the reality tunnel

I’m in Oakland for the CR10 conference.  We flew in a day early and it was nice to have some time to chill before being at the conference and to get to think about the content of the dialog that Decarcerate Monroe County is participating in at the conference.  I went running this morning around [...]

It’s dangerous to oversimplify what are ultimately complicated policy issues, like immigration, not to mention the huge variety of experience that immigrants face, but most of the public debate on this, and many other issues, seems founded on information, that, even at a basic level is pretty misinformed.  This diagram about different pathways to legal [...]

I’m running debian lenny/sid with  kernel 2.6.26-1 on my workstation and for a while, my audio hasn’t been working in most applications (I was most annoyed by the lack of sound in flash), though it has been working in amarok.  I was getting error messages like this when trying to do audio playback.  These particular [...]

If I ever need to check my tendency towards being a know-it-all or talking over people, I’m just going to watch this video.
The gender dynamic is insane as well.  I can’t imagine getting talked down to in this way by a colleague, especially when I was well researched, seemed to share the same political stance, [...]

At my high school, we called it sagging.  This word described the act of wearing baggy pants that would fall to mid-thigh and, if one’s t-shirt was not also quite oversized enough, reveal one’s boxer shorts.  In the midst of attempts by cities like Atlanta and Miami to criminalize sagging baggy pants, I thought [...]

I went to my first doctor’s appointment under the Healthy Indiana Plan yesterday, and went to the Volunteers in Medicine (VIM) clinic to get my records from the checkup I had there a year ago.  I wanted to write about these experiences and it seemed convenient to frame it in the metaphors of ‘a tale [...]

Extracting from a vimball
From http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=1502

Users of a vimball archive simply need to
:vim something.vba
:so %
and the contents of the vimball will be extracted and placed into the proper directories, no matter where the user opened up the vimball. Furthermore, the helptags command will be automatically and transparently used to make any doc/*.txt files’ contents available [...]

I’m terrified about the galvanization of power that could result this November.  If there’s one good thing about how candidates have been framed in this election, it’s that the response has become very clear and articulate.  The analysis that Rebecca Hyman applies to the election and the cultural back-and-forth about Palin, Clinton, and gender that [...]

I finally got off my butt and fixed a few things that had been driving me nuts with the settings on my workstation.
Weird KDE copy/select behavior
First, I use KDE, and the copy and paste behavior was driving me nuts.  If I copied text in an application with ctrl-c and then selected text with the mouse, [...]

I’ve been posting on the Defiance, Ohio website about why I’m voting for Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential election and why I think that people who connect with the content of Defiance, Ohio songs should vote, and vote for Obama.  I think there are limits to the power of voting, but I think punk [...]