It just rocks. Eff you, Kirk Cameron, you ludicrous piece of shit.

Lost a friend over some of the things that have been going on. I know that discussions have consequences, same as elections, but it still hurts and sucks nonetheless.

I don't have much to say, other than this:



Can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding

This is where the party ends
I can’t stand here listening to you
And your racist friend
I know politics bore you
But I feel like a hypocrite talking to you
And your racist friend

Unfortunately, some things can't be mended.

I'm so tired of jackass white guys who are so terrified of having a black man in the White House. Newsflash, the Civil War ended 150 years ago. You lost.

Rush Limbaugh called for resegregating busses (writeup at The Raw Story)

And Roy Blunt (R-MO) made a monkey joke - the audience of conservative assholes at the "Values Voter Summit" - and may I point out that I'm not exactly sure what kind of values these people have, but they sure as hell ain't mine - ate it up.



Note: he was also introduced by Tony Perkins, who has, in the past purchased phone bank lists from the KKK and has spoken to the Council of Conservative Citizens, an openly racist group very heavily affiliated with the Son's of Confederate Veterans, a group which, coincidentally, our Congressional Crier Joe "You Lie" Wilson (R-SC) is a member of. Along with Patrick Buchanan, another peach of a guy who just can't stop channeling Father Coughlin.

For a more in-depth look at the vile hate groups these people are associated with, check out Crooks and Liars excellent write-up about CCC and Joe Wilson's history of problems with black people.

I'm not exactly a Goldwater Girl, but the Republican Party needs to take a look back to a time when it had a spine and Goldwater told the John Birch Society to take a hike and not let the door hit it on the way out of the party.

Shout out to Little Green Footballs for keeping track of these issues.

Note: if you're going to post anything that defends these people or disagrees in either style or substance with any content of this post, just save everyone the time and unfriend me. I'm not interested in anyone that doesn't find this a problem, and a growing one at that.

Note 2: Hey Canada, got any room?

Someone needs to record some good new music, since I just felt the need to You Tube Love Never Dies out of nostalgia.

I'm in some sort of withdrawal and it's getting bad.

Send help. Or a real band.

To the tune, of course, of 99 Luft Ballons:

Behind a cut because this is obviously NSFW, so if you click and get fired don't whine at me. :)

( video )

Amazing and sad to think that the Lion of the Senate is no more.

RIP Sen. Kennedy.

It's the end of an era... and an American dynasty.

Comments locked on this. This is neither the time nor the place to debate politics.

if it wasn't so damn scary - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/12/stephen-hawking-enters-us_n_257343.html

Looking at video of the nutters disrupting town halls on healthcare, I notice that many of the people who are irrationally opposed seem to be older. I wonder when they're going to get around to realizing that Medicare is ruining the country with teh 3v17 soshalismz.

Amnesty International has released a report on how Nicaraguan laws on abortions are harming women.

This is very, very serious. For those of you who don't know my medical history, I have had 2 ectopic pregnancies. In one case, I didn't realize that I was pregnant until the pregnancy, which was lodged in my right fallopian tube ruptured. In the second case, I knew that I was pregnant, knew that I had a very high risk of a second ectopic and ran to the doctor for prompt medical attention.

If I lived in Nicaragua, they would have been barred, by law, from treating my ectopic pregnancy until the rupture.

Before a rupture, the treatment is an abortion.

Neither outcome was particularly pleasant. The second pregnancy, because I knew what was happening, was able to be treated with an attempt at the chemical protocol for treating an ectopic pregnancy. It is a drug called methotrexate and it works by disrupting folate reactions and thus halting the growth of rapidly dividing cells.

It is an abortifacient.

The first pregnancy terminated in a rupture. The pain was excruciating. I was hemorrhaging very badly by the time I got to medical care, my blood pressure was somewhere in the range of 34 over 60 and I was slipping in and out of consciousness. In order to stabilize me enough to get to the hospital from the emergency clinic, I needed IV fluids in each arm. I was home alone when it happened, and if I hadn't been extremely lucky and very, very stubborn, I would have bled to death by the time someone got home.

It was very frightening, very, very painful and it was closer than I like to think about being fatal.

