Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog

I AM LADY MARYAM ABACHA, WIFE OF LATE GENERAL SANI ABACHA, EX-MILITARY HEAD OF STATE OF NIGERIA WHO DIED ON THE 8TH OF JUNE 1998 OF HEART PROBLEMS. I CONTACTED YOU BECAUSE OF MY NEED TO DEAL WITH PERSONS WHOM MY FAMILY AND I HAVE HAD NO PREVIOUS PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS. SINCE THE DEATH OF MY HUSBAND, MY FAMILY HAS BEEN SUBJECTED TO ALL SORTS OF HARASSMENT AND INTIMIDATION WITH LOTS OF NEGATIVE REPORTS EMANATING FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND THE PRESS ABOUT MY HUSBAND. THE PRESENT GOVERNMENT HAS ALSO ENSURED THAT OUR BANK ACCOUNTS ARE FROZEN AND ALL ASSETS SEIZED. IT IS IN VIEW OF THIS, THAT I SEEK YOUR CO-OPERATION AND ASSISTANCE IN THE TRANSFER OF THE SUM OF US$50,000,000 (FIFTY MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS ONLY) BEING THE VERY LAST OF MY — OH SHIT THE FUZZ.

For those running Panther, all three of these you need to know about now. 1) Enable focus-follows-mouse in Terminal: While in the terminal, enter defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES, then restart Terminal. 2) Use the alternate “show desktop” behavior for Expos� While in the terminal, enter defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-olddesktop -bool false; killall Dock – now the Show Desktop behavior compacts everything into a little window, ala Minimize In Place. Much better than shoving things off the edge of the screen. 3) Dictionary auto-complete. Start typing into a text field, then hit F5. Bam, instant popup of possible endings to the word. (1 and 2 are from macosxhints.com; 3 is from Mark Levin.)

So the big shocking revelation today is that Bush, at a press conference, said that no one on his staff was responsible for the “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner back on May 1st. No, it was the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln, of course! There was a good comment on Eschaton from Bodini, and I felt like echoing it here: Someone else put up the sign. Someone else said Iraq was an “imminent threat.” Someone else said Saddam bought yellowcake from Niger. Someone else leaked Valerie Plame’s name. Someone else will be president in 2005.

A lot of people have asked over the past six months about my IIDX script. Having little better to do at 1 AM, I’ve finally packaged it up and written some shitty installation instructions. For the two people in the world that might find this useful, by all means, enjoy.

I’ve been annoyed at how my RSS feed looks. As such, I’ve stopped stripping the HTML tags out, and I put it back to the full body so there’s no retarded … at the end. However, as such, you may end up with your friends list munged, depending on how LJ handles this. I really recommend you get a real RSS newsreader anyhow. The friends page is less than ideal. :P

This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Every website can have a file associated with it, called robots.txt, that tells web search engine robots which directories to ignore. This is generally only useful if you have something you don’t want to appear in search engines or get cached anywhere. So what does it tell you when the White House has hacked together a robots file that excludes every single possible subdirectory that ends in a folder named Iraq? This lazily hacked together document (it really is just a complete listing of all the directories plus the subdirectories “iraq” and “text”) blocks a bunch of non-existent directories (/kids/eggroll/iraq/ – because, you know, Iraq is involved in the Easter Egg Roll ever year.), but also blocks 75 valid directories containing information about the Iraqi war and subsequent reconstruction. This is huge, folks. There will be no search engine archives made of any of the information about Iraq – and there hasn’t been since some time after April through today. There’s an excellent example of this on the original analysis page about this (which has a cached, where google can’t find something but the White House search engine can. How much more totalitarian can this administration get? How is this NOT a frightening example of where this country is heading? I hate conspiracy theories, but this is right out in the open and there’s no justifiable explanation for blocking any Iraq-related subdirectory. Please spread the word and link to the original analysis page. This can’t be ignored. (link is originally from Atrios, who is surprisingly subdued about this)

Also: Just got back from Matt And Ben. I join the countless other positive reviews to say it was quite excellent. Intimate, funny, touching, just the right length, blah blah blah. Go see it now if you’re in the city.

Since moving to NYC, I’ve resumed using my first-generation iPod on an extremely regular basis. A year of working at home means that you don’t really need your music to be portable, and so my iPod use was limited to trips out of state. Moving to NYC means an hour of iPod for each leg of the commute, and use in the office for a bit of ambient sound. Yesterday, however, things started going wrong. The iPod would lock up mid-song when connected to my work machine. I’d have to unplug and reboot the iPod, and desperately force quit and restart things on the computer to avoid a complete reboot. This happens about three times in two hours. This worried me. When I got home, trying to copy a 2 meg file off the iPod resulted in having to wait so long to get the copy dialog to even show, I began to worry. I did a full wipe-and-restore-to-factory-new with the newest version of the software. I ran DiskWarrior on it, which crashed halfway through the process. This made me really concerned. After throwing everything I could at it, the thing still took eight seconds to transfer one song from my hard drive to my iPod. I decided today would be a good chance to head down to the Apple Store in Soho. (Side note: I discovered that one of the subway lines at my station runs almost directly to the store. I’ve come to the conclusion our subway goes everywhere we could possibly want.) I waited in line for the genius bar until I had one of the geniuses come over, listen to my problem, and agree that the hard drive was probably dying. I asked how much repairs would be. He said $250. After I stopped laughing internally, I shrugged my shoulders – given how anal I am about my iTunes library, I really wanted a new one anyhow. The on-the-fly ratings and playlists, the new Music Quiz game, the more distinct controls, the smaller size – it’s worth at the very least another $50, assuming I don’t go hog wild and aim for a 40 gig. So yeah, just wanted to share my plight. UPDATE: Peter mentioned that he had the same problem with doing transfers in Firewire Disk Mode between two Macs until he unplugged his iSight. Unplugged the iSight, and blammo, it worked. How strange, since I’ve had the iSight plugged in at the same time for months…

Despite the people at LJ not telling me so, apparently my syndicated account is fixed. So go subscribe, you LiveJournal types. Thanks to herbie for pointing this out.

We normally have NY1 on in the morning, because it’s nice local background noise as we get ready to go. There was a little 3 minute piece this morning about Radio, the new “Oscar-worthy” softball being lobbed underhand into theaters this Friday. There were splices of an interview with Cuba Gooding Jr., and at one point, he said – and I’m paraphrasing here: The hard roles are the ones you just walk right into and do. The easy roles are the ones you have to do research for. Man, after Chill Factor, Rat Race, Snow Dogs, Boat Trip, and Fighting Temptations – Cuba must think he’s the hardest working man in showbusiness.