But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises — or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama’s aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.
You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you’re happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.
I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.
Camille Paglia, “Obama’s healthcare horror: Heads should roll — beginning with Nancy Pelosi’s!”, Salon.com, 2009-08-12
August 12, 2009
Woodworking tools from Altoids tins
Over at the Woodworking Magazine blog, they challenged their readers to come up with tools using Altoids tins as raw materials. The readers rose to the challenge, and then some:
I was worried this would happen. Some of the entrants to our contest to build a tool from an Altoids tin built tools that actually worked. Sigh. Woodworkers are so practical.
We’re also practical. And so the winner of our contest is Tom Bier, who built a working router plane from an Altoids tin. The tool is impossibly clever – you open the lid to store the iron and thumbscrew. Heck I’d buy one.
Final appearance of the Free Agent drive
In February, 2008, I bought a Free Agent USB hard drive to use as a backup device for the various computers in our home network. It lasted a month before failure started to set in. A few tweaks, a few visits to the support website, and it worked … until April. This time, it really was dead, so I got an RMA number, shipped it back, and eventually got a replacement drive.
The fact that I’m posting yet another tale of woe should tell you that the replacement was no better than the original. In fact, the replacement drive timed its failure to be almost as inconvenient as possible, failing just before it was needed to move files off a failing internal drive.
So the replacement drive has been sitting around for nearly a year, gathering dust. Yesterday, I wondered if it might be a problem that it wasn’t designed to work with Windows XP (why some deep thinking designer might have made that decision, I’ve no idea, but bear with me for a second). So I plugged it into my laptop, which is running Vista. It was recognized and configured immediately. I tested basic functionality by copying a few files over to the USB drive, then verifying that they were identical to the originals. Having passed that rudimentary test, I then dumped a medium-sized backup to the USB drive.
Twenty-six gigabytes of data went down … and 56 bytes were recorded on the USB drive. Yep. Bytes. Not Gigabytes, Bytes.
Now I’m going to borrow a sledgehammer, to ensure that this particular Free Agent drive never bothers anyone else . . .
Update, 14 August: Misery loves company: James Lileks posted a couple of tweets on a similar note.
Just had my fourth pocket hard drive go south. It won’t mount. Why does tech-talk sound like a robot’s sex-chat transcript?
It’s a Maxtor drive, btw. Apparently I enabled Daisy Mae Mode: looks hot, but can’t read or write.
Even more “rejected from the App Store” tales
Lore Sjoberg joins all the other sad-sack would-be iPhone/iPod Touch developers, having had all of his application rejected by those capricious Apple gatekeepers:
I, myself, have submitted several applications to the iPhone Developer Program, and have been rejected every time. I think if you look over my list of apps and the supposed reasons for their rejection, you’ll see that Apple’s decisions are pure whimsy, drawn up from the whimsy mines deep beneath the company’s headquarters in sunny Cupertino, California.
Low-Fat Chicken Breast Recipe Book
Apparently, Apple can’t even handle the word breast, because it rejected this app, which is nothing more than a guide to cooking healthful, delicious, boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Each recipe comes with detailed instructions and a helpful video showing the dish being prepared by a naked porn star.[. . .]
Steal Me!
This handy app uses motion detection to determine when your iPhone has been set down for three minutes or more, at which point it begins to yells a recorded message: “Steal me! Just grab me and run! You can get a hundred bucks or so, easy! Spend it on drugs! Anyone who buys an iPhone has too much money anyway! Go for it!” I have no idea why Apple rejected this app, but I suspect the company is working on its own version and didn’t want the competition.
Cellaring your wine in restricted spaces
Liam sent me this link, which may be of interest to wine fans who don’t have a lot of space for a proper cellar:
What is a Spiral Cellar?
It’s the quickest, cheapest and easiest way of building a wine cellar for your house.
A watertight, pre-cast cylindrical system that’s sunk into the ground, it can be located anywhere from kitchen to conservatory, workshop to study. It can be installed into an existing ground floor room, or incorporated into the build of an extension or new property.
If you’re the sort of person who never keeps any wine for more than a week or two then a cellar might not be necessary. But if you always like to have a few dozen bottles around the place and tend to keep bottles for months or years before drinking them, then you need a Spiral Cellar.
Perhaps of less use for apartment and condominium dwellers, however.
