Molt Be Blog

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Things to Do: Get Married. Check.

Yes. It's true. Put a big check mark next to married. R and I tied the knot on Monday at the DC Superior Court. The big party with all the family in town isn't until September, but with different nuclear family members going in and out of town over the summer, the best time to get them down to DC turned out to be this past weekend.

I'll write a longer update at some point, but this week work is literally beating me over the head with a stick as I have a pretty complicated piece of site to design by the end of the day tomorrow and don't yet have the data in place to base it on.


L1060429.JPG

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Friday, June 22, 2007

The System Works!

Yes. I'm about to stop complaining about those sidewalk closed signs. Because today, without my having to even send a letter to a councilman, they literally closed an entire lane of U street to let people walk in it. This is exactly what I suggested the other week! Fantastic! Nice work DC... today.
Sidewalk (not so) Closed

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Sunday, June 17, 2007

Just what I've been up to...

20040811 - 033
A week from tomorrow, I'll be a married man. Sorry, ladies!

Not too much else to report. The last week at work involved a bit more project management and a little less coding than I'd normally like, but I'm largely in control of what I get to do, so just need to make a mental note to spend more less time considering budgets and timelines and more time considering if...then statements and while loops.


Wednesday evening, we went out to see the Feist/Grizzly Bear show and it was incredible. I came home to find that the Mac Book Pro here had decided to stop charging its battery since I'd plugged it in the night before. I looked around on the interweb a bit and read something saying that a firmware update (sorry... getting nerdy here) had been released for MBP batteries. I installed the update and was told that I needed to restart. I clicked OK, but the computer just shut down and showed my background screen for five minutes. At this point, I made the fatal mistake of just holding down the power button to shut it down hard.

When I went to turn it back on, nothing happened. I tried holding down the power button for a few minutes, tried holding down Command+Option+P+R to reset the PRAM, yada, yada. Nothing. It wouldn't work on AC power, with the battery or on AC with the battery removed. Nada. Luckily, I still had the other computer working and started to figure out that the battery was probably completely toast. As it was now about 1am, I gave up and went to bed with plans to try to solve the problem again on Thursday night.

As usual, I couldn't wait; so Thursday morning I took out the battery and unplugged the computer and let it sit for twenty minutes while I got ready for work. This "patience" approach worked once when the other computer wouldn't recognize an external drive after it had been accidentally unplugged. Apparently, just leaving everything unconnected for twenty minutes or so allows for various things to reset. It worked again this time and when I plugged the mac back in after 20 it powered right up... with the fan blowing full force and loudly.

Once it was running, the battery appeared with a little X and wouldn't accept a charge. Late for work, I hussled there with the laptop in tow and after a little internet research at lunch on dead batteries, made an appointment at the Apple Store online for Saturday morning.

Friday night R and didn't do much at all as she had to work early on Saturday morning. Shortly after she went to work, I went to the hell hole that is Pentagon City to get the battery replaced. This proved largely uneventful, except that I had to wait from 10:40 until 11am before anyone even said "hello" even though my appt was at 10:40. After some inspection, I was issued a new $110 battery for no charge as the current one was still under warranty.

With the laptop fixed, I spent another hour searching for a new pair of brown shoes for the wedding and finally found them at Aldo after finding nothing at DSW, Nordstrom's or Macy's. I hate the mall and high-tailed it out of there to end up spending the next 20 minutes waiting for the metro due to work being done on the Yellow, Green, Blue and Orange lines.

After R got off work, we scooted up to MD so that she could pick up her dress for the wedding. Once back, we ate dinner and then I went of to BeBar with CG, DK, and PG where we met up with some others and then ended the night at the Black Cat. All for now, though I suppose I should insert a picture up at the top to make this interesting...

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Saturday, June 09, 2007

Out and About

Went for a ride along the C&O canal today after getting the bike from R's parents' house the other weekend and realized that I should have been riding a lot more in the last year or two.
C&O Bridge 2


District of Columbia WWI Memorial

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Tuesday, June 05, 2007

All the news that's fit to be really depressed about

I knew there was a reason I only check in on the news once a day instead of looking at the 24 hour news cycle! What a horrible world we live in. To wit:

The NYT published this article on that troop surge's lack of efficacy. I found it surprisingly even-handed towards the Bush admin for their plan's failure... but then, he can only go so low in the polls, right?

Commanders Say Push in Baghdad Is Short of Goal

BAGHDAD, June 3 — Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.


After the NYT broke it, the Post picked it up here.

Also in Iraq news, the Guardian reports that all three of the captured soldiers from May are now dead.


Soldiers seized in Baghdad ambush are all dead, says video

The Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group of insurgents that includes al-Qaida in Iraq, released a video yesterday in which it claimed to have killed all three American soldiers who went missing in the country last month.
...
In a translation by Associated Press, the video makers say the captives were killed in retaliation for the intense US search for them: "Fearing that this will have bad repercussions, the State of Islam decided to, and announced, their killing, making it a bitter result for the enemies of God, because they were alive and then dead."


On the environmental front, Bush is asking for countries to set "aspiration goals" regarding greehouse gas emissions when you really know that he and his cronies are just going to try to find a way to make money off of carbon trading. Meanwhile, China Outlines Modest Environmental Goals, rejecting caps because they "hurt economic development". My real problem with the whole "hurts economic development" excuse is that I don't think it's a worthwhile excuse for polluting the environment. Production and profits may be sky high, but there's a larger cost that really needs to be considered. Someone needs to send China a copy of The Lorax and CC Bush while they're at it.

And last, but not least, Hillary speaks out about how her "faith" helped her deal with Bill's infidelity. Notice her non-demoninational use of the word "faith" and then ask yourself whether this is all just politics. And she really had me liking her after the debate last night on CNN!

Clinton: Faith Got Me Past Marital Woes

"I am very grateful that I had a grounding in faith that gave me the courage and the strength to do what I thought was right, regardless of what the world thought," Clinton said during a forum where the three leading Democratic presidential candidates talked about faith and values.

"I'm not sure I would have gotten through it without my faith," she said in response to a question about how she dealt with the infidelity.

"I take my faith very seriously and very personally," she said. "And I come from a tradition that is perhaps a little too suspicious of people who wear their faith on their sleeves."


As far as what she says about tradition, I actually understand since my Mom went to the same high school as Hillary and also has the same Mid-Western approach towards keeping religion personal.

Per the article, my candidate Obama had some good points that didn't talk about Bill's tomcatting.
Obama's appearance focused more on policy than the personal. Asked whether he agreed with President Bush's portrayal of the current global struggles in terms of good verses evil, Obama said there is a risk in viewing the world in such terms.

He said he believes that the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were the result of evil. But he said that the United States' treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay is unjust.

"The danger of using good verses evil in the context of war is that it may lead us to be not as critical as we should about our own actions," Obama said to applause.


OK, that's all I've got.

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Friday, June 01, 2007

Banksy?

Banksy?
I saw this graffiti and realized that I recognized it from somewhere. I think that it might be a Banksy, but can't really be sure. There are a few hits on Flickr to compare to that are tagged with both "Banksy" and "Rat" here, but this one looks a bit mocked up and doesn't carry the usual wit in the sign that the rat is holding.

The New Yorker just published this article in a recent issue, which, after reading, had me remembering about the Wired article on Banksy from August of 2005. I'm pretty sure I'd heard of him even before (in Adbuster's or something), but until reading the New Yorker article I hadn't even considered that he'd hit DC.

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