Google Chrome? Yes and No
Not quite Google Chrome. I tried out the still buggy and full of security holes Google Chrome when it came out and thought, “Well, this might be a browser option someday, but it’s not my cuppa right now.” Perri Nelson noted some issues and features, and although I didn’t give it quite as much attention as he did at the time, I agreed that it was pretty good. Lovely Daughter tried it out on her lil XP Home Sony notebook and liked it.
Noodling around, trying to get the taste of McWhatsisname whimping out in “debate” number 3 out of my mouth, I stumbled across Codeweaver’s offering of “a Mac and Linux port of the open source Chromium web browser.” Hmm, thought I, isn’t Chromium from the same code base as Google Chrome? Nope. It is the code base of Google Chrome.
Sooo, downloaded and installed Codeweaver’s free “port” of the Chromium browser. (Codeweaver is a company making money off WINE technology by extensively testing and tweaking a WINE core to ensure compatibility with specific Windows products. It’s a Good Thing.)
Nice. Slick. My memory of Google Chrome running in a Windows XP Pro VM isn’t as pleasant as this browser (apparently the same browser, just a few rough edges smoothed over). Still not ready for prime time for my use, but it looks very, very promising. Some buggy behavior (a graphic artifact–“connecting…” indicating a site loading–showing up over my use of a different browser to write this post is annoying), but I still kinda like it. I’ll be checking back to see what comes of Chromium/Chrome in the future.
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“No presence”
“Just another guy peddling his viewpont.”–Joe the Plumber’s reaction to The One:
Oh, and…
*heh*
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The 3rd Debate
*sigh*
I keep leaving the room, because, although McWhatsisname is finally throwing some punches–finally!–they’re mostly sissy punches, and The Obamassiah? *sheesh!* All he has to do it open his mouth to let the lies fly. “Joe the Plumber”? Lie. Ayers? Lie. Acorn? Lie. Taxes? Lie. Health care? Lie. How great is Joe Biden? Lie. His actual record in Illinois senate of voting against born alive health care (for children who survive abortion)? Lie, lie, lie. (Hint to dumbasses who believe this snake: IT’S IN THE RECORD!)
Not one honest thing has proceeded from Obama’s pie hole so far, save for the times the camera caught him nodding in agreement with McWhatsisname. *heh*
Every single defense (Joe the Plumber incident, taxes, Ayers, Acorn, etc.) that The One has made is directly contradicted by facts on record. BUT, will that matter in the long run? Probably not, because the American sheeple are too damned stupid and intellectually lazy to do their own homework, AND rely on the in-the-tank-for-THE ONE Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind to tell them how to vote.
And folks, the sheeple are in the majority by a very long way.
Our only hope is that November 4th will be a day of bad weather in the “Blue States”.
Pray for rain. And snow. And high winds.
Seriously.
Because sheeple are “afeared” of such things.
Uniquely Weird
OK, so maybe I bore easily.
Noodling around for a solution to dual boot Son&Heir’s XBox, I found and downloaded “Damn Small Linux” in several flavors for the heck of it. Unpacked the “DSL-embedded” version, ran dsl-base.bat using WINE and…
QEMU/Knoppix bootloader brought up a DSL live session.
Crazy.
Next: VMWare Server and an actual installation (VM install, of course) of the OS.
Why not? After all my years of parsimonious hard drive space allocation, I find it pleasuable to cut another 8-10GiB out of the herd to install yet another VM. 😉
OK, installed and running, now. Hmmm, it’s “as OK” as the QEMU “ermbedded” version. As always, the Dillo browser sucks dead bunnies through a straw, but since I installed this version in a VM, installing another browser is a trivial task. Oh, I see Firefox is available. It’s not bad, but since I set this up to run in an 800X600 window, Firefox just Will Not Do (Firefox sort of enlarges fonts, etc., but does a crappy job of it).
Not as slick as Puppy Linux, save for its auto-configuration of network resources, but I can see where it’d be very useful for folks with older computers, and in fact I may install this on some old Pentium or Pentium II computer laying around here at twc central. Pretty nice. Probably won’t keep this VM around any longer than it takes me to become familiar with the DSL GUI, but it’s a nice, lean OS from wht I’ve seen thus far.
OK, for more OS-ey fun, I decided to “upgrade” VMWare Server to version 2, since the thing’s been nagging me to do so. 503MiB download. No console any more, just a browser management window that requires me to do some funky stuff like download a plugin to make the thing work. *feh* Took a perfectly workable console and screwed it up. Oh, things still run mostly OK, but some features are missing (where’s my sound? USB? Heck, where’s shared input between host and client? Screw thi silly “CTRL+ALT to release the mouse/keyboard, and no cur n paste between host and client? It’s all gotta be there somewhere… ) and it’s a darned sight clunkier than the old console. Oh. Well. That’s progress, I suppose.
