My man, Paul Krugman, weighs in on Kerry’s proposed health plan. As we get closer to the respective party conventions, I’m very interested to see what Kerry/Edwards have to offer. I’m convinced that Bush has to go, but they still haven’t convinced me that they’re the right replacement. There are actually a few other alternatives.
I just read this report from the New Republic. I’m posting a link here now and pointing it out so that I can refer to it later.
I realize that it creates a catch-22 for the Bush administration, but if they are applying added pressure to Pakistan now because of the election and it produces the capture or demise of Bin Laden, Zawahiri or Omar before the end of the summer, it’s the height of cynical politics. They should’ve been pressing Pakistan for the last two and a half years instead of focusing so much attention on Iraq. For some reason, this report in particular really pisses me off, but doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Just doing my part in waging the War on Pornography. I’m sure you can guess which side I’m on.
Our cable modem is constantly dropping out now. One minute you’ll have a connection and the next minute it’s gone, necessitating a reboot of the router which can’t seem to keep up. I put in another call to Time Warner tech support on Sunday. They’re sending out yet another tech tomorrow afternoon. This one is supposed to do a more in-depth investigation than the one that came out a little over a week ago. I’m hoping that they can resolve it as it’s interfering with work and play. SBC has been trying to woo me with cheaper DSL. If Time Warner doesn’t make me happy, I may be making the switch.
I ended up spending half of the day at Little City using their free wireless connection to VPN into work and get some things done. It’s much closer to home than trekking all the way up to my office. I felt a little out of place with my sad old Dell Latitude among all of those Powerbooks. I suppose someone writing .NET code on a Dell would fit in better at Starbucks, but they don’t have the free Internet. It being the first occasion for me to spend so much time using free wifi in a public place, I was reminded of Chip’s comments on free wifi etiquette. It helps that our babysitter was working the counter, so I don’t feel so bad about spending a lot of time there. Little City, at least, seems to encourage the practice of camping out. They’ve added a fairly long power strip on one wall to allow people to plug-in. It wasn’t very crowded yesterday afternoon either.
We spent the 4th at Andy’s and watched the fireworks from his front yard. We took a fair number of pictures. I’ll update the pic of the week tonight and send out shots to those attendees who requested them.
I just noticed that the last post was my 300th. I’m not sure what it means, but I thought that I’d point it out. Meanwhile, there was some chaos going on at Sofia’s yesterday. You can check out video and pictures here.
It appears that Howard Stern will return to the Austin airwaves on July 19th when Infinity puts him on in nine markets, some of which include those from which Clear Channel dropped him.
It looks like he’s going to be on 104.3 FM, which seems kind of odd given that it’s a hip-hop format, but the other local Infinity-owned stations aren’t really much more compatible. I enjoy a little Howard now and then. He was on the air here around the time that the film version of Private Parts came out. It’ll be a good counterbalance to my current morning drive diversion. I wonder how Mr. Dudley feels about Mr. Stern’s return?
On another local radio note, The Bloody Tears will be on Eklektikos tomorrow just after noon. I used to play with a lot of the guys in that band before I hung up my sticks to become Dad™.
This is amusing.
Yep, we’ve done a great job. Things are definitely much better now in Iraq. Thank you, Mr. Bush. You can go back to Crawford now and take Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle with you. Please?
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been attempting to upgrade some things on the site, but my test server and Internet connection aren’t cooperating. Busy yourselves with a bit of humor at the president’s expense.
Our internet access came back as mysteriously as it left. We’re still scheduled for a visit from a tech tomorrow. I’m going to wait and see if it lasts before I decide to cancel it.
Time Warner’s not the only large service provider screwing up lately. We switched to SBC from MCI at the end of March for our local and long distance service. I noticed a charge from MCI last month that seemed a bit late, so I called and asked about it. I was assured by the rep that this was a partial bill and would be the last one. Of course, it wasn’t and I got billed the same amount again this week. It turns out that they’re still billing me for long distance, even though I switched. When I called and pointed this out this morning, I was told that SBC needed to notify them and then the service would be disconnected. I moved on to SBC who said that they did, in fact, notify MCI, otherwise they couldn’t have started long distance for me and that it was “illegal” for me to be charged by two long distance carriers at the same time. Their advice was to go back to MCI and tell them that it had been done and to send them a copy of the confirmation letter that I received if necessary. Already pissed off about getting the runaround, I called MCI back ready to tear them a new one. Before I could get started, the rep that answered my second call politely cancelled the long distance and credited back the two months that they owed me.
You have to love big companies. I call two different reps in the space of an hour and get wildly different service and responses. Of course, I’ll probably get billed again next month, but the joke’s on them. The credit card that they’ve got on file has changed for security reasons and they won’t be able to bill a damn thing anyway. It’s unclear to me how or if this will affect crediting the charge prior to the card change. On top of it all, I’ve wasted an hour at work dealing with this and then telling you about it.
Even better, I’m now considering VoIP from AT&T which would mean another carrier switch and the possibility of no phone service at all at the house if I randomly lose internet access again. Isn’t technology cool?