House of the rising Moonglum

Why is this relegated to the last line on CNN? This seems like some of the biggest news of the year, and could be a direct result of US policy in the region combined with local groundswell. If true this could also be the biggest success of Bush’s policy to date. It appears that Mubarak has called for multi party elections for the office of president for the first time since the 1952 revolution deposed the monarchy to install a non-hereditary monarchy, often known as a dictatorship, but since they are the second largest recipient of US aid in the world we can’t really call it that.

There have been strong calls for a more democratic and open process in Egypt for years, but the calls have become much louder in the past few months with the elections in Iraq and Palestine. In particular Egypt recently arrested Ayman Nour a member of Parliment who was advocating multi party elections. The US has strongly criticized this for the last few weeks, and has of course been “encouraging democratic reforms” in the region for years now. I wonder if this added pressure, plus the locals wondering why if Iraq and Palestine, two countries under occupation, can have open and fair elections that they can not, have led to this announcement? Now to be fair, Mubarak was elected in the first place as was Arafat and Saddam. So taking this from an announcement through real open and fair elections is a looooong walk, and in addition this reform is only for the office of the president, but parliament has had other reforms recently, so I see this as a very hopeful sign for the most populous Arab nation.

Some of you may remember when I tried to fix my screen using the one from a wallstreet that my father-in-law sent me. It was impressive but showed that I needed a new I/O board. Well I have been looking around on e-bay for a while, and they are easy to get for $100, but harder to get for less. Well that seemed like a lot of money for something that might not even work, so I tried to get if for less a number of times and finally sniped it for about $20. End of story: I now have a working laptop again, but replacing the io board is an exciting process as it is the bottom board on the computer. Follow is the story.

First, you’ll need a torx 8, a small phillips head, and a chip remover. The little grabby thing helps too.

Once you have all that start taking off all the bits and carefully lay them out so you can put it back together.

When you are finally done, there will be a lot of parts everywhere …

… and be left with an empty shell.

Once you’ve done that, all you need to do is swap out the IO board.

Well that was a lot of work to take apart so it will probably be a lot of work to put back together. It would be nice to test it out before doing to. So what are the minimal amount of things you need for a computer? I sure don’t know, but my guess is: an IO board, a power supply, a processor board, a hard drive, and an external power source:

The first pass will use an external monitor since that worked before.

Do ya feel lucky punk? Well do ya?

Well that test worked out just fine, so now for the real test. Grab that old screen and slap it on. Of course you’ll need a good screen holder.

And then… IT LIVES!!!!!

So there is a sequl to the worst album covers ever. The first cover in the second list is the Manowar anthology. And one of the comments is “Other bands rock, manowar kill!” Oh yeah.

Last week was my Dad’s 60th birthday. He loves good food and good wine, so we treated him to a really nice meal and some really nice wine. And my brother treated him to a reeeeeally nice bottle of wine. A number of people have asked me how it was, so I thought I would write it up here.

First of all we went to Charlie Trotter’s, which if you have never been is a really nice once in a year kind of place. It is the kind of place where you don’t order, they just keep bringing you food. In terms of atmosphere, it was a little less formal that Tru, which I appreciated, but you didn’t get the same crazy presentation. So, what was the meal like? Well for starters, here’s the menu, please note that many of the courses have a wine associated with them. If they do the wine is listed with it. My review is interspersed. Please note that each of the courses was quite small, so we were actually able to make it through the meal, but also note that I don’t really drink much at all, so was completely wasted by the end of the meal.

Nantucket Bay Scallops with Watermelon Radish & Sea Urchin
- Pierre Peters “Le Mesnil sur Oger” Brut 1997 -

The champaign was good, but whites don’t really do it for me, so someone else would be a better judge. The scallops though, mmmm. I loves my scallops. The horrifying thing is that I don’t remember the sea urchin in this one.

