James Hill, Pirate for Congress

Mary forwarded this to me, and I'm tempted to move to Iowa so I can vote for this guy. He's definitely not your average candidate:

I would have your wife right in front of you. I would smoke the last of your glaucoma medication. Then I will surely drink your liquor cabinet dry. However, know this my friend. I will never break an oath to uphold the public trust. My affidavit will be signed in my own blood. A Pirates crimson mark, with real binding effects into my after life. Laugh if you will then ask yourself if you could do it.

At least he's honest, which is more than I can say for a lot of folks in Congress these days. It's too bad he's not asking for money, however — can you imagine a what a great time you'd have at one of his fundraisers?

Brain-dead

Republicans often talk about cutting waste from the budget. What they usually mean is cutting programs that don't benefit their rich pals in the business community. Case in point:

Brain injuries are so common among U.S. troops that they're called the signature injury of the Iraq war, but Congress is poised to cut military spending on researching and treating them.

House and Senate versions of the defense appropriation bill would chop funding for the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center from $14 million to $7 million. The center runs 10 facilities across the country, including one at Fort Bragg that has performed research and treated soldiers' injuries since 1998.

"It's just ridiculous," said Sgt. Maj. Colin Rich, a Fort Bragg soldier who has been legally blind since he was shot in the head while serving in Afghanistan in 2002. "Whoever is cutting the budget must have a head injury themselves."

But let's not just point the finger at an uncaring Congress — there is plenty of blame to go around over at the Pentagon, too:

The Pentagon asked only for $7 million and didn't respond properly when congressional staffers tried to find out whether it needed more money for the program, said Jenny Manley, a spokeswoman for the Senate appropriations committee.

"The Pentagon needs to get behind the things that they want," she said. "Otherwise, we'd just be kind of guessing about what they really need."

Pentagon budget experts did not respond Monday to a request for information on why they had not sought more money.

Today's GOP: Supporting the troops all the way to the grave.

Sign My Cast

Long story short, the joint at the top of my left foot is FUBAR and last week I got a cast put on. I'll be in it for four weeks, the hope being that the immobilized joint will settle down of its own accord. It better — the alternative is surgery with a 4-6 month recovery period and some loss of motion in the foot to boot.

This being my first cast and all (and hopefully my last), I definitely want to take advantage of that whole cast signing thing that I missed as an overly-cautious child. But let's face it, a lot of you reading this aren't going to be able to put pen to cast in person. Don't let that stop you from joining in on the cast signing fun — you can leave your well wishes and bad jokes in the comments. So have at it, and thank you for your support!

That's the Spirit!

It used to be that I'd mark the beginning of the Christmas season when Norelco would start running the ad where Santa is zooming around the snowy countryside in the an electric razor head. Those were good times.

But this year, I got my first winter holiday reminder a few days ago in an anxious email alert from the fanatics at the American Family Association. Yes, the war against Christmas has begun again, led by those infidels at Sam's Club who have refused — no doubt out of their devotion to our Dark Lord Satan — to use the word "Christmas" when referring to wrapping paper and ribbon in an August circular.

The AFA says it just wants to "keep Christ in Christmas," and I wish them good luck with that. I'm sure that slinging accusations of religious intolerance at everyone who doesn't share precisely your narrow vision of piety toward plastic Santas and shiny bows is exactly what Jesus would do.

Notice Anything Different?

No? Good. I spent a good chunk of yesterday updating the HTML and CSS of this site, not to change the design, but just to put into my personal blog what I've been learning recently with my work for clients. These changes will also, hopefully, make me solid with IE7 when it's finally released to the masses.

Of course, if you see anything wonky (content aside), let me know.

Fixing Phark for IE5/Win

Phark is the name of a common image replacement method that only web geeks care anything about. It's clean and smart, but it fails in Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows.

Or rather, it used to. Or rather, it still does, but there is now a simple and easy way to keep using Phark and having image replacement work in IE5 as well. I've documented the trick here, but if you have any comments, please attach them to this thread.

