I believe that Dave Winer is wrong

If Obama Wins

My wish if Obama wins tomorrow is that he start building a cross-party coalition with his new buds Chris Christie and Bill Clinton. Go to a Jets game maybe. Ask Christie which Repubs are fun to party with. Bring them along too. Start a new informal Cabinet of advisers, people the President hangs with to talk sports or drink a beer or (privately) smoke some reefer. Then they plot out new ways to get the whole country working, not just the tri-state area. We have something much bigger than Sandy to recover from, that is if Obama wins.

Ain’t going to happen.

Chris Christie still has endorsed Romney over Obama.

The TEA Party will make sure that it never happens.

Obama tried to be bipartisan early in his term.  I suggest the gloves come off and that he should be partisan as possible.

 

For further thinking on…

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/a-radical-pessimists-guide-to-the-next-10-years/article1321040/?page=all

 

 

Excellent!

Dude! /Bill & Ted

I have modified my Links to Monitor in a way that is pleasing to my eye.

I have figured out how to center the heading over the maximum length of my stuff (hand calculated right now, but oh well) instead of centering over the whole window.

It took some JavaScript to do it, and it looks like this:

<script>
var wanted = 1070, winw;
if (window.innerWidth && window.innerHeight) {
winW = window.innerWidth;
}
if (winW < wanted) { wanted = winW; }
document.writeln('<div style="width:' + wanted + 'px">');
</script>
<noscript><div></noscript>

Which basically makes the maximum width to be 1070 pixels for the header stuff.  And if there is no javascript, I just put up a dummy <div> to match up with the </div> that is buried elsewhere.

It’s probably absolutely ridiculous for most web slingers, but I like this.  I have really been thinking about how to get it to look like this for awhile, I’m glad I came up with a way that I was able to incorporate in less than 30 minutes.  And most of those 30 minutes were recovering from the crash that I was forcing Firefox to go through (for some unknown reason, I sent debug reports…) in search of a way to get what I wanted.

I may have to adjust the pixel amount every now and then, but at least, if anything, it’s at least close to what it should be!

 

Windows 8 Consumer Preview impressions

Let me state this up front.  Windows 8 Consumer Preview has been one of the worse beta experiences from Microsoft that I have experienced.  This from somebody who has beta’ed Windows 95 and Windows 7.

I’m pretty much ignoring the Metro UI.  That still needs a lot of work, especially for keyboard and mouse.  What would work by touch isn’t even close to be replicated by the mouse, and I think that this is a problem.

Unfortunately, just working with the desktop can be infuriating. 

Programs tend to stop working, and it’s certainly not the hardware, not when I can move the mouse and interact with other programs, at least for awhile.  I give up, and I hit the reset switch.

Installing programs test the patience of Job.  I installed the latest Ultraedit 32.  It seems to do nothing, but on the second try, I just let it sit there.  Eventually, itDID install.  Now why did it take half an hour?  Same thing with the drivers for my printer.  Which didn’t even work after it was done.

I tried to make a Windows to Go on a USB hard drive.  The instructions for that fail for me.

In fact, after already installing one new video driver, MS decided to push another video driver on me. The same day!  The second time, it failed.  Bad download? At 150mb, I sure hope not!

I’m seriously thinking about just going back to Windows 7, and leaving it at that.  At least most of my PowerShell programs seem to be working under V3.  One wasn’t working, because I didn’t dispose of an object when I should have, which under V2 was fine, but not V3 has issues, which is fine, I shouldn’t have done what I did.  And it now works as it is supposed to.

I’ve seen my system reboot in the single digits of minutes.  I’ve seen it take half an hour.  I really do not believe that it’s my (new) hardware that is at fault.

Microsoft really needs to issue an update I think, if they want this to be a success.  There just are simply too many bugs. 

Oh, the problem with the video driver not installing?  I’m given a link, which says it’s deprecated, and to go any further, I have to have a company account.  WTF Microsoft!

Also a problem, it should be a one click decision to put things like graphic, video and music files under Metro or under the usual suspects in the desktop world.

 

Windows 8 first impressions

Installed on a VM last night.

I’m not digging the Metro UI right now. It’s built for touch, but trying to deal with a mouse without touch just doesn’t quite work for me. Of course, I have a trackball, not a mouse, so it may even be less intuitive that way. After Windows 7 and Windows XP and Windows 2003, I expect something to happen when I right click something. I understand you really can’t right click in a touch system, but it’s been so engrained in Windows users that you would think that there was some kind of transition, at least.

Pressing the Start button or pressing the Windows key goes straight to the Metro GUI. I think it’s a bit too jarring myself.

If they keep it the way it currently is, it’s going to be a tougher transition than even going from XP to Vista or 7.

I have a machine I might use as a real test machine.

 

Some housekeeping.

Took care of a sample post done here (I’ll right about it later, when we get the site up). We’ll be using WordPress ourselves.

I’ve also been cleaning up my links that I monitor. One site that I had under my Monthly banner hadn’t been updated in five years according to the archives. A couple other sites had simply disappeared or were returning 403(!) errors. I’ve also got a few that are currently down, but I’ll keep an eye on those.

 

Annoying people ≡ ranting

On one of my mailing lists, I tried to raise a little awareness of what I thought was going on with the political process.

Nobody could tell me what I was wrong in, or where I was wrong. I did get called an elitist. And at least one person said that they thought I was wrong, but at least he wasn’t combative about it.

Here’s what I don’t understand. I’ve pulled a decade of civil service. Nobody else on the list has done ANY civil service, at least none that will claim it. I’ve had some people claim that working for a candidate for a couple of hours — in total! — made them something of an expert on the subject.

I don’t claim to be an expert in politics, certainly since I was never in a political type position, although I reported to a number of people who were. Let’s call it close exposure.

Also, this idea, that money, given by interested concerns running to the candidates, and when elected, running out of the taxpayers’ pockets right back to those interested concerns, was something to have some attention paid to it, wasn’t my original idea either.

But I find looking at this as idiots who think they can run the Iraqi War from their quaint little homes in the US acting as generals without having any real understanding of the war going on over there, because all they know is second hand, first off, and secondly, what information they have, is so highly scrubbed, focused, and distorted as to be pretty damn worthless.

The current “discussion”, if you could actually call it that, is how revenue can evidently be raised without raising taxes. Without any attempt at explaining how. As far as I am able to determine, it’s nothing but “and something magical happens” and revenues increase. Now how to deal with the reality of making the cuts that are supposed to happen in the mean time.