Poached South African Langoustine, Stewed Shellfish with Fennel Gelée and Marine Cider Vinaigrette

This course made my wife really happy. There were some yummy oysters or something. But it was also disturbing because it had squid. I mean whole squids. Little baby ones that sat on the plate that you ate whole. I’m not used to eating a whole animal in one bite. Mind you, that didn’t stop me from enjoying it.

Steamed Japanese Tai with Soup of Sunflower Root & American Sturgeon Caviar
- Chablis “Les Vaillons” Domain Laroche 2000 -

This was by far the best fish course. The tai was incredible, the soup amazing, and the caviar held it all together. The soup was just a dab on the side, more a sauce for the fish, but just amazing. Also, remember how I said I don’t like white wine? Well this one was making me change my mind. It wasn’t very sweet, and had a wonderful flavor.

Bobwhite Quail with Maitake Mushrooms, Boudin and Roasted Garlic Polenta
- Morey-St. Denis “Clos de la Bussière” G. Roumier 1999 -

This course and the wine were wonderful. I don’t normally think of polenta as cuisine, but it really worked well especially with the quail. At this point there was enough wine around that the dinner conversation started to get really interesting. I believe that this is where the pig with a wooden leg joke was told for the benefit of the one non member of the family who was the only one who hadn’t been subjecte— er hadn’t heard the joke.

Summerfield Farm Veal Loin with Cocoa Nibs, Trumpet Royale Mushrooms & Chocolate Emulsion
- Chateau Figeac, Saint-Emilion Première Gran Cru Classe 1945 -

This is where the wines went to an entirely different level. My brother spent a year looking for this wine, and the fact of the matter is that between calling to make sure it was ok to bring it in and picking wines to go around it, the entire menu was mostly based on leading up to and then eating with this wine. You will of course note that the wine came from the year of my dad’s birth. So apparently 1945 was an unusually good year for french wine. Apparently in wine books rather than rate that year, they just put a star there telling you, wow. Apparently the wine that year was fed by the blood of french patriots. This wine in particular was a good wine from that year. Now when getting a bottle of wine that old, there is always the risk that it has gone bad, fortunately my brother managed to find three half bottles rather than one whole bottle. The fill levels were good, so they were transported here. The sommelier corked them and proclaimed that all three were good! (I guess he can tell by smell.) He brought out the special glasses (”please don’t hold these too hard, the glass is like paper.” “how many of these do you break in the kitchen?”) and they were poured. And oh my goodness. They were quite good. They tasted like blue cheese had melted on your tongue, and the wine taste was amazing. I have never had anything like this in my entire life and probably never will again. I know very little about wine and wine tasting, but I know that that was the best wine I have ever and probably ever will have. Really old wine like this doesn’t last long once you open it, but these guys laster more than 20 minutes. But near the end of that time we did have to drink them down. Mmmm. My tummy is still glowing. We sent a couple tastes down to the kitchen, I think they enjoyed it.

Prickly Pear Sorbet with Black Quinoa

Mmm, this as a wonderful palette cleanser after that extravaganza.

Black Truffle Semi-Freddo with Ennis Hazelnut Praline & Forelle Pears
- Chateau de Fargues, Sauternes 1989 -

This desert wine was great, but I was getting really full by now, and don’t really remember the actual food at this point. From here on out it was all about the ruckus conversation.

Indonesian Chocolate Crepe with Kaffir Lime Emulsion
Mignardises

Man was I full by here. I remember they stuck the nuts food in front of my sister in law before bringing out her dessert which had no nuts in it. *sigh* But all in all it was a incredible time, and everyone had fun and we had the whole family together, which was really the important part.

I’ve been reading the Blog of a soldier in Iraq for a while now. Lately it has been getting a little harder to read for at least some of my friends, so I know a lot of you have stopped reading it. If you were more into the Iraq stories and what it is like to be a soldier stories, you should make another stop by. She got back to the US recently and has been having a pretty easy time adjusting to life here, but she paints an amazing picture of the world through her eyes once again. If you have stopped reading her, read this. If nothing else it will put a good conclusion on what she was writing before. If you weren’t reading her, but are interested in the life of soldiers returning from war, read this as well.

