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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Georgia Primary Results

Governor Roy Barnes easily wins the Democratic primary. The Republicans will apparently have a run-off b/t Karen "I did NOT say gays are human" Handel and Nathan "I don't care about liberals, I care about you" Deal.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Georgia Politics - Good News

This year's gubernatorial race is going to be a good one. That is to say, no matter what happens Georgia will be miles better than it has been under Sonny 'The Chicken' Perdue.

First, the Republican. Don't get me wrong, I won't be voting for John Oxendine. A pro-life, pro-gun, Reagan Republican platform that under ordinary circumstances would make me want to puke. BUT - Oxendine has been a very good Insurance commissioner. Implemented some real reforms, worked harder for the people than the inscos (as far as I could see) and despite his conservative creds has been just what one wanted in the position - a public servant. Works hard, gets things done. Of course there's a down side to that - some of the things that he wants to get done are school vouchers, more abortion restrictions, and similar nonsense. But he also opposed state "high risk" health insurance pools because that's something the federal government should do, so there is hope. At least he doesn't want all the gays to go to hell and the Confederate Flag flying over the capitol (at least not publically) and wouldn't make Gerogia a laughingstock by praying for rain on the capitol steps. Plus, RedState says he must be defeated. So there must be something good about him.

But even better, on the Democratic side we have former governor Roy Barnes back in the race. Arguably the best governor Georgia has had in ... well, ever. He's no Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich, but after all this is the Deep South. Roy is strong on education, pretty strong on women's issues, strong on public transport and fair on healthcare. His platform is jobs jobs jobs (plus education reform) done right. He's smart, capable, and doesn't back down.

It's going to be a close race, both men are popular and go straight to the issues. If Oxendine stays clear of the 'social' issues, we could have here what America has been missing: an actual race decided by policy positions. I'm pulling as hard as I can for Barnes, but either way Georgia wins.

(cross posted at not Eschaton)

Monday, May 31, 2010

Grain Of Truth

For every winner, there is a loser. But not necessarily the other way round.

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Memorial Day on the VW Bus

Not having much to say on this day, we refer you to Ms F and Bluesman.

Life On The Bus: Memorial Day

Friday, April 30, 2010

Updates to FortyToo

Almost there. Version 3.2 is finished, including admin capabilities. With that, FortyToo is complete and ready to roll out.

So what's next? Building a marketing site, self-registration, and the revenue model. Oh, and some self-installing widgets for Blogger and Wordpress. For now, I can set anyone up pretty quickly that wants it but once it gets rolling I won't want to do each site by hand.

One of the cool new capabilities is picking a skin for the program - I'm still using the default skin here, but you can check out the others with these links:

JP - Forest Green

Satan - Orange

Simplicity - no side toolbar!

The structural changes I've been making to the program make it very easy to create new skins - so if someone wants a custom layout they can have one - for a small fee. And I'll be adding more stock skins. Each site gets to pick one skin, but can change it at any time.  Of course, I built a back door into the demo site so I can show any one of them by using different links.

I'll also be adding a demo Admin account so you can check out how easy it is - for now, only registered users can see the admin pages ('coz I don't want you messing with my settings).

If you are already using FortyToo as your Blogger or WordPress comment system (or really, anywhere else) it's easy to update: edit your template and replace bensonmum.com with fortytoocomments.com - or just wait a couple of days, I'll be updating the scripts to point to the new site. Be aware that when you do switch over, all saved preferences, nuke lists, nyms, emails, etc. will be lost. It's a Flash security thing, I can't help it. But they aren't hard to reset.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Come on Jon... You Know Why

Jon Stewart expressed - in his unique style - anger and dismay at the insurance industry tonight. It seems that although the new Health Insurance Reform bill prohibits refusing coverage to children, inscos have already found a loophole.

Jon was shocked. Shocked! Not that there was a loophole, but that the inscos went looking for it. Are they just pure evil? Do they want to be sure to catch the Haydes Express?

No, Jon. It's far simpler than that. And less sinister.

