After watching the almost 8 minute long, lucid explanation of why Colin Powell endorsed Obama, it saddens me to think of all of the people, meaning people like Rush Limbaugh and his fans, who boiled it down in their minds to six ridiculous words: “It’s because he’s black.”
Colin Powell’s Endorsement
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_NMZv6Vfh8
We need to get beyond this kind of race-baiting rubbish.
I also, regardless of whether it’s a political ploy or not (and I don’t think it is), very much respect Obama’s decision to leave the campaign trail and visit his sick grandmother. To temper our ambitions and remember our most important relationships, is to ensure that we don’t forget our own mortality.
that the Gods must really enjoy messing with humans.
Pretty nice day today, really nice actually. Went for a 30km bike ride to the Mueggelsee, a small lake on the east side of Berlin, and got to see a lot of the suburbs on that side of town, some nice, some very GDR. Had a great time, though I also managed to get lost once. But then, that was the most fun part.
So I finally made the jump to Linux on my laptop. There was a problem with the Trackpoint that caused the mouse to generate a couple of hundred interrupts per second on the default Ubuntu 8.04 install, that I had to fix by unscrewing the keyboard and then detaching the PS/2 ribbon cable from the Trackpoint module. The thing was broken anyway, so it really was just a pure source of problems. I also had the chance to clean out the fan module, and that thing was just utterly disgusting. I notice that it runs way more quietly and cools the processor way more efficiently now, so that was one step that was overdue.
Otherwise, I’m pretty impressed with the system’s speed. Flash actually plays video more smoothly than under Windows, and the package management is all but seamless. Firefox works just fine, and Skype also works just fine. The wireless LAN setup was also smooth as silk. So all in all, I would only need Windows for games at this point.
Well, that, and FlashDevelop. But I don’t have to use it to do Flash development.
We had a great rainstorm in Berlin today, just a huge wall of water coming down, cutting visibility down to maybe 50 meters. Watching that come in over the city from our office on the 13th floor was for some reason stunningly beautiful.
Our secretary came around and asked us if any of our floor-to-ceiling glass windows were leaking. Nope. I love the view from my office.
Oh, and I bought a set of 6 red and 6 white wine glasses, and will probably buy another set of each tomorrow, or the next time I take the train to work (I can’t haul that stuff back on my bike, fool!). Also in the plans, a bunch of champagne glasses. I’m stocking up for the next, or should I say first, einweihungs party I can throw.
-777 points. It’s your lucky day, Wall St!
Yeah, I’m still alive, no worries.
New things: Bought a digital SLR last week and shot 500 photos with it over the weekend (a wedding). That was pretty nice. It’s a good camera that I need to use more.
Otherwise, not much else to report. Been very, very busy at work.
I’ve been renovating my apartment in Berlin for the past few weeks now (which sucks), and getting it in line with my own comfort levels, and I have to say, whoever it was who used cheap-ass paint on top of, I believe, and oil base layer, deserves to be punished. I say that because the paint on the ceiling of my living room decided to peel right off after I painted over it two weeks ago and I’ve been dealing with the consequences ever since. I hate people who do stupid things and don’t have to bear the results. In any case, to avoid having to strip everything off the ceiling and reprime the whole thing, I’m now basically experimenting, to see what I can do to get paint to go up and stay up, so I don’t have to redo everything ten times over. The whole process has left me a bit exhausted and annoyed, since it doesn’t make doing good things like renovating an enjoyable process that feels rewarding.
So I attended the Obama speech at the Siegessäule with a couple other Americans and found it somehow lacking in punch. He’s a good orator, but in this case, his material sort of sucked. I came away from the event with the impression that many of the Germans attending were also underwhelmed. Too bad. Some of my coworkers noted that there was an upside to it: Obama managed to speak for 30 minutes without really conveying a recognizable key point, the speech just sort of wandered, but didn’t challenge us to reach the moon, or defeat communism, or what have you. What we were left with was a call to tear down the barriers between the haves and the have-nots in the world. Unfortunately, as track records go on that matter, the U.S. has a long way to go.
So I’ve been doing some measurements on my household appliances (my measurement device is getting a workout, and I’m getting my money’s worth). Anyway, turns out the new fridge is something like 4-5x more efficient, where the old one was eating 1kWh every day, this one’s only chewing up maybe 200-250Wh, while my beer is even colder than before.
And my washing machine is quieter and much more efficient than the old, chewing up only about 370Wh for a 30deg.C load. This is not bad.