This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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December 2007
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So Slow

I’m actually at work today. There are very few people here today. I have no meetings today. Well, OK, there was one about half an hour ago, but only two (including me) of the usual six people were there and it took about 30 seconds. I have some email to catch up on, and I’ll do that. And I”m sure I could figure out some other things to work on. I’ll try. But it is a SLOW day. It will probably be a slow week. But for now, it is time for lunch…. uh, if the cafeteria is open. I guess I’ll go check.

Edit: Nope, no cafeteria, although the little coffee thing is open. I got some donuts from there earlier when I first got to work. For lunch, I’m having chips from the vending machine. Woo!

Curmudgeon’s Corner: Stupid Positions for No Reason Whatsoever

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Washington State Primaries and Caucuses
  • Huckabee’s Appeal
  • Hope vs. Bitterness
  • Goodbye Tancredo
  • Republicans on Immigration
  • Huckabee not that Nice?
  • Unpredictable Iowa
  • Happy Holidays (In a Secular Way!)

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Pedia’d

I was just scanning my stats for the first time in awhile and noticed that in terms of visits referred, all of a sudden it isn’t all search engines and the occasional website of someone I know or one of the handful of blogs that have linked to me over the years. No, all of a sudden there is something new. Wikipedia is in the list. All of a sudden the #4 source of visits to my site (behind images.google.com, google.com and search.msn.com) is en.wikipedia.org. That is of course the English Wikipedia site. Lower on the list are the German Wikipedia, the French Wikipedia and the Italian Wikipedia.

What the hell? In any case, looks like a few weeks ago someone added a few links to my site (specifically this page) on a few different Wikipedia pages where it is sort of semi-relevant.

Who knows if it will last, but still kinda cool.

And it wasn’t me who did it… really! :-)

Oops

Missed a day blogging for the first time since May 8th. I suck. Well, I got all of June, July, August, September and October… and most of May and December. But I still suck. I had been doing so well too.

I didn’t think about it in the early part of the day 00-08 UTC when I usually try to do it. Then I slept. Then I thought about it once around 18 or 19 UTC, but I was busy at work. Then I completely forgot about it until about 01 UTC today, but by that time there had been no post on Friday.

Bad Sam.

Oh well.

Short Personal News Items

There are several things worth noting from the last week or so that I haven’t posted about yet, so here is a quick post with a few notes on those things:

  • The visit from my mother, just under four days, was good. We didn’t *do* a huge amount. We basically hung out for a few days. We went to one of Amy’s choral performances. We played a board game my mom brought. We sat around at home and played with the dog. We went out for meals a few times. Unfortunately Brandy had a cold through most of the visit, and I was still recovering from my own maladies (still am) but we managed to have a good time anyway. There are pictures, but they are in my email, so I haven’t done anything with them yet.
  • As soon as my mom left, Amy caught whatever Brandy had over the weekend and missed a couple of days of school. She insisted on trying to go to school today, but is probably still on the edge, so we’ll see how that goes. Meanwhile, neither Brandy nor I are 100% either.
  • Earlier this week my sister Cynthia shared the news that she officially got word that she had been accepted by her first choice college, the one she had done the early application thing for. That would be Oberlin. She should be starting there in the fall. Congratulations to Cynthia. I know she is more than ready to start. For now though I imagine it is all about fighting Senioritis.
  • While my mom was here we got a tree up and decorated it and all that kind of thing. Roscoe proceeded to knock it down the next day. We put it up again, but in a new spot which would be harder to knock down.
  • Amy’s hand is still in a brace thing after she hurt it chasing a boy at school more than a month ago. But we got word last week from the doctors that it looks like she needs physical therapy rather than surgery, which is a good thing since we’d been told earlier that might have been a possibility. I imagine she’ll start having to go to the therapist after New Year’s. She had recovered enough to play her bass again a few weeks ago, but then went into the Doctor for more tests and they reinjured something in the process, and so she’s once again not able to play, which frustrates her. But hopefully she will be able to again soon.
  • The mail issue continues, but not because I don’t know how to fix it, but because lately when I get home I’ve just wanted to lie down so I haven’t done anything very productive at home in weeks it seems. I need to get that mail stuff done soon though.
  • Um, that’s it for now.

Foiling the Evil Greg

Notwithstanding Greg’s mean comment on my last post, it looks like I will indeed be able to retrieve everything. It will just be a fairly long semi-manual process where I have to reimport each old mailbox one at a time rather than grabbing a bunch at one time (because mail.app spins for an hour or two then crashes when I do that). And there is still a chance that I will find a corrupt mailbox in the mix somewhere. But I think I already verified that the ONE mailbox that would have had content that wasn’t duplicated elsewhere (in either a day old partial backup I had, or a two month old full backup I had) is fine. I may still be missing something, but I think at this point I feel confident I can retrieve everything, it will just take some work. I’ll do a little each evening and then try to finish up on the weekend I think.

In the mean time, I’m still not checking email regularly.

