The Swamp Land Exile

"Hard-Hit Families Finally Start Saving, Aggravating Nation's Economic Woes"

Mind boggling.

I just saw this Chrysler ad on CNN.com, thanking "America" for its nationalization.

So let's see. A bankrupt company gets taxpayer aid and uses some of it to take out ads thanking the victims of taxation. Right...

Flickr set.

Various pistols and a rifle were stolen from Burress's home by people with pistols and rifles (and machine guns, tanks, SWAT teams, tasers, explosives, canines, surveillance equipment and helicopters). All this For Your Own Good. After all, safety is very important.

Taken close to sunset.

From a friend:

It is hard not to notice an asymmetry in the way "price gouging" is alleged to work. When gas prices are rising, consumer advocates are vociferous about price gouging at the pump. There will be numerous items on the evening news about government efforts to crack down on price gouging gas stations. But when prices fall significantly, there is never any suggestion that consumers have somehow "gouged" gas station owners. When prices are low, everyone believes that the fair price is the prevailing price and that government should not intrude on capitalist acts between consenting adults. But when prices are high, suddenly we need to mobilize against the evil gas station owners who are "gouging" us.

Though there seems to be some cuts being made to the enormous $120 billion budget for the State of New York, the latest Patterson plan includes nonetheless new or additional taxes. Incredibly, the proposal would increase taxes on hospitals and insurance companies. Then there's the elimination of the current tax-free status for clothing, the removal of the tax gap on gasoline, and the threat of forcing Indian retailers to collect sales taxes to non-Indians. Oh, and a tax on non-diet soda.

Thank you, Mr. Governor, for taking care of me. My family also thanks you very much. I cannot imagine what I would do without Albany.

First Decent Snowfall in Ithaca from Manuel Lora on Vimeo.

Some Thanksgiving photos here.

For Thanksgiving last week Melissa and I went to visit my parents. On Friday, we took a drive to the Maryland side of Great Falls National Park. At dusk, I shot a series of bracketed shots. Below is the result of the HDR tonemapped composite.

He will pardon a turkey but not the thousands rotting in federal prisons for non-crimes. Ain't justice grand?

I needed a home server to manage my increasing number of photos, music and other documents. Thus, some weeks ago I gathered the parts required to build a new box. Aside from the case and power supply, I picked up an old AMD CPU (Sempron), 2 gigs of RAM, a gigabit card, a motherboard and 2 1TB Seagate drives. For the operating system I chose Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid, the 64-bit version, and I used an older IDE drive to install that.

Because I didn't want to bother with a CD/DVD drive, the easiest way to boot the installer was from USB. After a couple of hiccups (because I didn't RTFM), I finally managed to do a network install. The installer was great. Even though I already knew how to create the RAID devices and associate them into the LVM system, the installer gave me that option; I went with RAID1.

The system was ready to go. The next step was to set up NFS, which I chose over SMB because all my computers at home either run Linux or Mac. Initially I could not get OS X to connect to the NFS share. I found out that you need (no_root_squash,rw,insecure) in /etc/exports. That did the trick.

Besides having all my data in a single location (btw I still need to establish a backup policy for the NAS), I've always wanted to have a music server that would run without a P2P model (that is, without having to resort to, for example, iTunes to stream music on the LAN or beyond). The Firefly Media Server comes to the rescue. It implements the DAAP protocol so that DAAP-enabled clients can connect to the server, which in turn streams the music. I migrated my iTunes library to the NAS, installed the mt-daapd daemon (the Firefly Media Server) and configured things a bit. That was all to it.

From work I can now connect, with Songbird (and a DAAP add-on) to my home server and listen to all of my music. Songbird supports Ogg Vorbis too.

My iPhoto library has also now found a place on the NAS. I'm in the process of configuring Aperture so that it can also work from the NAS.

That dark spot down there is a car.



Explanation here.

Of course, only a minute amount of the total will be created into paper, but still, one can get an idea on just how much money we're talking about. And that's just 315 billion. Imagine 7.4 teradollars.

The video says it all