What they are is businessmen. And corporations. And shareholders. They do not exist to help poor sick children. They exist to make money. That is the nature of the free market and for-profit service industry.

Which is of course the whole problem.

Three undeniable truths about the free market: You get what you pay for,
not everyone can afford everything, and profits come from charging more than cost.

As long as we have for-profit health insurance, we don't have univeral health care. By definition.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Three Days in Spring

My regular readers (both of you) are aware that I am not particularly religious, in much the same way that Jupiter is not a particularly hospitable planet. This is not because I'm not familiar with the scripture - if anything, because I am. Which is why I can appreciate the cunning of setting the resurrection myth at the beginning of Spring. As though life from death were a good thing. Or rather, that our ability to perceive this great joke were. Intelligent Design indeed.

I've spent two days in the garden now, and tomorrow will be the third. Killing weeds. Tearing up unwanted wild raspberries. Hacking the limbs off perfectly healthy but overgrown bushes. The great destroyer, armed with clippers and rakes and hedgers and a chain saw. All to make room for new life. And if some of the bushes don't survive the onslaught no worries - they can be replaced with fresh ones. They won't be missed.

Or will they? There's the rub.

New life is a wonderful thing, no doubt. But it can never replace the old lives extinguished, the old loves lost, the flowers that never bloom again. And we alone perhaps in the universe get to understand that in time these too will fade, and new weeds will always return. The circle of life is necessarily a circle of death.

Which is why the resurrection myth is so appealing. This one time, and one time only, the same life comes back. The concept is wonderful to imagine.

I just would have chosen someone else to be that one.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Donnie Darko

As I watched Donnie Darko on DVR tonight, it occured to me that someone wrote that movie. Someone thought of it, wrote it, and turned it into a movie.

And it made me realize again how little I want to go back to sitting in an office creating software to make someone else rich helping other rich people sell things.

Creating art is more than a desire. It is a physical necessity. Air and water. Life. And for as long as I am compelled to hang on to this rock, however tenuously, I am determined to live. Because survival just doesn't seem that important to me.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Asstounding

I had a lot of fun going through the Teabonics flikr group (h/t Bo). The misspelled signs are often ironic ("English is our lanaguage, learn it!") and sometimes just amusing. I know, I know. Cheap shots. I'm not such a great speller myself, and there is no spell check on a piece of posterboard.

But before I start feeling guilty about making fun of the educationally challenged, allow me to share this one:


It's not just a problem with the language. It's a problem with the whole concept of America.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Depression

Once I wrote a program
made it run
billed the client for time.
Once I built a network
now it's done.
Brother can you
spare a dime?

Sunday, March 7, 2010

SNL - A swing and a miss

Political humor works best when it hits issues people care about. SNL stepped up to the plate last night with an opening bit with Obama, flanked by Pelosi and Reid, promising to pass the Health bill despite it being "terribly unpopular."

The wind-up, the pitch; and it's a slow sinking curve. Pelosi, Obama tells us, is safe at home in San Fran, but Reid could be out thanks to the very, very unpopular bill. Steeeeee-rike!

No one cares whether Harry comes or goes. He's a non-issue compared to the one standing there with a bat: why is the Health Insurance Reform bill, the Democrat's comprehensive legislation on the issue that swept them into the White House and solid majorities in the House and Senate, so deeply, deeply unpopular? it's funny when you think about it.

You can blame the Republican parlimentary procedures, or the Fox news misinformation campaign, or the ranting fringe teabaggers or the effect of insurance lobby money. As though it were a great bill that people would get behind if they only understood what it was about.

That's the pitch they should have swung at. Maybe they would have even hit upon the real reason: voters don't want everyone to have access to health insurance.

We want everyone to have access to health care. Health insurance  is the thing preventing that.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Not Careful

Everyone from Sean Hannity to Jon Stewart was talking about Obama's big presser yesterday. They all got it wrong. They all said it was about Health Care Reform; except for Obama himself of course - he was very careful to call it what it is: Health Insurance Reform.

And therein lies the problem. Or rather, the wrong problem. So please be careful.

