Show Off originally uploaded by mrwilloby.
This was funny. I set my camera to rapidly take photos when holding down the shutter button. Christy saw me skiing by and starts dancing. I guess she was paying more attention to dancing than snowboarding.

I haven’t paid much attention at all to the San Jose mayor’s race. I’ve seen blurbs in the paper and a few ads in the mail. I was thinking the other day, though, at least three of the candidates are current city council members. There is at least one other guy running, a developer, I believe. My first impulse is to support the developer. I think I figured out why.

When a person has a private occupation, even one that some may not particularly like, we know where that person stands. We know the history, and we know what we should be skeptical of in that person. It would be much more apparent, and egregious even, were a business person to be elected mayor and then award known friends and contacts of that person with beneficial contracts, favorable regulations, or what have you.

On the other hand, when a candidate is already a politician, his or her full time job is already a spinner, a deceiver, and a back-room dealer. It is much more difficult for the public to see what this person is doing when already his or her time is constantly spent making false promises and covering up blunders.

By default, I pretty much distrust anyone who aspires to be a politician, so I cannot see the sense in repeatedly electing those same people.

While at work at another school the other day I became frustrated with the effort required to keep up to date with all of my friends’ sites and various other sites on the web that I read. I had access to a computer so I began checking out feed readers. I tried out the interface or at least looked at the website on many of them. I was using FeedBurner as a reference because they give a whole slew of options for subscribing to feeds when you pull one up at the site.

In the end, I settled with Bloglines. It is a web-based feed reader that is incredibly easy to work with. Although I initially resisted feed readers in general because I didn’t like having to click into different folders and having to view each feed separately, I may come around because Bloglines makes it so easy. My prior preference was for aggregators in the fashion of LiveJournal Friends pages or the feed aggregator built into Flock. When I install the Bloglines Toolkit for Firefox it makes life so easy by putting a “Subscribe to this Page” option in the context menu and putting a notifier in the browser window. I know right away when something new is published.

A feature that I just explored last night has proven quite useful already. Bloglines allows you to set up unlimited numbers of email accounts with them, which is particularly useful for subscribing to mailing lists. Mailing list subscriptions will never flood my email account anymore, and I don’t have to worry about being spammed.

I know Jessica started using Bloglines yesterday when I was telling her about it, and I noticed that Jacob uses it. I recommend it to anyone who tries to stay on top of many different sites.

Check out my subscriptions here. Subscribe to me here.

technorati tags: bloglines, feeds

The most refreshing thing I’ve read all week:

The economic case for energy independence has always been nonsensical. It is not possible to shield American consumers from rising prices at the pump simply by replacing foreign oil with domestic oil. Why? Because regardless of where the oil is produced - Oman or Oklahoma - its prices are set by the global market.

From a piece by Shikha Dalmia on the Reason Foundation’s site. She lays out the case for why nationalistic scaremongerers are all wrong when it comes to proper policy in regards to oil.

After giving a history of attempted (but ultimately failed) market manipulation by various entities, she details why the incentives for every party involved are to bring more oil into production for the world market. Dalmia also explains how, in the end, this buying and selling between nations leads to more global stability.

Thus whatever other arguments there might be for boosting domestic oil production, national security is not one of them. While this might seem counter-intuitive, it is really part of the overall logic of trade: The mutual dependence that trade breeds fosters peace because it gives hostile trading partners an incentive to refrain from acting on their hostility. Energy independence would weaken that incentive.

technorati tags: oil, trade

I know I have been neglecting this blog for the past few weeks. One main reason is that about 2 weeks ago my main computer died. I’ve been chugging along for now with a machine that peaked during the heyday of Windows 98. It’s a 400MHz AMD K6-III machine with 320MB of RAM, so it works, if a little slowly. I certainly can’t multitask like I am used to though.

One day at work I even wrote up a long blog post on a piece of paper documenting my computer woes, but when I didn’t type it up that very day, it became outdated. In the end, I lost 2 hard drives, a motherboard, and a power supply. I think the power supply was the culprit in all of the problems. It took me quite a while to recover from the shock of losing over 200GB worth of data as well. Nothing original, just many years worth of collecting various bits of digital memorabilia.

The last of the new pieces arrived yesterday, so I will get to constructing soon enough.

One beneficial thing to come out of the trauma is that I started exploring some Linux distributions for use on my old machine. I’d been dual booting XP and Ubuntu for a while, but Ubuntu would tend to start running slowly. It got annoying. I’ve always noticed that Live CDs are quite zippy and started looking into some of them to use. I found an awesome one. Puppy Linux is a Live CD that loads itself completely into RAM and runs from there. It’s about a 60MB distro that only requires 128MB of system memory to function well. The aspect that really nudged me to try it out, though, is the multisession ability. Burn the ISO as a multisession disc and it will save your session back to the CD/DVD that you booted with, so that all the work you’ve done will be saved for next time. That has always been a drawback of Live CDs for me because I don’t have a USB stick, which some distros can save sessions to.

Puppy Linux seems really great. There are about 3 versions in the works right now. A standard 1.0.8 version, a community modified 1.0.9 version, and a 2.0 preview version. The community around Puppy Linux is extremely helpful and I’ve gotten great support from the forums. It’s really quite nice.

Right now I happen to be at a high school where the teacher had a PC that ran XP. I don’t know a quick way to get past a user’s password with XP in order just use the computer, so I tried the Live CD. Fortunately for me, the computer was set to check the optical drive upon boot and so I am running Puppy Linux right now.

technorati tags: puppylinux, linux

Flickr Balls originally uploaded by mrwilloby.

I found these in a classroom today.