In Nicaragua, right now, every woman who gets diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy will need to go through that situation because doctors can't perform even a theraputic abortion.

Had to watch this, since it's been stuck in my head since the original version was on the muzak at Burger King while we were eating "lunch":



I have a (now not-so-) secret fondness for Jim Steinman songs.

However much I'd love to do another day of my Convergence round-up, my head's too fried.

Anyone around here intimately familiar with Postgresql and/or Glassfish? We're getting the spinny wheel of death when we try and hit the db off the app, and pointers or just fix it please on either tuning the db or properly configuring Glassfish to talk to the outside world would be loverly.

As far as I can tell, hitting smaller tables (user, table of things $user can access, both < 10 records) works fine. Accessing the tables of $ThingsUserCanAccesaAndDoShitWith (almost all >2000 records, not huge, but seeming to make a difference) makes the connection sad.

satorisearching can give you ever so much more detail about the actual app, since my understanding of Java leaves much to be desired (I can look at the app and say Look! it's an app! and it's in Java! and then it does stuff... lots of stuff in lots of statements that I can sorta follow along with! which probably doesn't help you at all)

Enviro: both app and db servers are newish builds, well loaded, decent RAM, RAID 10 configs, running stable on Ubuntu Hardy, Glassfish v2 on the app server, Postgre 8.2 on the data server. Connection seems to be going through fine, since we can log in and select available campaigns, so I'm confident that we can elimiate a tunneling issue. We've vacuumed the tables, which seemed to help on Satori's local install but the deployed instance logs the user in, and shows the donor and campaign select links, but won't display anything off the big tables - just spinny wheel of doom.) Indicies should be fine... I'm wondering if the problem is that the look-up tables which link donor_id<-->campaign_id and contact_id<--->donor_id are causing the issue, since I had a fairly simple (although numerous) series of update ... set; statements bomb on one of those tables a few days ago. (For reference, they're composite key tables that link the donor table to the contact table and the contact table to the campaign table by autogenerated id. There isn't anything else in either of them) I need to up Postgres's logging level tomorrow (tonight was NOT the night for me to fuck with a prod config) and see if that shows anything interesting, but as of right now, nothing's throwing warnings, fatals or exceptions in either Postgres or Glassfish logs.

I'm betting heavily on something being wrong in my Postgres config, so pointers on that directed this way would be most helpful.

Figure I'll do a day-by-day Convergence roundup and photos are forthcoming... as soon as I have time to be on the computer and not drunk or DBAing.

Starting with:

Thursday: yes, the car fucked me. It tried to stall out at the goddamn top of the fucking Cajon pass and again about halfway through. (If you don't know my terrors, the drive from Vegas to LA is not my favoritst thing in the world, and I'm fairly sure that someday I'm going to die in the Cajon pass. This did not make the choice of potential stalling locations optimal.) We gimped it in to LB in the truck lane from the 15 through the 10 down through a few more interchanges until I finally bailed on the 710 and took Long Beach Blvd down. Arrived fried, freaked out and exhausted, but only had one major panic attack and 3 outbursts of anger on the trip. All in all not bad.
Ran in to eveofdstruction almost immediately when we got there and found out about spacekadt's near-death experience. Put things in perspective, so I was happy to check in to the room... First room was not working for us since it had 2 twin beds... as I said to satorisearching I'm on vacation with you not from you. Queen Mary staff was on the spot with finding us a new room quick.

After all the drive drama, I really, really, really wanted a drink, so we headed up to the bar. Who'da thunk that we'd have found goths in the bar? hellsop and geekers were there and we were soon joined by blackavar, missjanette, unagothae and kest with whom we left for lunch, since I was starving (see panic attack on the road. Panic attack != lunchtime appetite, so I needed speedbumps before the meet and greet thingie.