I haven't seen this particular workaround documented anywhere else, but if I'm not crediting the right people, please let me know and apologies all around.

Getting Ready for IE7

With the release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 on the immediate horizon, folks like me who build websites for a living have some work to do. In a nutshell, IE7 fixes lots of bugs in IE6 and earlier, and ironically, the tricks we used to keep these earlier versions looking good have the potential to make the newer, better browser look bad.

So what to do? First, don't panic. Second, read Tantek's take on hacks. It was written last year, but it's still dead-on. Third, conditional comments are your friend.

So for now, I'm keeping my much-used box model hack, and making a surprisingly small number of modifications, mostly involving moving a few rules into conditional comments. Of course, all this effort is for client work — no time to worry about this old site for now.

Update: If you are using conditional comments, but also have multiple standalone versions of IE on a single machine, you need to read this how-to guide to get conditional comments working right in the older versions.

Update 10/19/2006: After installing IE7, conditional comments in older browsers will be broken. You will need to redo the procedure in the update above to enable them again.

So Much for That

During the 2000 campaign, Bush promised to restore "dignity and honor" to the White House. Here's what we got:

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we're learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

Ah, I can smell the dignity and honor from here.

That's Pretty Crazy

I don't think this expression will be used much after November, but until then it's going to be part of my vocabulary for sure.

"We Have Met the Hackers, and They are Us"

When the Lieberman website went down on election eve and the campaign spent lots of free media time the next day claiming that it had been "hacked" by the Lamont campaign and/or Lamont supporters, my first reaction was, "that's bullshit". I've spent enough time baby-sitting servers to know that traffic spikes a lot during the last few days of an election. It seemed obvious to me that what really happened was that the website went down under a perfectly predictable surge in traffic that the campaign was, for whatever reason, not prepared to handle.

And thanks to Kos and alexa.com, we now have some nice charts to prove it. Here's my favorite:

Wow, nice spike! It looks like Lamont's site was seeing about double the number of pageviews as Lieberman's was, and yet it was able to stay up and running. It looks like the Lieberman campaign "hacked" themselves.

One more thing. I will not be surprised at all to find out that an analysis Lieberman's server logs shows a lot of attempts to gain access to the server or shut it down. The net is full of already-hacked machines spewing out all sorts of automated attacks — I see them in my logs every day. These sorts of attacks aren't news or evidence of targeted malice, they're just a fact of life.

Sore Loserman

Well there you have it. Having lost the primary, Lieberman is carrying through with his threat to run as an independent. "For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot and will not let that result stand," he said during his speech last night. What a wanker!

After working so hard to get him elected Vice President in 2000, I've gradually lost respect for the man. His decision to ignore the wishes of the Democrats in Connecticut, "for the sake of the party", is the last straw. He's clearly not taking this step because of love of country, state or party. He's doing this because of love of Joe Lieberman. And that's been Joe's primary motivation on a lot issues recently.

Whenever the Republicans need a little bipartisan cover for their latest insanity, more often than not, Joe has been there for them. Social Security privitization? Capital gains tax cut? The war in Iraq? Vouchers? Yup, all issues that Joe has championed in the name of bipartisanship.

Now, Joe's supporters will tell you that all this proves is that Lieberman is the last honest, principled man in politics, willing to break party discipline when bigger issues are at stake. Bipartisanship, they will say, is his virtue, not his curse. And no doubt, St. Joe loves him some that hagiography.

But it's a funny thing, this Lieberman bipartisanship — Democrats never get anything out of it. Instead, Joe crosses the isle, supports the Republican party line, and criticizes the rest of his party for their unrelenting partisan tone. There's no "working together" or compromise — it's all just a way for Joe to have his "Sister Souljah" moment over and over again.

Besides, who really believes that it's possible to work with the GOP today? The House and Senate leadership allow no room for compromise, and in the Bush White House, politics trumps policy every time. This is why Joe Lieberman is indeed Bush's favorite Democrat — he lends a veneer of respectability to the GOP's own partisan agenda. So maybe Joe is the last honest man in Washington, but if so, then he's also an idiot. His bipartisanship enables are larger, more viscious partisanship, and his "principles" end up serving their opposites.