Monday, March 1, 2010

When two companies love each other very much

America: the nation where corporations can marry, but gay citizens cannot.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Open House

Hey everyone - thanks for attending FortyToo's Open House - and thanks JP, Curly and Larry Elvis for hosting it. Coming out parties are always so exciting!

I've got to work today, so I can't give detailed answers to every question, suggestion or complaint. I don't really even have time to bask in the praise! But I'll address a couple of things quickly, and add the rest as FortyToo comments here tomorrow.

First, the "crash:" this is, as someone pointed out, the reason we have Beta versions. There was not a server problem. There was not a volume problem. As with all systems, there is an upper limit, but 288 comments isn't it. I've tested over 900, which with the Alpha version started showing some slowdown, mostly due to the Gravatar connection - Beta doesn't slow down there, but it can take a while for all the "hides" to work through. In either case, once the initial thread is loaded, it speeds right back up.  And the text version is totally immune to volume, unless you use "0" as your page size. Which is one reason why it is paged.

No, the problem was isolated to one post and simply stopped everything after that from displaying. I know what the problem with the post was and fixed it, but still have to work out how it got in there in the first place.

There were some very good suggestions I'll be implementing, some that we've already discussed and planned, and some that sound good but would actually be very annoying.

For example, the reason that refresh doesn't take you to the next new post (it only moves the scroll bar and shows how many comments that try retrieved) is that it can happen automatically. If you were in the middle of reading a previous comment and suddenly the window scrolled to the bottom, you would be mightily and rightly well pissed. However, I might be able to have it jump there only if manually refreshed.

And it isn't really "refresh" - that's the difference. I shouldn't label it that way. It's really "Get New."

There are plans to give more control to the auto-rate, but it's a performance thing. It's really not there for active conversation (click the NOW counter button whenever you want) but for when comments are trickling in and you just want to see them come while you're working on another window. If every lurker on every blog that was using FortyToo hit the server every five seconds (even when no new comments were available) it would eventually slow things down.

So what I'm planning is a "smart" timer, that adjusts itself to how fast comments are arriving. That will be a while coming.

What else? Let's see ... Preview is indeed broken. I must have done something on the last update that upset it. And when you go to Text mode there are no scrollbars - that's a side-effect of opening the initial Flash window with no bars, they can't be turned on once the window is open. But I do have a way around it, I'll implement it tomorrow. Copy/Paste will come eventually, but it's kind of a big deal with the Flash Text/Graphics Engine. Some of you may remember that when PDF first came out, you couldn't copy/paste with Acrobat Reader either. It's a similar issue. The question is, will I get around to doing the complex code involved before Adobe updates the platform to make it easier? Probably. I'm faster than they are.

Thanks again everyone, hope you enjoyed your night out from the Trolls and we'll all talk again soon.

--dirk gently, sociopathetic

Saturday, February 20, 2010

FortyToo, Also - vers 2.0 BETA

Things are trucking right along with FortyToo - the only commenting system to use Bensonmum Troll-b-gone technology. Version 2.0 is up, it looks a bit cleaner, it's easier to work with and it has the NUCLEAR OPTION.

Check it out by commenting here, or over at JP's site.  Or check out the newest feature description at http://bensonmum.com/comments.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Forty, Too!

Well, I've done it. I've switched over to the Best Comment System In The World, AKA Forty Too. OK, it's not even in Beta yet and can only be accessed with Flash so far, but that will be changing very soon. No one really comments here anyway, I just wanted to make it work with Blogger. So, yeah, I've got to do an auto-install widget someday. But for now, it's only a three line change in the template and if anyone wants to use it you can email me your Blogger template and I'll switch it for you. Or just tell you the lines. Of course, this implies you know my email address and I know you. It's not for the unwashed masses yet.

When I finish the non-flash version I'll set up some Terms Of Service and start assigning site names (you'll need me to get Admin capabilities anyway) but for now knock yourselves out. I'm also working on a comment importer - I'll at least do one for Blogger, maybe for JSKit. We'll see.