Foundation

So Firefox has been acting up on me more and more lately. Weird slowdowns and stutters. I’d been suspecting Firefox 3.5 in general to be at fault, but just this morning it finally hit me what the pattern of slowdowns indicated: It was choking on the history.

Realizing that, I immediately dropped my history size from 90 days to 30, and it’s working well now. If you get weird, annoying slowdowns and stutters, do that.

It came to my attention in Atlanta that some people might be curious about what it looks like to work on RedState. There’s no magical server room, or at least, none that’s anywhere near me. That’s with some third party company in Texas, while Eagle’s people are in DC and I’m in California.

But that does leave the matter of my workstation. I don’t know if penguin2 is the only one who’s curious or not, but here it is. Click for full size picture, and there’s a legend below the fold.

1. Sennheiser EH 150 headphones. Padded and useful for watching television/listening to music from computer/playing games for extended periods over the sound of the air conditioner to my left.
2. Wii Sports Resort for the Wii and Makai Kingdom for the Playstation 2. The former’s in my Wii and the latter’s in my Playstation 3
3. Wii Remote with Classic Controller and Motion Plus
4. Universal remote (controling 4 devices), plus AC remote
5. External hard drive (from my old G5, now used for Time Machine) with card readers
6. Samsung 192N 19″, 1280×1024 LCD display. Unused since replacing my G5 with the iMac)
7. 20″ iMac. Dual core, 4GB RAM.
8. Kinesis Freestyle keyboard. Mac model
9. Playstation 3 controller.
10. Etymotic Research ER 4P headphones in case.
11. Casio DB-35H watch
12. Notes for a poker experiment I made, and have since discarded
13. Kensington Orbit Optical trackball
14. Wacom Graphire 2 4×5 tablet
15. GameScience dice. 5d6 red. 3d6 blue.
16. Samsung 912N 19″, 1280×1024 LCD display. No, the 912 and 192 aren’t typos.
17. Americans for Prosperity notebook
18. Receipt for Lucky Star Volume 6 from Amazon
19. IRS paperwork nonsense
20. Logitech headset. El Cheapo I bought when my last El Cheapo fell apart after an hour long conference.
21. Safeword for Checkpoint widget. Used to get into VRWC computer network.
22. Kinesis keypad. Mac model.

Sorry if this punctures any bubbles. It’s not entirely enough like a Bond villain’s lab. I do plan to buy a new desk (well, an actual desk and not a table) next month or so, though. Not sure how much that’ll help though. I’ll have to rely on the blamstick to get by now that the aura’s gone.

You have a nice city, but you don’t need to name every street Peachtree.

Leon Wolf has already taken down the birthers by showing the negative political consequences of pushing the vast, bipartisan* conspiracy theory, and of course point by point takedowns of the theories themselves have been published, but today NRO has a good summary up.

All at once, the Editors (of NRO or National Review, I don’t know which) take down every aspect of the whole birther movement. It’s a good read.

I already know the answer the truthers birthers are going to give, though. “No, a Certificate of Live Birth is not a Birth Certificate,” they say. Except, well, Hawaii’s Vital Record office uses the terms interchangeably. What is different, however, is the Certificate of Hawaiian Birth. That was a pre-statehood program to get people registered who had been born without getting a birth certificate. People in that position I assume primarily were natives. In any case, a) the program was terminated when Hawaii was granted statehood, and b) the certificate presented by the Obama campaign clearly states Live Birth, not Hawaiian Birth.

Other objections are handled by the article well, I believe, and are complete with historical precedent. It’s worth a read.

Mainstream Republican and conservative activists must push out the birthers to the fringe, where they belong, lest our whole movement become as deranged as the Netroots became over 9/11 conspiracies. I thank NRO for their help in this, reprising the role NR played in attacking another famous fringe, the John Birch Society.

* Linda Lingle, being a Republican and Governor of Hawaii, would surely have to be involved in any conspiracy to forge a Hawaiian birth for Barack Obama.

Sean Parnell has been sworn in as the new Governor of Alaska. Good luck, Governor Parnell.

I think more eyes are on former Governor Sarah Palin though. In her farewell address she said what so many have been thinking: that she sees private life as an opportunity to do more for her causes than she could as Governor.

I wish her and her family luck as they move on to the next stage of her career, away from running for office and toward a different kind of activism. She can write columns, make speeches, raise money, travel the country, and get cheers instead of ethics complaints. She can be herself without being second guessed, and most importantly without having her children under constant attack. She can be a perpetual ‘rock star’ without any of the disadvantages that come with appearing on a ballot ever again.

I hope she’s a great help to Republican candidates in 2010 and beyond, with peace and comfort to her family as she does so.

Good stuff. Going to kill my arms all over again.

The sword fighting works very well. The three point contest is great. Bowling’s harder and more responsive. The frisbee’s going to be tough but interesting.

That’s all I’ve tried so far, my arms are worn out, between getting spin on the bowling ball and draining bonus balls in the three point contest.

Obama is fighting California’s union-bought Democrats over teacher standards in this state. Big Government’s getting ready to slaughter a left-wing cow.

Pass the popcorn.

Barbara Boxer might have a reason to feel touchy about her title of Senator, it seems. Not only is she facing a determined, conservative challenger in Chuck DeVore, but even her own caucusmates don’t think she’s equipped for the job.

In short, they think she’ll botch any job she’s given the responsibility for, so they’re taking responsibilities away from her.

Says Politico:

In private conversations, Senate staffers say that Boxer’s abrasive personal style helped tank the climate bill that Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and former Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) sponsored last year. And several recent embarrassing episodes involving the California Democrat have them worried about a repeat performance.

….This time around, Democratic leaders have spread Boxer’s workload among six committee chairmen.

“I don’t think anyone is going to let her take the ball this year,” said one staffer at an environmental group. “Not after last year.”

Politico may be relying on anonymous sources, but the roles of committees in the production of bills are a matter of public record. Boxer simply isn’t trusted by Democrats, nor should she be by Californians. She’s just not up to the task, and it’s time to vote accordingly.

Let’s help Chuck DeVore chuck Boxer out of a job she can’t handle.

Sage, the original RSS reader for Firefox, died. Sage-Too replaced it. Now Sage-Too is dead. Fortunately one of its developers is making his own version called Sage++.

Thank you and good luck Higmmer. I was getting close to doing my own fork. Now I don’t have to.

So my brother got the DVD and was watching it. I made a few obligatory Star Wars jokes. I had seen a trailer for the DVD when I saw Star Trek. I assumed it was going to be a particular kind of movie, very frustrating and aggravating. So I intended to keep making Star Wars jokes until the movie got frustrating and then I’d just leave.

It didn’t get that way. At all. It was a fun movie. Some of the best revenge I’ve ever seen in a movie. It’s not a great movie, but it’s quite fun and definitely a release.

It’s not needlessly graphic, in my view. It’s not shocking for its own sake. It’s just a father getting the bad guys.

I recommend it.