And so it was during the vice-presidential debate last Thursday, where Biden stuck to his talking points and whole lot of policy (Bo–ring), while Palin stuck to her talking points, folksiness and, oddly enough, a whole lot of winking.[1] Reading the transcript afterwards confirms that there was very little substance to Palin’s responses and that to call them “responses” is being very generous. At least half of her answers were filled end-to-end with words and concepts completely unrelated to the... [More]

Lot of politicians—most recently and fervently, Vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin—want to represent “Joe Six-pack”. Good old Joe represents, for them, the quintessential American. America exists to protect Joe and, should Joe come to harm or should Joe fail, America has failed. Accepting that, perform the following thought experiment: envision Joe, picture good old Joe in your mind. Got it? Good. Now answer the following questions:

1. Is Joe black?
2. Is Joe gay?
3. Is Joe female?
4. Is Joe... [More]

They say that the financial system is on the brink of collapse, that it has stopped “working”. This sounds bad. However, before rushing to support whatever solution is put forward to fix it, it would be best to figure out what it was like when it was working smoothly. Only then can you know whether or not you want to fix it. Some of the votes of “no” to the bailout came from representatives that believed just that: that the goal is not to put everything back the way it was, with the same people... [More]

Sarah Silverman is back with a slightly-less-profane video offering than her last outing, this time stumping for Obama. On a site called The Great Schlep, she lays out her angle: with Florida playing such an important role in previous elections, jewish Obama supporters should “schlep” to Florida to convince their grandparents to vote for Obama.

The great schlep officially takes place over Columbus Day weekend. Talking points are available in PDF form from the web site.

SNL: Hillary Clinton & Sarah Palin Make an Announcement (NBC.com)

This segment was inevitable the first time someone noted that Sarah Palin wears “Tina Fey” glasses. Clinton & Palin come together to address sexism in the media; hilarity ensues.

SNL: Couric interviews Palin, Part 4 (NBC.com)

Katie Couric, not known for her hardball interviews or journalistic acumen or sophisticated questions, interviewed Sarah Palin this week; disaster ensued. No matter how hard Couric tried to toss Palin softballs, she bobbled... [More]

Google has entered the mobile market with the G1, a phone—as described in The G1: Almost perfect (CrunchGear)—for “the programmer and the geek and, in a way, the average consumer”. In a very, very small way. First of all, look at it:

G1 Phone

It’s a smart-phone and aimed squarely at the smart-phone market, but don’t even try to mention that the “average consumer” is even conceivably a target market for this monstrosity. It looks huge[1], way bigger than a BlackBerry or an iPhone. With it’s slide-out keyboard and... [More]

Examining the Republican TicketA recent analysis, George W. Bush’s Overall Job Approval Matches ARG Low (American Research Group), sounds pretty good, on the surface. People think Bush is doing a poor job; McCain wants to be Bush, so McCain’s plummeting, right?

Right?

Things are rarely that simple. Two excellent election resources are Five Thirty Eight.com and the vaunted Electoral-Vote.com (EV)[1]. Whereas both sites currently have Obama in the lead (with FTE giving Obama a 75%—oops, today, it’s 73%—chance of winning), the Republicans are not... [More]

Most of us don’t follow the markets very assiduously. We buy into pensions or mutual funds or get CDs or money-market funds at the bank or we just have a savings account with decent... [More]

Take the FM 100 Hue Test (XRite); make sure you have about five minutes or so. Decent light conditions and an LCD help. If you have a CRT, you should probably run some color calibration if it’s been 10 years since you last did one ;-).

When you’re ready to go, you get a grid like the one shown below.

The Color Test

If you’re wicked awesome and have eyes like Superman, you’ll be taken to the following screen after moving the little tiles and pressing “Score Test”.

You Have Perfect Color Vision!

Booyah!

The batch of conservatives preening their plumage weekly on This Week on ABC flipped a bitch so hard this weekend that they nearly lost their false teeth and toupés. After having effectively campaigned brilliantly for McCain throughout the 2008 season—when they thought electing him would be better for their investments, presumably—they now unreservedly trash him, dragging out his dirty laundry for all to see.

ABC Roundtable: McCain 'Unpresidential' & Age Issue (YouTube)

They played Obama’s newest campaign videos, then gleefully agreed with them,... [More]

At long last, the article A Nation of Masochists by Juan Cole (Informed Comment)[1] proposes a realistic alternate theory that explains America’s voting habits. This one is no less subtle that the current theory that Americans suffer from sheer, blinding ignorance mixed with heaping helpings of stupidity.