So, I love windows hibernation. It makes it very easy for me to stop working in the middle of doing something, leave all the screens in the same place and come back and have it waiting for me. Well this morning, I started up, hoping that everything would be where I left it, and half way through loading in all of the state data, it brings up this screen telling me that there was a problem and would I like to erase the state and reboot, or continue booting with the broken data. It turns out that when you get that, you should choose erase the state and reboot. You’ll get a nice BSoD otherwise. *sigh* I guess maybe I won’t be trusting that quite so much in the future.

What’s going on in England? Well they are banning the fox hunts, which is all fine and good, and everyone and their dog (pun intended) has an opinion on it. Of course the real issues at stake are incredibly more complicated than just animal rights (though that is certainly a part of it). I just read a New Yorker article on fox hunting that should really be called a brief summary of English politics. Do you want a primer on the current state of UK politics? Read this article.

This is pretty old news, but there is finally one bright light in the eVoting arena. As many of you know I have had huge issues with eVoting for a while. The main problem being that it is nearly impossible to independently verify the results. It’s not that I am paranoid, it’s just that I know about assigning trust to different parties and when the producer of one of the largest eVoting machine manufacturers is talking about delivering votes for one candidate or the other, I don’t want to assign my trust there. Well the easy solution is a voter verifiable paper trail. It looks like there is a bill going through right now that may require that on all future eVoting systems. This would be one of the first good computer laws that I have seen in a long time if ever. It is amazing how little people know about technology who legislate it.

You must go read this summary of The Apple Product Cycle now. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. But only because it is so true. The author’s bio:

The author has been an Apple user since 1984. During that time, he has owned an Apple IIe, an Apple IIgs, a Mac SE/30, a Mac Quadra 660AV, a PowerComputing PowerCenter 150, and a Power Mac G3/350 (Blue & White). He currently uses a Dual 2.0GHz PowerMac G5 and a 12″ PowerBook G4. In spite of his loyalty to the platform, he finds most “Mac people” to be tiresome and annoying. He is pretty sure that if he had to attend WWDC or Macworld, he would wind up slapping the shit out of a bunch of people.

Thanks to Marty for pointing this out and to popvssoda.com for compiling the data. Now we can know for sure where the pop people and the soda people are. I have to say while I was growing up in California, I think that Coke generally won out, but looking at that map, it is only lightly soda, so I suppose it could be like 40/35/25 with coke being the 35.

The McLibel case which has been going on in Europe for 20 years has finally ended. Of course McDonald’s lost, but wow. The article points out that a trial like that probably couldn’t happen today.

Oh my. I normally don’t like the interviews. They just had the actor Alan Cumming on. He is making a fragrance. As he put it, “it’s pay back time for years of abuse of my name.” Eeeehhh. I need bleach for my brain.

It looks like IM, e-mail and the web distracts people at work. Really? Who would have thought that? Of course living in Chicago with a job in New York, those distractions are generally called work. Having said that, I still do turn off my IM when I need to be left alone to work on something.

The madman Keyes is in the news again, but this time through his daughter. She is speaking out against families that abandon their children because they are gay.

Now there’s family values for you. I have to admit, people give Cheney’s daughter crap for backing her father, but he never threw her out. There is politics and then there is family, and family should matter more. Families fight, bicker, argue and have differences of opinion, but at the end of the day, they are family.

Well it looks like the initial election results have come out of Iraq today. It appears that the UIA (the list Sistani backed) won a plurality, but not a majority. This is about the best result that I could have hoped for. If they hadn’t won a plurality then we would have known that there was some sort of fraud going on. (It’s the advantage of having the equivalent of the pope on your side.) But if they had won a straight majority, that would have caused chaos in another direction, possibly trying to turn different elements of governing over to religious authorities. Nope, this was a good result.