‘Barack Osama’ for President
Someone’s letting their Freudian slip show…
*heh*
Or maybe that’s what it really says on The One’s birth certificate, and that’s why he refuses to cough it up. (Yeh, yeh, I know The One’s campaign has posted a problematic graphic of a COLB, but a.) a COLB is not a BC and b.) the graphic’s hinky.)
How many “uninsured” are there, really?
Note: I am NOT going to link to the facts below. Why? Because unless you do your own digging to either verify or attempt to prove this post a bunch of hot air, you’ll never learn for yourself. This is an issue it’s important to get right, and anyone reading this who doesn’t care to do their own homework is simply a part of the problem. So there. Besides, I got all the info I needed from a few clicks: a google search and a search of US Census reports. It’s so easy a Geico commercial would be harder. *heh*
The “47 million uninsured” meme has been bruited about so much, and without specific all too often, that I begin to wonder if the spirit of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels isn’t infusing the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind.
First, subtract from that inflated number at least 10 million illegals Obama and the Dhimmicraps want us to pay for. Those folks should be denied ALL health care save for genuine and extemely urgent and life-threatening emergencies. Period. Without exception. Let them go back whence they came, get in line and enter the country legally, and then maybe social services of ANY kind might be properly made available to them.
That’d whittle the leftards’ and Hivemind’s number down to around 37 million right there.
Now, subtract the number of folks making over $50,000 a year who are just too cheap to buy their own insurance. How many? About 17 million.
Oops. We’re down to less than half the brutal numbers leftards are whining about.
But the hits keep on coming: according to the Congressional Budget Office, between 40% and 50% of “uninsured” are transitory uninsured who are simply between coverages. Yep. Within three months or so, nearly half the “uninsured” at any one point are simply on their way to different coverage.
Now, we’re down to the 8-13 million the Kaiser Foundation estimates to be the range of those who are uninsured and unlikely to be able to afford their own insurance.
So the next time you hear an Obamaniac or other leftard weep and wail and gnash their teeth over the need to take YOUR money and use it to provide health coverage for illegal aliens, deadbeats or folks who are simply between coverages, just blow ’em a big fat raspberry.
One to See
I rarely come across a movie I’m willing to go see in a theater. This one might make the cut, though.
From the trailer, it appears to be a reality-based fantasy about a world that ought to be. *heh*
Who Are You Voting FOR?
Perri, of the eponymous Perri Nelson’s Website, asks, “Shouldn’t we look at why we want to vote FOR a candidate when we’re choosing one?”
Well, of course we should ask ourselves that, Perri! In fact, it’s usually the first thing I do ask myself when looking at candidates for office. Unfortunately, I have rarely found a political candidate who offered me much in the way of valid reasons to vote for them. In fact, I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the total number of political candidates–national, state and local–who have offered me much in the way of legitimate positives in their candidacy or persons.
Ronald Reagan was one such. After voting in several other presidential races for the “least bad” choice (and being monumentally wrong with one, to my shame–and no, I’m not referring to votes cast for Nixon), my first vote for Reagan was a relief.
Bob Xxxxx–(in a local race). Good guy, Honest. Does his office credit.
Kevin Zzzzz–yeh, not an interesting speaker, but a decent man for a state senator.
Ummm, just about running dry here. I guess I could include our district’s Representative to the House. He’s a blowhard who gives me a rash, and he has his head up his _____ on several issues, but overall, he’s been an “honest politician” (that is, he’s stayed bought). I’ll vote for this blowhard again this time based on his (few, IMO, though in one case profound–his son’s turned out to be a better man than he is) positive accomplishments and the fact that his opponent’s a snake.
That about covers the pols who’ve given me valid, positive reasons to vote for them in the past.
Perri notes some positives for McWhatsisname, and I have to admit they exist, though some of the ones he mentions as reasons to vote for McWhatsisname are negatives in my estimation. A commenter on Perri’s post mentions his reasons for supporting The Obamassiah. Funny thing, none of his reasons involve any actual accomplishments or anything else I’d count as a positive.
Frankly, I’d like to embrace Perri’s idealistic search for reasons to vote for political candidates and avoid voting against a candidate for the candidate’s negatives, but while I always look for positive reasons to vote for a candidate, in the last 4 decades, I’ve found few. Perhaps that’s just my natural ability to spot flaws–an ability that has served me both well and ill in the past–but almost every time I hear a politician speak my B.S. meter pegs out, and that can’t be a good thing. *heh*
(Of course, it’s the rare, exceedingly rare instance when a Mass Media Podperson doesn’t overload my B.S. meter, but that’s another problem.)
