such a buzz-kill.

My point is this.  We shouldn't be in Afghanistan.  We are wasting our children's lives and our national treasure in an unwinnable situation.  The government must be harassed on all sides to account for itself.  The press used to help do that.  If they can no longer do that then I dearly wish that they would cease and desist from puff pieces.  We could start with the Today show sticking to what they do best, rehashing mindless banalities like "The new trend in socks with toes, rainbow patterns!!" 

Please don't take this the wrong way Matt, Meredith, and Al, but when it comes to Barack's wars,  sit down and shut the fuck up.

Scribefire and Zemanta Win!! Prestigious RTTC Sneaky Bastids Award!

Hey kids, here's some exciting news from the world of Ubuntu blogging!

This morning I was inserting some blockquote tags into yesterday's post by hand in Scribefire because SF doesn't have that feature. I noticed the following at the bottom of the post I had done last night.  (I had to remove the LT/GT chars from the HTML to show you here.. Scribefire does not distinguish between HTML typed into the HTML view window and the rich text editor window - niiiiice!)

div class="zemanta-pixie" img class="zemanta-pixie-img" alt="" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=31f6976b-00ba-8d08-9b5f-b47a0a4fc0dd" / /div

Evidently Scribefire and Zamanta think it's a swell idea to implant tracking elements in blogposts by default with no notification whatsoever.  There is a switch in the Publishing settings dialog to turn this off, but still....

Blogjet didn't do this...

Neither did Qumana, the other blogging tool I had a brief relationship with on Windows..

So - my hat is off to Scribefire and Zemanta, the winner of this week's RTTC Sneaky Bastids Award!  Congratulations to you both.  I won't be using your tool much longer. Good luck in your quest to 'monetize.'


 

Compulsory Happiness

"The admonition to be happy, voiced in concert by the... sanatorium director and the... propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his child for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office.  It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a direct line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain." 

- Theodor Adorno, German Philosopher - 1951

Fill up the Accord at the Blue Canoe in Wakefield and it's "Little Drummer Boy" on busted tinny outdoor speakers.  Christmas lights are springing up everywhere.  Fake snowflakes abound. The sound of sleigh bells infects seasonal commercials.  I hear sleigh bells in my sleep.  Women with snowman sweaters slam down aisles at Costco.  Toddlers are being dressed in red outfits.  Almost every business establishment I go to, I am advised (admonished?) to "Have a happy holiday!" 

What evs.

I've always resented the compulsory nature of "holiday" happiness.  Smile or else. Be cheerful or else. Laugh or else.  It was such a breath of fresh air to run into Mr Adorno's quote in the Sun Magazine this month (one can find it all over the web as well).  He puts his finger right on the button.   Culturally mandated happiness helps to paper over not only the suffering all around us, but life itself in all its monstrous beauty. 

This year as our president gets ready to send 34,000 more of our children into the meat grinder to "Finish the job" (apt choice of words that - one wonders what job will be finished), the marketing of cheerfulness, and snowmen, and reindeer, and tinsel, and drummer boys, and all the products you just have to have if you're going to be happy during "the holidays" strikes a deeply discordant note.  

they must hear a clanking sound when they sit down...

What does it take to sell instant coffee for a dollar a cup?

Give up?

Here’s what it takes brothers and sisters. 

 

Nothing says school and playground ornament like a m60 main battle tank..

I suppose it’s good to get children used to war paraphernalia as soon as possible..

Hoo – Ahh!!

It looks like Mr Obama is on the verge of sending 34,000 more kids to Stanley “let’s fast-track the fraudulent account of Pat Tillman” McChrystal’s shining moment in Afghanistan limelight.  Such a tragedy, and one brought on merely for the purposes of reelections in 2010 and beyond, because it will matter not a whit in deflecting the arc of the war..  Democrats have to look manly..have to look ToughOnTerror, have to FightThemOverThereSoWeDon’tHaveToFightThemOverHere...

Iraq War:

American Dead 5,359
Coalition Dead 325
Contractor Employee Dead 1,395
Journalists Dead 335
Academics Dead 431
Iraq Dead 1,339,771

Afghanistan War:

American Dead 916
Coalition Dead 597

$929,557,360,985

 

Democrats.org emails - worse than deer ticks..

Right after Barack got elected, I got an email asking for more donations.  Huh?  Weren’t they already elected?  Didn’t they already extract hundreds of millions of dollars from people? 

Looking back on the last year, I wonder what they would have used the additional dough for anyway.. Gardening tools?  Dog obedience classes?  More dinners and coffee socials with the Republican leadership?  Support groups for Banking Execs stung by the public reaction to their bungling and mendacity? Certainly they would not have used it for moving the country forward…

Over the weeks and months since the election, I was able to unsubscribe from that mailing list as well as others that were asking for money for the President and his party of sandbags, doorstops, and paperweights.

