Cafe Bucky

I usually don’t care for rap, but I’m sure going to point at Eminem’s video: Mosh

Time to send the Cowboy home to Texas.

(and an update - very good analysis at: DailyKOs.com )

A quick programming note - Next time I get back to California, I intend
to take my server offline for a few days to do some upgrades. I am
thinking this will be in early November.

This will affect the following sites:

* daniel.org
* JavaJoint.com
* FlexiPhoto.com
* ThereAndThen.org
* SnapSmith.com
* SophiaSmith.com

This entry just serves as something to get cached at feedster.com, google, and elsewhere while the sites are offline.

And why am I going back to California for a couple of months? Well, that’ll
be another post! I’ll elaborate when I know for certain.

My fix of vinyl, put off for so many years, is getting addressed!

I just got a Stanton STR8-80 Direct Drive Digital Turntable. It’s been at least 15 years since I’ve heard my records! Glad they’re still in great shape.

Hearing old albums is like being reunited with old friends. The first batch of albums I played was stuff like Kate Bush, Mike Oldfield (think sonic landscapes are newish? Hergest Ridge goes back 30 years!), UB40, and some early Pete Townshend solo work.

It was a lot of fun showing my daughter how records and turntables go together. “Don’t bump the shelf, or you’ll knock the needle out of the groove” (scrunched face) - “You have to flip the record over to hear the other side” (rolling eyes) - “hear those little pops? that’s specks of dirt!” (barely supressed laughter). We’re so spoiled in our east & west coast pads - we’re always streaming off of an iPod or iTunes, or doing something more manual by using the CD/DVD changer. Using a manual turntable is like meandering back to a much simpler time.

And I love that.

A while back, February if you’d like to be picky, I wrote “Would Nader Please Fader?”. In it, I briefly expressed the hope that Ralph would butt out, for the good of the country.

Who knew back then that the race would be so close now?

Ralph Nader! Leave the race! Put ego aside and do the right thing for your country. You don’t even have to endorse any particular candidate (most of your voters would go Demo). I just get the queasy feeling that we’re heading for a 2000 election all over again. Of what use is his point if it gets us four more years of Bush?

Ralph: right candidate, for the wrong office, at the wrong time (I think he’d be as popular on the national level as Gray Davis was in California, which is saying something)

I hope he doesn’t go down in history as the biggest political spoiler of all time.

I can’t pin down the day, but around 25 years ago I started experimenting with my Father’s Atari 800 computer. Later on I got my own Atari 400, and I was off and running …

Sometime in 1980, I enrolled in some “business data processing” class at College of Marin. The teacher knew nothing about Apple ][’s, Ataris, or anything smaller than a full-blown mainframe. He was square, daddy-o. But, lucky for me, I met someone with one of the original pocket computers. He couldn’t figure it out, so I ended up borrowing it most of the time. It had a whopping 1.5 K of memory! I aced the class, of course, but learned a heck of a lot more on whatever machines I could use around the house.

So anyway, I won’t go on endlessly about all of the generations of computers I’ve been through. I actually had a programming class at Santa Monica High School in 1976, but I don’t really count that, since we only got to run our programs twice in the whole damn semester. Everything else was just theory.

And that much theory gets boring. I’m a person that understands the Hands-On Imperative.

So I’ll mark it now. 25 years. I love it. I’m sure I’ll be doing some form of programming 25 years from now. If you’ve ever got into it, you’ll understand.
If you were one of those folks that just got into it because you thought it
would be “lucrative”, you won’t. And if you’re into some other creative form (photography always comes to mind), you’ll get it. Simple as that :-)

I can’t wait for the rest of the presidential debates to take place. I’m hoping that Cheney shows his true (mean) self. Not that Edwards needs help. I’m expecting Edwards to more than hold his own.

If you are so inclined to listen to the first debate again, you can get it from the iTunes store. It’s 90 minutes long, but if you take out all of the times Bush stares into the camera (doing his best “deer in the headlights” impression), I think it can be heard in about 50 … The SNL take on the debate was a hoot. (”coming in on Saturdays… it’s really haaard”)

I don’t usually post about politics, preferring to read people like Maureen Dowd of the New York Times (always fun to see her shred the GOP). I will say that I have a concern about this election - and that would be Nader. Ralph would serve this country best by butting out. Of course he won’t, but my fear is that he will take just enough votes away from Kerry to tilt the election in favor of W. That would be sad indeed for us Dems. It would be a nice “October Surprise” for Ralph to pull out.

You know, I really miss Clinton. I thought he did a great job. I’ll vote for Kerry, but like many, it’s more of a “OMG, don’t re-elect Bush” vote than an expression of “yes! I really want this guy!”. Clinton was the last candidate for whom I had real enthusiasm.

So I’m out in California, getting our house ready to lease out. A big part of that is putting a lot of personal stuff in storage.

That’s where the shredder is so handy. 1980’s parking ticket? Nah, never happened. So says the shredder!
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