Mostly about my amusement

Month: October 2008 (page 1 of 2)

Governor Palin shows lots of class

Okay, I guess Bill Ayers 15 minutes are up.  Now their linking Senator Obama with the PLO.

Here is the appropriate response:

The Obama campaign called Palin’s remarks “another recycled, manufactured controversy from the McCain campaign to distract voters’ attention from John McCain’s lockstep support for George Bush’s economic policies.”

Palin accuses Obama of ties to second ‘radical professor’ – CNN.com

Not able to speak intelligently about the McCain campaign’s proposed policies for energy, foriegn policy, and the economy, she continues to appeal to the worst of their supporters. Why can’t they just talk up what THEY would do in the white house? CNN has a fact-check article here.

I know that Governor Palin’s time is running down, and if John McCain loses this election I’ll be glad just to get Palin out of the news cycle.  That is, assuming McCain loses.  I am pretty sure that election night is going to be a nail biter.

Senator Stevens is convicted of all 7 counts!

Holy mackerel.

Mr. Stevens’s defense was largely built on the notion that many of the goods and services he received were unasked for, and were things for which he had no use.

Alaska Senator Is Convicted of Violating Ethics Rules – NYTimes.com.

I’m reading it but I don’t believe it.  Wonder if he’ll resign? 8 days left in his race.  It would not be the first time a convicted criminal was elected into office and it’s a good bet he’ll appeal.

But if he has to serve some prison time how will he serve as senator? I wonder if he’ll do the right thing and resign?

Fall Anime

I’ve picked up watching Gundam 00 Season 2 and the going is slow.  I know it’s only the third episode but it’s really reminding me of Zeta Gundam.  That’s probably an overreaction but if a Camille Biden clone shows up then I’m walking away from the series.

The other show I’m starting is Ga Rei Zero.  It’s a horror show based on a manga.  The basic story is that evil spirits are violently attacking people.  These spirits can only be seen using special equipment or you need to be born with the natural ability.

People with this ability fight using weapons that have been “blessed”. The action is good and the animation is very well done.  One on the people introduced rides a motorcycle and uses the wheels to attack “Category C” spirits.

It’s a horror anime alright. The entire team that is introduced to the viewer is massacred in the last 5 minutes of the first episode.  That was an odd twist and I expected some of them to be revived in the second episode.  That did not happen and I’m interested enough to see how the show plays out.

Joost got better

One of the things that I did not like about Joost was it needed a client to work. On my PCs that client frequently crashed so I uninstalled it and did not bother to try it much.

Now they’ve converted to a Flash based web page.  I’ve just watched some of my favorite scenes from The Professional and a CSI episode. So far there is a brief ad before the show but it’s not intrusive.  It went from a kludgy client to a simple web based service.

I don’t think I’ll watch whole movies on Joost but it just got added to my list of fun time wasters.

Cleaning up the WP database

WordPress blogs are based on MySQL and all the dynamic content is stored in a database. After trying out plugins, odd themes, and generally screwing around, my database has items in it that I can’t even recall what they were or if I need them.

One way to clean out the database is to export the blog to an XML file.  This will produce the posts, pages, and all the comments and not export the ton of junk in the database.  This way I create a clean empty blog, add the users, set up the theme and look I want and import the data.

This produces a very clean installation. It also removes me as the author for the comments I’ve left on my own blog. The table wp_comments table has a user_id field that the XML file does not have.

What I wanted to do is run a MySQL command that will find all instances in wp_comments which match my e-mail address, and update that record with my user_id on the blog. I could do this one at a time using phpMyAdmin but that’s pretty inefficient, not geeky, and time consuming.

After some research I found out to run these commands:

$ mysql -p
USE blogdatabase;
Database changed
SELECT * FROM wp_users WHERE user_email = 'notreally@myemail.com';

That gets me the ID number for my user.  Since it’s the first user created the ID is 2.

UPDATE wp_comments SET user_id = 2
WHERE comment_author_email = 'notreally@myemail.com';
Query OK, 113 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 113  Changed: 113  Warnings: 0

This updates the wp_comments table so comments left by me using my e-mail address.

Governor Palin abused her position and so what?

The report is in and apparently Governor Palin (or her husband, I can’t tell which) has abused her position. And it does not matter one bit. The folks who will vote for McCain only care about ethics, rules, and laws when it applies to Those Darned Socialist Democrats.

If anything this will solidify the base of voters who will claim that Governor Palin is the target of a political hit job. Any conservative who writes about Palin in anyway negative will simply get targeted as a not-country-first turncoat. That’s what Joe Six Pack says, anyway.

John McCain does show some signs of realizing what he’s doing, but he apparently still wants to get elected at any cost.  I still believe that he’s not really this scare mongering talking head (I liked McCain in 1999). But this is his last chance and I think in the next 2 weeks we’ll see the McCain campaign full out the stops.

Gundam 00 Season 2 begins

The second season of Gundam 00 has begun.  No huge surprises yet but this season seems to be imitating Zeta Gundam more and more.  I’m pretty sure we’ve just met the group that will be this series Titans.

I wonder how long it will be before Bandai produces a Master Grade 1/100 scale version of the Exia?  The Exia looks like this episode is it, so that ought to make it a good candidate.

60 foot tall fighting robots.  The kids and I will have fun watching this one.

That was totally expected, no release for those 17

Those 17 not-enemy-combatants that Pakistan handed to the U.S.? An emergency motion blocking their release was granted to the administration.

That’s not surprising; I expected that the administration would not have bothered with a court order.  I mean, they could have just refused to comply.

This whole situation is ridiculous.  If this is really an immigration issue, why not transfer them to an immigration detention center?  Isn’t that where immigrants who are being processed for deportation go? That way it really does become an immigration status problem.

The Bush administration has already released over 400 prisoners to other countries. While the 17 do not have a place to go, keeping them in the U.S. gulag can’t be the right thing to do.