Disorderly Content

I first discovered Neal Gabler when he and Jeffrey Lyons attempted to replace Siskel and Ebert on PBS, an experiment that was mercifully brief. I next ran into him through his wonderful book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, which explains the movie business's origins in Yiddish theater and its audience amongst the lowest of the low. One of his more interesting claims was that the Hollywood Blacklist was as much anti-semitic as it was anti-Communist, perhaps even more. Gabler returns to the era of McCarthy and the Witch Hunt to explain the basis for the modern Republican Party. In an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, he draws a line not from Barry Goldwater's abortive 1964 campaign but instead that selfsame Senator Joe McCarthy. If he's right, we haven't seen the last of vicious slime like Sarah Palin, even as I expect Heronner and the First Dude to fade from sight before much more time has elapsed.

An overwrought model's post to a photography website about being asked to participate in kitty porn was in fact a combination of poor spelling and overreaction to the situation. But it did introduce me to this, so at least some good came out of the kerfuffle. Click through if you dare, but I warn you that it's entirely SFW...

I am an idiot. Worse, I am a long suffering idiot. The suffering stopped today, the idiocy may linger a while.

A couple of months ago I switched from the Earthlink DSL I'd had for years to AT&T/Yahoo. They promised higher speeds, they promised a lower price. Faster's better, so I finally said okay. The install kit arrived while I was on a trip, so the moment I got home I had to get things running, what with them blocking my old Earthlink service. That's when the fun began.

The new modem was cool, with a built-in router with wireless. Performance was only marginally faster. But reliability was something else again, and not in a good way. I was having huge problems with servers not responding. I thought it was a DNS lookup problem, but switching to OpenDNS made no difference at all. Then I discovered that web surfing while connected through my employer's VPN worked great, even though it used the same connection. I guessed there was some retry timeout thing that the VPN was handling differently. But I endured, not having the time or energy to get on the phone and sort out what I assumed would be a protracted battle with tech support.

Then a week ago I got let go, and suddenly couldn't use my VPN workaround. So today I got on the phone with AT&T. They confirmed that my modem was putting out a weak signal. Then they beat me up about not using the cable they'd provided, and the dual port filter. I was still using the cables I'd set up for my old DSL, and didn't want to bother changing. Still, knowing they wouldn't help until I tried their solution (I used to work in tech support, so I have nothing but sympathy for those who do it now), I swapped out the cables and replaced my inline filter and splitter with their combo splitter/filter. And, as you have already guessed, things started to work. Not perfectly, mind; I still get delays accessing some major servers. But nothing like what it was like before. I'm finally back to having the quality of service I had before the switch, plus a little bit faster throughput. Which of course I'd have had right from the beginning if I'd only learn to follow directions. Not that that's gonna happen.

Update 11/14: Okay, maybe I'm not a complete idiot. There are still problems, so I'll have to get back on the phone with the phone company. But it's a whole lot more stable than it was. And that's good.

Update 11/20: And now I finally have it working the way it's supposed to work. Looks like it was a combination of problems: first, the bad connection caused by my iffy cabling; and second, a DNS problem. But not an ordinary DNS problem, where switching servers fixes things. Oh, no; that would be too easy! No, it turns out my router is acting as DNS server, passing requests to the real server. Well, it would be doing that if it were behaving, which it wasn't. The fix was easy: give my computers the DNS server addresses and bypass the router. Which also explains why having the VPN on made everything work. That was bypassing the router as well! Anyway, life's finally good on the Interwebs! Or could that just be because Senator "Series of Tubes" Ted Stevens is now about to be former Senator and newly convicted felon Ted Stevens?

This is proof positive that a picture really is worth a thousand words. Beautiful.

No, I'm not referring to the election. This is work-related.

Early this morning I got meeting request from my VP in the UK. It was for tomorrow morning, when I'll be on the road to Los Angeles for my annual Farscape geekfest, so he rescheduled it for this morning instead. I could tell something from his tone, although he's rather like Eeyore at the best of times. But when the HR director got on the line I knew.

Short story: I'm once again among the unemployed. I've been RIFed. Laid off. Declared redundant. Not surprising when your customers are mostly banks and brokerages. Just one more victim of four years of Republican free market radicalism.

The good news is that I'm prepared. The better news is that I can focus on some things I'd rather be doing. So it's a little bit of a shock, but I'm doing okay. In many ways I feel sorrier for the folks I'm leaving behind.

Update 11/05: After talking to a couple of now former colleagues, I decided to head to the mall for a little lunch. My Panda Express fortune cookie knew just what to say:

GOOD THINGS ARE COMING
TO YOU IN DUE COURSE
OF TIME

Nice to know. Oh, and I stopped at the Apple Store on my way out, where I bought myself a 16GB iPhone 3G. I may have to give up my 3G-equipped Dell, but I still feel the need for speed!

As I type this, ABC is calling 297 electoral votes for Senator, now President-elect, Obama. God, I can't believe I just wrote that. It feels amazingly good, not just because the better man won but because he did it by following the high road. John McCain became George Bush in his attempt to pull out a win. No, he became worse than even George Bush and Turd Blossom ever dared, and there wasn't much they wouldn't do. And that will be his legacy.

As for our new President-to-be, I know we're going to have moments of disappointment and frustration. The honeymoon won't last. But at least we can hope for inclusiveness and honor. And, if the Senator from Arizona will forgive the use of his catchphrase, at last some straight talk.

(Thanks to Joho the Blog for the link.)

I wanna work for these guys.

I'm a procrastinator, but not about voting. Truth be told, I stopped down at the county offices a couple of weeks ago and cast my ballot. But now I'm not so sure I did the right thing. These guys have me thinking that maybe I should have given McCain my vote. It's kind of a mitzvah.

If you haven't voted yet, rush out and do so. It's important, even if you're leaning toward the other guys.

After all the claims of how ACORN was perpetrating the greatest voter fraud in election history, it's entertaining to read that such rhetoric is based on a singular lack of anything resembling proof. As reported in ProPublica, McCain advisor Ronald Michaelson admits as much:

“Do we have a documented instance of voting fraud that resulted from a phony registration form? No, I can’t cite one, chapter and verse."

Not one? Isn't at least a little evidence a minimum requirement for policies that will disenfranchise thousands of voters? I guess not.

Sent to me by a friend. It isn't often that one of these email things is worth passing along. This is one of those times...

Dear Red States:

If you manage to steal this election too we've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood.

We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss.

We get 85% of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama.

We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22% lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq , and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80% of the country's fresh water, more than 90% of the pineapple and lettuce, 92% of the nation's fresh fruit, 95% of America's quality wines, 90% of all cheese, 90% of the high tech industry, 95% of the corn and soybeans (thanks Iowa!), most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT. With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88% of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92% of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100% of the tornadoes, 90% of the hurricanes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100% of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38% of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62% believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the war, the death penalty or gun laws, 44% say that evolution is only a theory, 53% that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61% of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.

Finally, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico.

Peace out,

Blue States