snafu

My beautiful wife Eva has her birthday today and I just wanted to say how lucky I am to be married to such a wonderful woman. Love you tons. XXX

This is such a lovely elegant tool and every time you use it you will think kindly of me and how I have made your life better.

If you are like me then you find it increasingly painful to read news sites on the Inter-webs because the actual news story is lost amongst an ugly mish-mash of advertising and miscellaneous blinking and flashing graphics.

Enter Readability. Set it up as you wish, choosing the style with which you want your content displayed and then when you come to an ugly web page simple click the Readability button and the hotch-potch is reduced to one simple column of text gracing the screen.

It’s beautiful! Probably does not work with every page on every site, but it will work on many. How long before they work out how to cripple it?

I am so excited about Rahm Emanuel being Obama’s Chief of Staff.

And there’s the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting “Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!” and plunging the knife into the table after every name. “When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape,” one campaign veteran recalls. “It was like something out of The Godfather. But that’s Rahm for you.”

He’s the mean-ass motherfucker the Democrats have needed all along. Surprisingly he considered a career as a ballet dancer and won a scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet.

“He’s got this big old pair of brass balls, and you can just hear ‘em clanking when he walks down the halls of Congress,” says Paul Begala, who served with Emanuel on Clinton’s staff. “The Democratic Party is full of Rhodes scholars — Rahm is a road warrior. He’s just what the Democrats need to fight back.”

Since it got colder Izzy jumps up on my lap in the morning and I put her inside my robe where she dozes like a dittle kangawoo baby! It so kewt!

Sadly I missed the showing of JFK at The Texas Theater here in Oak Cliff. The Texas Theater is where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested. It has gone thru some hard times but is now owned by a foundation that has renovated it and is working to make it a cultural center.

I just looked at their FAQ and this is weird - it opened on my birthday in 1931. Of course that is a 1 in 352 chance, statistically not that high. We were watching a film the other day and the license plate of the car was my initials LWH. What are they trying to say to me?

Anyway, the Oak Cliff Foundation (owners of the theatre) has this to say - 2009 marks the 75th anniversary of the day a posse of four Texas and two Louisiana officers shot and killed the notorious Oak Cliff outlaws, Bonnie and Clyde. To note this historic date, the Texas Theatre presents Arthur Penn’s classic film, Bonnie and Clyde, featuring Warren Beatty, and Faye Dunnaway.

FYI - Clyde Barrow is buried about a mile away from our house. Here’s a picture I took of his grave.

From Ricky Gervais’ blog via my wife…

I heard someone on the radio once say that they were tired of the prejudice aimed at the overweight. They said something like “you’re not allowed to make fun of gay people, so why are you allowed to make fun of fat people? It’s the same thing.”

It’s not the same thing though, is it? Gay people are born that way. They didn’t work at becoming gay. Fat people became fat because they would rather be that way than stop eating so much. They had to eat and eat to get fat. Then, when they were fat they had to keep up the eating to stay fat. For gayness to be the same as fatness, gay people would have to start off straight but then ween themselves onto cock. Soon they’re noshing all day getting gayer and gayer. They’ve had more than enough cock… they’re full… they’re just sucking for the sake of it. Now they’re overgay, and frowned upon by people who can have the occasional cock but not over indulge.

When a doctor tells me that that’s how you become gay, I’ll stop making jokes about fat people.

Just posted some images on Flickr from our Festivus trip to Santa Fe. Lovely time as usual.

All-round good guy Billy Bragg is involved in a great project – “Jail Guitar Doors is an independent initiative set up by Billy Bragg with the aim of providing musical equipment for the use of inmates serving time in Her Majesty’s prisons. It takes its name from the b-side of the Clash’s 1978 single “Clash City Rockers”.”

Makes sense to me.

So I tried the Amazon Kindle, their electronic ink book, as Oprah had a coupon that knocked it down to about $300. The ink technology is really cool and the screen is great to look at but it wasn’t that much better than looking at my iPhone and although I liked the idea of downloading newspapers & books the reality is that I prefer a color screen and almost always buy used books.

So I returned it and bought an Asus 900HA a pint sized little netbook that runs XP has a 1.6gHz processor and a 160GB HD. It’s super tiny and very cute and surprisingly usable. The keyboard is the only let-down - not because it is small, although that doesn’t help, but because the key feel sucks and the space bar is dodgy. Of course it runs XP which sucks for this die-hard Mac fanboy, but I am learning to live with its quirks and banalities. How the fuck did this become the OS of choice? Just installing a bluetooth mouse was a royal pain in the neck.

One of the benefits of using the world’s most ubiquitous OSs is that there are bucket loads of software to try and I have managed to recreate most of the usability that I have in OS-X. Launchy is great if you are used to Quicksilver and I tried some dock replacements but have learned to live with the task bar. I used some utility that went thru my system and,with my permission, turned off all the superfluous effects and other processor hogs and although it now has a Windows 98 kind of look to it, the little bugger si quite snappy. I loaded Lightroom on it so it will be interesting to see how it does on our Festivus vacation.

I am writing this using Windows Live Writer which seems, after cursory inspection, to be quite a cool desktop blogging client. You can insert all kinds of objects - this aerial of the golf course across the road for example it grabbed from Microsoft Virtual Earth. It does have a strange habit though of scrolling the page up and down of its own accord as you type. Bizarre.

You can get plug-ins for different tasks. I am downloading  something called Windows Net Framework sadly because apparently I need that so that I can install a plug-in. Stuff like that happens all the time where the OS seems to be adding and replacing components but overall, after some tweaking, I am learning to live with Windows XP.

Damn it’s good to be in America!

Foreign-born “preachers of hate” and other violent extremists will have to prove they have publicly renounced their views or be refused entry to Britain under tough new rules unveiled today. The measures, set out in a written ministerial statement by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, will make it easier to exclude those who want to come to the UK to stir up religious or racial hatred.

‘Hate preachers’ must prove they renounce extremism or face UK ban | Politics | guardian.co.uk

It has been known for years that the UK has had a very lenient immigration policy and even when foreign extremists have been identified amongst them, getting rid of them seems to be beyond their ken.

It seems that finally they are being more realistic. Free speech is one thing but standing on a soap box in the country that has taken you in and calling for its destruction just seems somewhat rude.