The main Kurdish party came in second with more than a quarter of the votes. This is also great as it gives them a larger voice than they have ever had. They have even suggested that someone from their list (Talabani) be president! It may also serve as an example to the Sunni’s in the next election, and by fighting for their own rights they will probably be ensuring those of the Sunnis as well, so they can feel less abandoned by these results. The only “sunni” party in the elections was Pachachi’s party which got less than 0.1% of the vote since the Sunni’s, as well as most of their political parties, were boycotting the election.

And finally, the “Iraqi List” with the current PM got about an eighth of the vote, which is nice because they have some experience with how things currently stand and should be able to help smooth out the transition of power.

One important thing to remember about this election is that people were voting for lists and not parties. Most of the lists included people from diverse parties in order to get more votes for that list. For example the UIA, ostensibly a Shia list, includes many technocrats (ostensibly the “Iraqi list”) and a number of Kurds. Unfortunately none of the smaller lists got any seats at all, but as Mohammed says in that link, “The world will remember the number “7461″; these were the candidates who didn’t submit for blackmailing and decided to take the responsibility despite the threats and the dangers.” Actually that link has a lot of info on the current status of the main list and how the different parties in it interact. You should go and read it.

The other lists also contain people in the other direction. What this means is that none of the power blocks that won this election are as powerful as they may appear. This is all a good thing as this government is supposed to write the constitution and arguing over that document is probably a good thing. There are other opinions about, but even the usual pessimist, Riverbend, seems to be thoughtful about the current situation. Rather than telling us what is wrong, she is asking what the people now in charge can do right. It might not look like it, but that is a huge change of heart and gives me some hope that this government will be given the benefit of the doubt by all iraqis, but only time will tell.

Was this the best scam ever, or just helping someone out? So there was this shabby looking guy at the train station on my way back from NYC. He was at the ticket machine working it. The ticket he punched up came up with an $8 fee. In his pocket all he had was a five. He sits there moaning, and waits for someone else to offer to give him some money. The guy at the machine on the other side from me gave him a buck. I gave him the remainder. As I was walking away I thought that there was just something a bit off about him. So when I was away for a bit I stopped and watched him. Looked like he stuffed the money away in his pocket, not in the machine. And then he started the process over. *sigh* You try to be nice to someone. Unfortunately my train just called all aboard. Fortunately the station attendant was just starting to take some interest in him. My hope is that he was just having some trouble with the machine, but that just seems pretty unlikely.

Now one thing I find interesting with these situations is to figure out a “secure transaction”. How could I make sure that he couldn’t just take the money and buy booze with it. Next time I will offer to use my credit card to buy his ticket for him and he can give me what cash he has. He ends up with the ticket, but has to give up some money. If he really wants the ticket, no problem, but if he is just looking for the cash, he won’t give it up. Now he could just want both, in which case I am up the creek, but at least he won’t be using my money for booze.

Hey all, I’m back and cleaned out the comment spam. I’ll have to look and see if there is an updated version of my blocker. Probably won’t be posting much next week either.

Woot! I just sold my first thing on E-bay! Now I get a few bucks and a piece of electronics doesn’t go into the landfill! Now the question is, does this mean that I keep trying to do this with my random crap?

Hedgehog Day, Hedgehog Day, Hedgehog Day, Hedgehog Day!!!!

Wheel Wheel Wheeeeeeeeeeel!

And for those who don’t understand how much wheel means to the hedgehogs, I present photographic evidence.

Notice how the METAL is worn down on the left side. Now having seen this picture I do wonder why she always runs on the left, and wether or not we need to “rotate” the wheel like you do a bed or tires?

Oh and, Happy Birthday Stella! (If a couple days late. Her real birthday is on the 30th.)

Apparently the terrorists are now kidnapping dolls. I have to admit this is an interesting tactic. It does kick down the emotional toll a bit!