For now, I think I’ll concentrate on dumbasses who proclaim themselves “undecided” and fools (yes, fools–those who aren’t themselves active poisoners of the body politic) who have swallowed the Obamassiah’s sugar-coated cyanide capsule and attempt to compare and contrast those few McWhatsisname’s and Sarah Palin’s (many more than McWhatsisname’s) positives with the truckload of poisoned B.S. from The Obamassiah.
That’s about as positive as I can be about this election cycle’s presidential offerings, and frankly, one-on-one, the method has shown some apparent success. I’ve had former Obamaites and Obama-leaners come back to me with negatives they’ve discovered on their own once their eyes were opened… and in one case, simply pointing an Obamaite to facts about the McWhatsisname health care proposals opened blind eyes to the lies Obama’s been spouting about that. That alone was enough to persuade one more vote for McWhatsisname/Palin.*
Heck, that’s about as positive as I think I can be in our local (Sheriff/County/City) and State (rep/senate/etc.) races this year. Well, perhaps a bit more positive about the Democrat running for governor in my State. In fact, he could well be my fifth candidate in the last 40 years I can actually vote for in good conscience. (Heck, even my dad has had good experiences with the guy, and he lives in another State!) I don’t even have to think about what a snake the Repugnican’t candidate is.
Politicians *spit*. Can’t live with ’em; can’t live with ’em. I’d be happy to live without ’em. Heck, a constitutional monrchy could scarcely be as bad as the mess we have now. I’d probably be better. See the header quote on this blog for a part of the reason…
“Render Unto Caesar”
I was over at Cathouse chat, just checking in to see what has been going on in Kat’s life recently, when I stumbled across a comment that referred to Charles Chaput’s “Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life”. Now, I’ve not yet read the book, but I have some taste of the probable thrust from the title. I’m not Roman Catholic either, but again, I think I can infer a bit of the content from my knowedge of Roman Catholicism, as well.
Looks/sounds interesting from what reviews I’ve seen. If its content is anything close to what I can infer from reviews/title/current knowledge about RC thought, I may well find myself in substantial agreement with Chaput.
Backing up a bit. I grew up in a Southern Baptist subculture where Matthew 22:17-21 ws usually applied thusly: pay your taxes and pay your tithe. Now, that’s always–even from childhood–struck me as a particularly shallow exegesis (*heh* from long before I had an inkling of an idea of what the word exegesis even meant). As I grew “in wisdom and in stature” (and in girdth and breadth *heh*), I became able to put some meat on the bones of my disatisfaction with that shallow interpretation. And so follows my shirt tail exegesis… a group of Pharisees came to Jesus and said,
Matthew 22:17 Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? 18 but Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, [ye] hypocrites? 19 Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. 20 And he saith unto them, Whose [is] this image and superscription? 21 They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.
First, this was a group of Jewish “lawyers” attempting to pull Katie Couric on Jesus. Roman occupation (and Roman taxes) were strongly disliked by the Jews of Israel, so, they thought, if Jesus did not denounce paying Roman taxes they’d have trapped him into an unpopular stand. On the other hand, the Romans really came down hard on anything that even smacked of fomenting tax evasion or revolt, so if he did choose the popular answer they more than half expected, they could have him up on charges before the Roman government lickety split.
Horns of a dilemma? Not so. Jesus simply invoked the very orthodox Jewish principle of the imago dei–the concept that we are all made in God’s image, and then turned the Pharisees’ challenge on its head. “Whose image” is stamped upon the coin? Caesar’s. But you see, when Jesus followed that up with both “render to Caesar” and “render to God” he directly invoked the principle of imago dei, essentially saying, “This coin comes from Caesar, so pay him with it, but YOU are stamped with God’s image and belong to Him, therefore, you owe Him yourselves.”
I like to ask myself further, “What does this image of God look like when stamped on a man?” Now, we can look all through scripture and nature to discern what God’s image might “look” like, but I think Jesus was talking about His image as to character and behavior, and probably no other description succinctly distills the imago dei like Micah 6:8
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
That is what the “coin” stamped with the image of God looks like: Justice; Mercy; Humility. Look for those traits in someone who’s “render[ing] untoi God the things that are God’s” and you’ll see someone who has internalized 2 Corinthians 5:17… and who exemplifies submission to Jesus command in Matthew 22:21.
Yes, “render unto Caesar” means much more than simply paying our taxes. It also–at the very least–means obeying those laws that do not directly contradict biblical precepts (see Acts 3-4), and in a representative republic (with democratic elements), it also means we have a responsibility to govern well. (Which in my experience largely means we ought to concentrate on throwing the bums out of office at every election, but that’s just my view, of course. :-))
“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”