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What killed the public option?

$19 million and 5 purchased votes shot down the best change that could have ever come to this country.

Max Baucus got $7,734,102, Blanche Lincoln received $4,190,592, Ken Conrad took in $3,287,891, Bill Nelson was given $2,414,895 and Tom Carper accepted $1,592,380 from health industry interests. [Source, Intershame.com, Bought by the Insurance Lobby]

These Senators clearly voted against the wishes of their constituents who 81% favor the public option. Is this another example of the Government of the Corporation? In CEO We Trust.

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Now where’s my unicycle?

Years ago I had a unicycle. Years ago I was a mountain biker. As I approach 40. I lament that I may never do these things again. Perhaps I need to rethink that.(that was an awkward forced sentence because I don’t really feel that way) {Dear Reader, Fill in something here that connects the thought that I used to do these things and he still does as my Muse escapes me. Then skip all these words and just watch the video.} At 53 years old, Unigeezer is both unicycling and mountain biking like someone in their 20s!

Check out UniGeezer.

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Killer Stress

Stress will make my life shorter.

I woke this morning feeling hung over but I didn’t have anything to drink. For that matter, I had a decent amount of sleep, slept like a rock, and had ultra vivid dreams. I know getting a handle on my stress is essential. The side effects of stress that I’m experiencing are increased absentmindedness, memory loss (rather recall issues..I believe the memories are there but the ability to draw them out is hindered by stress), sore muscles, headache, blurred vision, and exhaustion.

I want to live a long stress-free life. Time to get back to Quad II.

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Sometimes I hate computers

I spent some of this weekend making the final transition back to my desktop so that I could give Tommy full custody of his laptop back. Of course, before I gave it back, one of the dogs knocked the laptop off my desk breaking one of the keys. Fortunately there was no other damage. Saturday Sarah’s Palm Centro died. Unfortunately it is out of warranty and after 2 hours on the phone, AT&T declared it a hardware issue. My phone has turned flaky as all get out randomly turning itself off even in the middle of a phone call. Then the icing on the cake, this morning my desktop computer quit recognizing the new hard drive. I wonder if Denso is hiring. I think I could handle a union, an assembly and a repetitive task.

Update: Just to keep the day interesting, we brought a plant in from the porch in anticipation of tonight’s cold weather, placed the plant in the bathroom, Cathy got into the bath, then the yellow jackets started emerging from the plant’s soil.

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We need a single payer option

Health care reform is essential in this country. People are dying so that other people can put dollars in their wallets. That is wrong.

Kimberly Young, vibrant 22-year-old who was working at least two jobs in Oxford after graduating with a double major in December 2008, became ill about two weeks ago, but didn’t seek care initially because she didn’t have health insurance and was worried about the cost. "That’s the most tragic part about it. If she had insurance, she would have gone to the doctor," Brent Mowery, her friend and former roommate, said. [Source, Crooks and Liars, R.I.P. Kimi Young, 22, Another Casualty of Our For-Profit Deathcare System.]

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My workstation is almost working

After fighting with trying to clone my old 60 GB hard drive to my new 500 GB hard drive, I finally gave in and started from scratch. Since I was installing from Windows XP sp1 I was limited to 137 GB partition. Once Windows XP installed successfully I upgrade to sp 2 then sp 3 and installed all security patches and updates. Then I began reinstalling software beginning with Avast antivirus first quickly followed by iTunes.

Everything seemed to be going very well until I decided to actually switch back to working on the machine. I tried to remap my development servers but cannot browse my network. I get the error message:

WORKGROUP is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions.

This list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available

Guess I’m network troubleshooting this weekend.

Update: I made an important discovery today. None of the computers in the house see each other anymore. I used to be able to open Windows explorer and browse to My Network Places then to Entire Network then to Microsoft Windows Network then to MSHome (the workgroup) then to a specific machine that was visible on the network. However at the workgroup level the error message above occurs. I thought it was specific to this Windows XP machine but I reproduced it on another Windows XP machine. Then I tried browsing the network with Windows Vista and also could not see any of the LAN. So on my newly installed Windows XP machine, I tested pinging various machines on the network with success. So in Windows Explorer I typed a machine name and a known shared directory "\\mickey\www" and successfully browsed the remote directory. I then successfully mapped the drive. On my Ubuntu Linux 8.04 workstation, I clicked Places then Network Servers then Windows Network and get the message "Unable to mount location – failed to retrieve share list from server" which in the past would have simply listed all the devices on the local area network.

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Of Being Dad – TP

The center of the Toilet Paper roll is filled with Tooth Paste. I should mention that between basic needs, the fun of simply spinning it off the roll, making mummies, and doubling as dog chew toys, we use a bunch of toilet paper. Second to food, toilet paper is given the highest priority in this house. Rethining that, I might allow us to run out of food before I would ever dare to run out of toilet paper. To have the toilet paper roll flopping around on the holder like a flat tire on a car and simultaneously smelling bubble gum (flavor tooth paste like bubble gum and children brush more) was a little unexpected first thing in the morning. This is the joy of parenting and, no, tooth paste in the toilet paper was not in the manual.