The Democrats.org mailings however have been a more virulent and hardy strain of annoyance.  Today when I got their chirpy little note about “Health Care Reform”, you know – the bill currently referred to as “a long and loving blowjob to the insurance industry”, I’d had enough.  I clicked on the unsubscribe link which brought me to a web site that asked me for my email address and the reason I was unsubscribing. I entered both.  Pressed submit. 

I got another screen.

This one – claiming to be about protecting my account (please), said that Democrats.org had mailed me an email with a 4 character code in it and I had to enter the code into a little box on the webpage and then click submit again.

I waited and then refreshed my inbox.

There it was.. an email that promised to hold the 4–character key to my never seeing another email from the party of Big Industry and Big War.  With fingers trembling from excitement, I opened the note to find:

It was empty.

Blank.

Devoid of 4 character codes.

Unhelpful as the Democrats have been since sweeping into power.

I tried this again with the same results.

I’ll handle this on my end with a mail rule..

 

Buh. Bye.

Third time is the charm.  Editting multiple files earlier this morning (with the printer on…) and KEE-RASSSHHHH!! 

Time to bid a fond adieu to PSE 8.0. 

Onward to GIMP and the wild world of open source image editors. 

 

Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.0 - Feel the love

Dear Adobe,

PSE 8.0 isn’t ready for prime time.

Over the last 3 days, it’s crashed twice while I was in the middle of editing images.  Like a fool, I didn’t save every file every three seconds as is probably warranted with 8.0, so I’ll take some of the blame for aggravation and lost time.  Nonetheless, sharing the blame with you didn’t prevent me from making this face when your ‘product’ crashed most recently.

I used the Google, searched for “PSE 8.0 Crash Win XP” and came upon the Adobe forums.  My favorite quote to date:

“Unfortunately, there are many reasons why the PSE Editor might crash, and often it is hard to diagnose quickly the reason for the crash.”

My favorite reason for your ‘product’ crashing?  You know what it is.  C’mon be honest, it’s probably your favorite too.  It’s the “editing multiple files while the printer is off crash” of course! 

You’re kidding me right? Not to sound like an old curmudgeon or anything, but PSE 5.0 was a frakking rock. A rock..

This is release 8.0 of this program and to date it runs like Alpha software.

Oh yes – the other thing I love is the helpful dialog you put up asking for a detailed account of what I was doing when your ‘product’ went down.  Please.  If I can crash this program doing the simple tasks I am doing, you don’t need a neato-keen ‘symptom-collection-dialog-box-so-our-developers-can-diagnose-your-problem”.  No.  You know what you need?  You need to keep the release in-house, test the frakking thing, fix the frakking bugs, rinse and repeat until it is ready.  

It’s quite simple really.. give it a try.

Best,

 – roy.

 

This confuses me.

 

Thank you PhotoShop Elements 8.0! May I have another?

A couple days ago I upgraded to Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.0, probably didn’t *really* need to – but there you have it – the grasping acquisitive mind at work.

I was working on an image earlier this evening and applied the Old Photo layer to it.  I didn’t like how it looked so I wanted to remove it.  At the bottom of the Effects tray is a trash can.  It is marked below with a red arrow and the word EVIL next to it.

Since there are some new (read ‘annoying’) UI thingamabobs, I thought to myself “Oh I’ll just delete that effect by pressing the trash can. 

The EVIL trash can button DELETES THE EFFECT ITSELF – NEVER TO BE SEEN OR HEARD FROM AGAIN – UNLESS YOU RE-INSTALL THE MOTHERFRAKKNG ‘PRODUCT’…

Sigh.

All I want to do is make my images look a little better.   I don’t want to have to re-install this pig of a product just because I pushed the wrong button.

I’m sure that some incredibly smart Adobe Architect or Adobe User Experience person could ‘splain the reason why they made it so FRAKKING EASY TO DELETE PARTS OF THE PROGRAM!!!  What I’m not so sure of is whether I’d agree with them. 

One of the ‘remedies’ I’ve seen on the internets is to delete the media database file in one of PSE’s directories.  Upon startup, rumor had it,  the ‘product’ would rebuild it’s complete set of effects including the one that had been deleted.  After backing up the old file, I tried that approach and failed.  Oh, it’s true, the ‘Old Photo’ effect icon came back ok.  It even has a purty blue diagonal band on it..  but when you select it now – you are brought to a sign in dialog box to go to you Adobe Account – ostensibly so that you CAN BUY THE EFFECT FROM ADOBE!

Where is my twin brother Lewis Black when I need him?