Email Explosion

By the way, for those who haven’t listened to the podcast this week yet, over the weekend I had an email meltdown. This is a client side meltdown this time rather than a server side one. And I don’t THINK I have lost anything based on the copies I have in a few different places. I hope. But I can’t get to my mail the normal way at the moment because my client is very confused, and I can’t get to my long term email archive at all at the moment. (The long term archive is ONLY on my local machine, not on the network.) I can get to my current mail and my short term archive (which are on the network) using alternate clients on other machines, or via the web. But I am not doing so actively or regularly until I fix my local client. So if you really need to get ahold of me for something in the short term, you’re better off calling me.

Anyway, at this point I’ve tried the two or three simplest default ways of getting mail.app unconfused, and they have not worked. So after having completely backed up my mail folder, I’m off to go try more drastic things. I’m still pretty upbeat about this at this point, because I don’t think anything is actually lost. However, if over the next day or so I start discovering that I am wrong about that and part of my long term email archive actually is lost, I will get very very upset.

Curmudgeon’s Corner: Failing to Discuss Huckabee

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Sam: My Computer Sucks
  • Ivan: Maybe I could live with Hillary
  • Hillary’s Collapsing Campaign
  • Hillary’s Self-Inflicted Wounds
  • More Stuff Goes Missing
  • Divided Republicans
  • Path to a Brokered Convention
  • Newt Returns?

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Now the R’s

OK, the Republicans are looking completely fragmented, and that is tons of fun. Here they are on the states pollster.com tracks, using as the numbers the (pretty conservative) trend line they generate using the results from all the available polls:

  • IA: Huckabee leads Romney by 6.3%
  • NH: Romney leads McCain by 16.2%
  • NV: Giuliani leads Romney by 4.8%
  • SC: Romney leads Thompson by 3.0%
  • FL: Giuliani leads Romney by 15.1%
  • MI: Romney leads Giuliani by 1.9%
  • CA: Giuliani leads Romney by 15.6%
  • NY: Giuliani leads McCain by 31.7%

Now, on the Democratic side, there were only two people who were in first place in any state, and even if you count number 2 placements, it was still just Clinton and Obama with a lock on 1st and 2nd place on all of these early/important states.

But the republican side? There are 3 different candidates who are currently polling in first place in at least one of these states. And if you add in second place there are five candidates who are polling in first or second place in these states. FIVE. And in a lot of those states the gap between first and second (and sometimes third) is VERY SMALL.

What does that mean? It means crazy dynamics in the race. At least possibly. If Iowa and New Hampshire happen, and anybody who doesn’t win there collapses, it could still be over pretty quickly. But if we have different winners in Iowa and New Hampshire, and the strength of a third candidate manages to continue despite those losses to then compete in later states, then we could still have three viable candidates getting to Super Duper Tuesday and perhaps beyond.

So here is hoping for fun and excitement in the Primary season. Giuliani seems to be in some trouble lately. I don’t want him to be president, but I’d like him to stay strong enough so that we can get Huckabee, Romney and Giuliani all winning some important states and keeping this race alive as long as possible. It would be fun to see McCain come back and win a few too, but I’m not sure he still has it in him unless the others self-destuct (which is certainly possible).

Getting Interesting Fast

The chink in Hillary’s armor in Iowa has been expanding rapidly these last few weeks. The trend has been clear for a bit, but as of now even on pollster.com’s really conservative trend line she has lost the lead (but barely). And her lead in other states has started to slip now that her weakness is showing in Iowa. Most of this has been due to one good speech by Obama at the JJ Dinner a few weeks back, followed by a series of missteps by the Clinton campaign. (Who thought that Kindergarten thing was a good idea, really? Come one…)

Anyway, from the pollster.com trend lines in some significant states:

  • IA: Obama leads Clinton by 1.5%
  • NH: Clinton leads Obama by 6.0%
  • NV: Clinton leads Obama by 22.1%
  • SC: Clinton leads Obama by 9.7%
  • FL: Clinton leads Obama by 30.9%
  • MI: Clinton leads Obama by 25.4%
  • CA: Clinton leads Obama by 32.0%
  • NY: Clinton leads Obama by 31.9%

Uh, OK. In most states Clinton is still blowing away Obama. However, as Ivan and I have discussed on the podcast a number of times, these early states matter a lot and can change the whole dynamic of the race. Hillary has always been weak in Iowa, her lead has always been smallest there. But now it has evaporated. Although Obama’s trend line is now higher, really Iowa is now a dead heat between Clinton and Obama with Edwards in spitting distance.

And Hillary’s lead is getting smaller and smaller in New Hampshire too.

If she loses in both of those, then other states where she has huge leads right now will also suddenly be in play.

If Obama wins both he will be in a very strong position. If Edwards gets Iowa and Obama gets New Hampshire then things will just be wide open and potentially VERY interesting in January and February even on the Democratic side.

Meanwhile, and I’ll get to this in another post soon, the Republicans are a mess. Things will almost definately be VERY interesting on that side.

But it is very nice that it is starting to look like the Dems might put on a show too.