So, maybe Joe is a moron or maybe he's a self-aggrandizing bastard. Either way, he shouldn't be in the Senate anymore.

2006 Bank of America Criterium

Yesterday Mary and I spent the evening watching the Bank of America Criterium. Perhaps not the best timing for cycling, given that the official word of Landis's test results dominated the morning's news, but it was still a great way to spend a lazy Saturday. We live right on the course, so most of the time we spent in the lobby, which has a nice view of Church Street.

I took my camera along and got some nice pictures. The race results are here, as well as some more pictures.

Kansas Not Totally Stupid

Good news from Kansas — enough smart people voted in the school board elections yesterday to defeat the previous stupid-supported majority:

Moderate Republicans scored key primary victories in State Board of Education races, wrestling control from conservatives in a battle shaped by the debate over the teaching of evolution.

Conservative Republicans began Tuesday with a 6-4 board majority. However, one of their incumbents lost, and a pro-evolution moderate won the GOP nomination for a seat held by a retiring conservative.

The results left only four board members who voted last year to adopt science standards that questioned the validity of evolutionary theory.

Best of all, Connie Morris, Queen of the Stupid People, lost her seat. In celebration, I'm proudly wearing my FSM t-shirt.

But my exuberance is tempered by this write-up by John Hanna of the AP. He closes with this:

The [Kansas] standards say that the evolutionary theory that all life had a common origin has been challenged by fossils and molecular biology. And they say there is controversy over whether changes over time in one species can lead to a new species.

And the part where he reports that evolution represents the consensus view of the scientific community, that these "challenges" and "controversies" are coming from a few crackpots, that fossils and molecular biology support evolution, not undermine it, that evolution is one of the richest and well-supported theories that science has ever produced, a landmark achievement in the history of human reason… oh, he didn't put that in. This story doesn't even rise to the level of he-said-she-said reporting so common in bad science writing. Here we just have one side, and it's the wrong one.

But Hanna does get a point back for including this wonderful self-refuting quote:

"I feel like if you give two sides of something, most people are intelligent enough to make up their own minds," said Ryan Cole, a 26-year-old farmer and horse trainer from Smith County, along the Nebraska line.

Sorry Ryan, better luck next time.

Sacrebleu!

Bad news from Capitol Hill — the noble stand against the insouciance of "Old Europe" that many of our fine elected officials (e.g. Bob Ney, R-SCANDAL) took near the start of the Iraq War has fallen victim to a "cut-and-run" flanking maneuver by some unnamed fifth column in the House cafeteria. The Washington Times has the scoop:

The fries on Capitol Hill are French again.

So is the breakfast toast in the congressional cafeterias, with both fries and toast having been liberated from the appellation "freedom."

Three years after House Republicans trumpeted the new names to get back at the French for snubbing the coalition of the willing in Iraq, congressmen don't even want to talk about french fries, which are actually native to Belgium, and toast.

Neither Reps. Bob Ney of Ohio nor Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, the authors of the culinary rebuke, were willing this week to say who led the retreat, as it were, from the frying pan. But retreat there has been, as a casual observer can see for himself in the House's basement cafeterias.

I can't help but worry that this means the terrorists have won, but maybe I'm not giving proud patriots like Ney and Jones the benefit of the doubt. What if Ney and Jones are playing it close to the vest for reasons of national security? What if this is all part of some top-secret operation to identify al-Queda operatives working at our breakfast bars and lunch lines?

As a proud patriot myself, I know I shouldn't really ask any questions. But at the same time, thousands of greasy-spoon diners throughout the country need the critical culinary nomenclature guidance that only Congress has the time and resources to offer. Without endangering our troops in the field, we need to conduct an immediate classified investigation, and then quietly disseminate the results through a organization with the proper clearance and protocols, like the CIA or the CIA.

If we have to go back to calling them French Fries to better wage the war on terror, so be it. I wouldn't be happy about that, but war is hell.