Juan Cole reports almost exclusively on the Middle East, but clearly something ruffled his feathers and he is pissed.[2] His recounting of the last eight years under the Republicans is mostly accurate, not completely fair, but... [More]

Even the most razor-sharp of hewers to the party line must be having a tremendous amount of psychic agony in trying to follow the script. If cognitive dissonance can cause actual, physical pain, then now is surely the time for it to do so. John McCain is praising the bailouts and buy-outs of major American financial institutions to high heaven, while at the same time calling for even less regulation—ostensibly because there are still a few banks that haven’t managed to glut themselves into... [More]

There is no way that the average American (or world citizen, for that matter) can stay on top of the firehose of mis-information aimed at them in an election season. Any conversation about policy, society or the philosophical underpinnings of living on this planet together, without killing each other, inevitably—and incredibly quickly—devolves into a bilateral effort to disprove facts held by the other party. For example, imagine a devout Republican discussing “equal pay for equal work”... [More]

On September 3rd, Jon Stewart was much more vicious than usual, tearing into Laura & George Bush, Fred Thompson (“Foghorn Leghorn”) and Senator Lieberman (“Deputy Dawg”).

John McCain: The Person He Is by Jon Stewart (The Daily Show)

Next up was a juxtaposition of videos that let Karl Rove contradict himself (wherein he gushes over Sarah Palin’s experience running a town of 9000 people after disparaging a Democratic VP hopeful as inexperienced because his city has only about 100,000 people). Bill O’Reilly also hit the chopping block for, on the one... [More]

The Nader version appears to be a paraphrase of “[t]he people can have anything they want, the only problem is they do not want anything”, which, though possibly more accurate, doesn’t read nearly as well.

Much has been said of Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight. Many have drawn parallels between elements in the movie and the recent history of the United States, from the attacks of 9–11 to the ensuing war on terror and its effects, both foreign and domestic. The Joker is chosen as the terrorist and the only way to stop him is to be just as lawless, to forsake all that you are defending—if only for just a little while, until order is restored—before everything you hold... [More]

Palin/McCain '08Reports that the Democratic convention has given Obama a “bump” are greatly exaggerated: he was ahead by six points a month ago, McCain caught up and passed him just before the Democratic convention[1] and, now, after five days of nearly exclusively Democratic coverage in the media, Obama has clawed back his six-point lead.

Bravo, Democrats.

This is clearly still the party that knows how to speak to the American people and holds a tremendous amount of appeal. Obama didn’t have the guts to choose... [More]

This article is written in response to a couple of incredulous emails I received about my recent publication of a handbook for the Book Library, which seemed like a lot of work documenting an application in use by two people, with no hopes of ever being used by more.

The Book Library as it is today is a Windows-only application built with Atlas, a Borland Delphi-based framework available from Opus Software AG.

I used to work at Opus, and the Book Library is the application I wrote to get a... [More]

This article is part (9) of a multi-part earthli Albums tutorial.

Before you start adding pictures, you should read the article Uploading pictures in earthli Albums (earthli News) to learn how to prepare pictures for publication online.

If you have a lot of pictures to add to an album and you don’t feel like adding them individually, you can upload them all at once and then edit them later.

Let’s start, as always, by going to the Galapagos home page, as described in the navigation tutorial, as shown... [More]

This article is part (8) of a multi-part earthli Albums tutorial.

If you’ve got a lot of pictures in one album and want to group them or categorize them better, you can make sub-albums within the main album. Picking up from where we left off in the navigation tutorial at the Galapagos home page, we see that there are hundreds of photos in one album.

Before you can move pictures, you have to create the album to which you’re going to move them.

To move pictures, you have to switch to the... [More]

This article is part (7) of a multi-part earthli Albums tutorial.

In addition to adding and editing pictures, you’re invariably going to need to delete some as well. There are a couple of ways to do this, but let’s start off—as always—where we left off in the navigation tutorial with the Galapagos home page, as shown below:

Delete Picture from Album Page (click to enlarge)

To select a single picture for deletion, hover over the small “command” triangle (1) next to it, then select “Delete” (2) from the menu. You’ll be taken to a... [More]

This article is part (6) of a multi-part earthli Albums tutorial.

Changing the cover for an album is the same as editing one, but you need to actually add pictures or move pictures from another album first. To change the cover picture for an album, go to the album’s home page. If you follow the instructions in the browsing tutorial, you should see the Galapagos as shown below:

Galapagos Home Page (click to enlarge)

Near the top of the home page, you should see the “Edit” button (1); press it to show the page below (if you... [More]

This article is part (5) of a multi-part earthli Albums tutorial.

Editing an album is just as easy as creating a new one. To edit an album, go to the album’s home page. If you follow the instructions in the browsing tutorial, you should see the Galapagos as shown below:

Galapagos Home Page (click to enlarge)

Near the top of the home page, you should see the “Edit” button (1); press it to show the page below (if you can’t see the button, follow the instructions for logging in before continuing):

Edit Album (click to enlarge)

There are a lot of settings... [More]