08:49 – Barbara’s been gone two days now, and Colin is taking it pretty well. At night, he’s taking advantage of her absence by stretching out full length on her side of the bed–with his head on her pillow, yet–instead of having to curl up in a little dog ball at the end of the bed. Still, he’ll be happy when she returns home tomorrow, as will I. I made it through seven episodes of Heartland last night, S4E17 and 18 through S5E5. That leaves 13 episodes of S5 and S6E1 remaining, which I won’t get through before Barbara returns.
I finally took the time to install a DVD writer in the new system sitting in the den. I’d used a borrowed optical drive to install Ubuntu on that system. It appeared to work fine, until power-saving kicked in, at which point I could no longer get any video even after a cold start. So last night I installed a new Samsung optical drive I’d gotten from Amazon.com and installed Linux Mint. Everything went as expected, and I immediately turned off power-saving mode. I used the system all evening, and finally decided to re-enable power saving to kill power to the display after 10 minutes. I watched the clock ticking down. At 10 minutes, sure enough, power saving kicked in and cut power to the display. I moved the mouse, and the screen came up normally. Success. Then, this morning, I moved the mouse again. The video was dead. So when I have a moment, I’ll try restarting the system. If it comes up, I’ll disable power saving entirely. There’s something going on with Linux power saving and this Intel Atom motherboard, but I’m not sure what. Worst case, I’ll just manually power the display on and off as needed.
I’m working on a core set of prepared microscope slides for the Life Science kit. I think we’ll include that core Slide Set A with the kit. It’ll be 10 top-priority slides of specimens that are difficult to prepare at home, things like onion root-tip mitosis, cross-sections of monocot and dicot stems, and so on. Then, as an option, we’ll offer another 10 or 20 slides as Slide Set B, which’ll include second-priority slides.
This is why the Congress of the United States should all be jailed for crimes against the Citizens of the United States:
http://www.atr.org/days-taxmageddon-a7203
What kind of fucking politicians make a law/bill to automatically *increase* taxes? It should automatically *decrease* taxes. My wife makes good money with her speaking business. Now we’ll be paying for a whole neighborhood of freeloaders. Geeze!
I hate power saving mode for desktops. I backup my office LAN at night time and power saving mode interferes with this greatly. I always turn it off for desktop PCs.
Of course, those tax increases are all scheduled for *after* the election. In particular, there’s no particular reason that most of the ObamaCare taxes couldn’t have taken effect at the beginning of this year. This is very deliberate.
I don’t know if my view from abroad is more or less accurate that the view from within the US. Whichever, from here it looks increasingly likely that Obama will be re-elected. Romney is simply failing to inspire people outside of his core following. I can’t tell if he is complacent, if he doesn’t really care, or (perhaps most likely) if he simply isn’t charismatic enough.
To take a specific example: the 47% quote. Once attacked, he should have had an immediate and overwhelming counterattack. It is a fact that too many people have a net income from the federal government. This must change! The end of the world is nigh!! Instead, we have…nothing…
If Romney were any kind of fiscal conservative, he should have taken that attack ad, slapped on an “I’m Mitt Romney and I approve this message”, and aired it himself. But no, as a tone-deaf candidate and fiscal disaster, he acts like it was an accusation that had bite. To hell with them both.
That tax deal is just another bag job from our rulers. And there is a reason Mittens looks lax and uncaring and goofy and out of it and why his campaign just sputters from gaffe to gaffe, etc., etc. It’s simply another bag job; the fix is in and has been for a long time. I saw this coming many moons ago and posted it here and elsewhere; the Republicrat half of the War/Money Party set up a little circus show of increasingly weird freaks and wack jobs and then ended up with this Richie-Rich Caspar Milquetoast imbecile so as to present a false choice. Once again, a total charade for the benefit of Mr. and Mrs. Boobus Americanus and the rest this sorry-ass nation.
We’ll have, once again, half the country voting for him and the other half, a polyglot of the very people Mittens was accurate about in his alleged uber-gaffe at that fundraiser that everyone is all hot over on the net, will re-elect The Prophet, Barack Hussein, many blessings be upon his name. And we will have another four years for him and his regime, under orders from our overlords and masters, to continue destroying what was once a constitutional republic with a rule of law.
And the one-issue-only Tea Party types, the Republicrat country-club hierarchy and the so-called official libertarians will be screaming that it is all our fault for not voting for Mittens, a picture of whom I recently saw glad-handing Bibi, in essence telling Bibi to forget Barry Osama, “I’m your bitch, Bibi!” So, of course, whatever Likud wants to do with regard to anything, including a probable full-scale attack on Iran next month, is just peachy with Mittens.
But Barry might go for it after all, just before the election, stay tuned, sportsfans.
And like someone just said here, to Hell with both of them.