After lunch, retired to the room to clean up for tikibar goodness... I'd list all the people who were at tiki, but just assume on my flist and a.g people and you'd get the list. Tiki place was somewhat lame, but provided gathering space, so it was all good. Spent time chatting with our lovely (and non-hospitalized) captains, met a guy who hadn't been to convergence before, so we had an amusing round of introducing him to everyone and trying to keep names straight, wandered off in search of the_axel and the_siobhan who had wandered off to scope out a potential bar with less yuppies in it. Found out that Sio was told that she was technically out of tiki bar dress code since her t-shirt didn't have a logo on it (which made all of us wish that she was wearing the Shit! Goths! t-shirt). Reports were that that bar was also a bust, so we retired back to the ship for drinks. Took over the bar with everyone. Wound up at a table with ramonarjona, Kest and Satori where we talked about Hawai'ian history, Micro$oft and a bunch of other stuff until we were so drunk we could barely stand. Went back to the room and promptly passed out.

That was the fun stuff... the work stuff has been happening since we got back. In reality between money and work we probably should have passed this year, but I know in 10 years I won't remember how shitty this week has been and how behind we are on work stuff... but I totally will remember trying to understand Pidgin and smoking cloves and be insanely glad that I went.

But yea, this week has sucked ass. But I'm drinking a lovely Spanish wine (Vilosell if you're interested) and about to eat some phenomenal cheese with Satori, so all in all I think I'll live.

More later. Now cheese and wine.

Home. Car behaved much better this time than on the way out.

Thanks again to the Patron Goddess of Bad Ideas for not flaking on me this time.

Enjoying a post-terrifying-drive glass of wine, about to collapse... early morning tomorrow... "back" to work (or at least back to a full-day of work uninterrupted by random net.goths. *sniff*)

Missing all of you already - quick thanks: to our lovely Captains for putting this crazy stuff together, christalblu for the corp-goth dinner, anyone who contributed to my drunken show very early Sunday morning and especially to the staff of the Queen Mary - beautiful ship, amazing staff.

Okay - I go night night now.

I put together the cds for the drive tomorrow... includes Shaggy, Lady Saw's response to Shaggy, Combichrist, Ani DiFranco, Trisha Yearwood and showtunes.

If Satori looks frazzled when you see him tomorrow, assume that being trapped in a car with my odd musical tastes for 5 hours did him in and buy him a drink.

Of course, now if you don't see us by 3, it might be that the car crapped out or that my poor husband got fed up and buried me in the desert. :)

at least for the weekend.

We were cleaning out the office this afternoon and satorisearching looked out the french doors and said "there's a dog in the yard"

So out I go to see if I can grab the dog and read its collar. Which I did and I could, so I called the number on her tag and got a business's vm. Left a message. No call back yet.

Satori did some googling and found this: http://lasvegas.craigslist.org/pet/1250715748.html

Yup, Tora's the name on the tag. The business is in Henderson. Dunno if they found a home and either she got loose or got dumped real fast or worse, they couldn't even wait and see if they got any ad responses.

She's a really good dog, too. Very friendly, quite well trained (responds fairly well to voice commands, although "stay" could use a little work), only a little pully on the leash. We just got back from a walk and she's chilling in the spare room as we speak. Hasn't even barked once. I get the sense that she's the kind of dog that only barks over something really important.

At least she's safe for the weekend, especially with all the exploding firecrackers going on outside. Stupid frakking fourth of morons with explosives, but I suppose that's a topic for another post.

I'll leave you with this:



Thank god we had a leash.

OMG, I'm gonna be broke: http://1fashionaddict.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/mac-style-black-full-collection-details-pre-release-info/

In other news, it's fucking hot here. *sigh*

I found the latest Nielson usability alertbox to be very interesting.

Anyone have any thoughts?

The one thing that leaps out at me is user reaction to removing password masking. I can see why Nielson would suggest it because technically I think he's right. But what would the user perception be?

Thoughts?

How is it that I've never seen Portraits as Living Deads.com before it ended.

sadness. but the archives rock.

...again

Choice quote: “Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House,” Hoekstra tweeted from his BlackBerry today.

For those who don't remember Hoekstra, he's the Rep who also Twittered about being on a top-secret mission to Iraq.

I really think that Republicans ought to stay the hell away from technology.

In other news, Ensign resigned his leadership post today. He literally phoned it in. Much like the rest of his career. Hopefully he'll take the same advice that he gave to Bill Clinton.