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In spite of how irksome I find "oh hai i upgrayded!" posts, I'm about to be guilty of same.

I upgraded my Optiplex GX620 from Gutsy to Hardy yesterday afternoon and it seemed to go as smoothly as it did on my HP box at home.  All looked a-okay this morning until, upon returning from a meeting, my display was all funky and jerky and laggy.  The right edges of my windows were uniformly screwy — I would have to click about an inch to the left of whatever I wanted to click on — and the right and left edges of the screen caused visual trails when I dragged windows around.  (And this has nothing to do with my usual breakfast of bacon and psychedelics.)  This wasn't the first time I've run into problems with compiz/beryl and Ubuntu and so I was hopeful that things could be easily remedied.

I was still able to get around a bit and I found a Hardy installation guide that fixed me all up (I hope).

I should probably note that the Optiplex in question has an ATI Radeon X600 series video card.

Pining for the visual trails,

Mike from Arlington

P.S. Ubuntu, I still ♥ you.

Guess who is finally on Twitter?

That I very nearly called this post "Southern comfort" reveals me as a long-time yankee from the urban northeast.  No, I suppose Arlington, Virginia isn't quite the south — certainly not culturally — but you can see why I'd say so if you consider that I once thought any place south of 195 may as well have been Deliverance country.  Ah, the old provincialisms.  And to further deconstruct this ridiculous metaphor, my entire apartment is probably smaller than a veranda.

But, boy howdy, did I have a relaxing and refreshing day: sitting on the couch with the windows open, reviewing a chapter of a friend's upcoming book, while the wind rustled the blooming saucer magnolia right outside the windows.  It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the pair of mourning doves that have taken up residence on the neighbor's window sill were soaking up the rays, singing their "woo-woo-oo-oo-oo" song on occasion.

Almost any sort of writing is a real chore for me and yet every now and then I commit to writing or editing something or other.  I enjoy it but it does take the sort of concentration that I've found so difficult of late.   I do not regret agreeing to review the chapter in question (on DRM technologies, for the curious), and I feel somewhat validated in my decision after the elements all aligned today and made for a very pleasant time.  (I did not get as much done as I would have liked, but what else is new?  Time management remains a challenging task, especially when the television and the internets are so near. )

I'm beginning to ramble and I don't really have a point.  It was a good day — an entire good weekend in fact — and I felt it worth committing to bits.

… Hey, are those banjos I hear?

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. — Thomas Payne, The American Crisis

Rest in peace, GOP. You had a good run, but in the end, loyalty to a broken system weighed down the time-tested principles of the party that Lincoln built. Now you are grand only in name.

I remain hopeful that the enthusiasm of the Ron Paul Revolutionaries sustains their efforts to transform the Republican party, from the ground up, back to the party of non-interventionism and small government (even while my own energy to stay involved has waned). I do believe there is a place for (small l) libertarian ideals in American political debate and that place is not out along the fringe. And though I am a lifelong progressive, I will continue to play whatever small part I might in nudging the GOP away from neo-conservatism, which I see as a highly dangerous ideology.

It is looking more and more likely that I will have no better option than to vote for Barack Obama (EDIT: or Hillary since she did not bomb in last night's primaries) in the 2008 election. The Democrats are no less the party of American Empire than the Republicans and I am troubled that the only two viable options in our electoral system are both agents of big government and imperialism. I have long supported the Democratic party despite their being a ship of fools, more concerned with the fringe than with the core, despite rampant political correctness, despite turning their backs on the anti-federalist principles upon which they were founded. I won't feel at home among their ranks, but I will very likely be supporting their candidate against the war-mongering John McCain.

Cynicism and idealism are battling within me, and I fear it's only a matter of time before cynicism once again wins the day.

Yes, I'm being dramatic. Maybe I'm overreacting a bit. But damn it, am I bummed.

Oh frabjous day! I noted with great excitement the following post from "Digital Eccentric," Leslie Johnston:

I was initially very excited by the announcement on BoingBoing that The Atlantic had opened its archive. I read the Editor's Note describing the decision. I followed the link to start my exploration.

It's a little misleading. The _site_ is now open to all. They have "Unbound" (web only) content and full issues back to 1995 open. But their other free content seems to be selected material.

Back in 2000, after having survived the terrible and great Y2K (!@#), I read a fascinating article by Alston Chase on the childhood and college experiences of one Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski: the Unabomber. It humanizes him in a way that may have you screaming "darned bleeding-heart apologist, how dare you!" and puts his actions in a context where they actually, gulp, make some sense. This is not to excuse his actions; rather, it is a glimpse into how an otherwise rational and normal (if brilliant) man transformed into a monster:

In the fall of 1958 Theodore Kaczynski, a brilliant but vulnerable boy of sixteen, entered Harvard College. There he encountered a prevailing intellectual atmosphere of anti-technological despair. There, also, he was deceived into subjecting himself to a series of purposely brutalizing psychological experiments — experiments that may have confirmed his still-forming belief in the evil of science. Was the Unabomber born at Harvard?

From "Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber".